What are the politics of boredom? And how should we relate to boredom? In this paper, I explore these questions through cases where the disaffection and restlessness of boredom have become a matter of concern in the UK and USA at the junctures between Fordism and neoliberalism, and amid today’s resurgence of right-wing populism.

With reference to ethnographical fieldwork conducted in scientific laboratories and in Yunlin County, I demonstrate how subterranean materials continuously frustrate the state’s volumetric practices. By problematising the geopolitics of land subsidence, this paper also advances the understanding of political geology, which is seeking to ‘decolonise’ and ‘pluralise geological thought’.

This article introduces the concept of patchwork to understand how repair practices are carried out in Mexico City’s networked hydraulic infrastructure. Drawing on data gathered through a one-year participatory ethnography, patchwork follows the Mexico City Water System (SACMEX) workers’ descriptions of their own labor and how it relates to infrastructure in a context of structural austerity and rapid socio-material change.

Recent scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article contributes to this new body of critical work by addressing the dispossessory dynamics stitched into Gaza’s urban fabric through an episode from its urban and architectural history.

Using the mass transit planning process in Addis Ababa as a point of entry, we trace how the city’s transformation is negotiated at the intersection of local agency, the Ethiopian national political setting and international networks. This relational mobilisation perspective arguably infuses hope into the debate, because it opens new ways of identifying seemingly insignificant actions and actors elsewhere and recognising them as potential drivers of change.

In this article, I draw from 24 months of ethnography with subvertisers to suggest that a particular ideal of public space, that of a ‘regime of order’, is folded into the hegemonic spatial management of urban communication by advertising actors.

The article works with Carl Schmitt’s theory of the spatial framing of political–economic orders around the juxtaposition of land and sea and shows that freeports detach themselves from this oppositional logic.

Digital technologies tend less to divide space according to a specific function (i.e. work–life division), and more to create spaces of coordination that can adjust the definition of purposeful activity. Such spaces of coordination constitute the platformization of work with digital technologies in which spatial and temporal processes for instituting work extend beyond a single organization.

Focusing on iron ore mining in Australia, an industry sector that is currently increasing its automated operations, the paper draws on a series of fieldwork encounters with people differently positioned in the mining sector. Through the presentation of five stories that incorporate combinations of these fieldwork encounters, the paper constructs a more complex picture of how automation is redefining different bodies.