To Örebro University

This forward-looking book examines emotional geographies as both a subdiscipline and a practice. Written collaboratively, the authors demonstrate the diverse ways in which emotions influence research, knowledge and everyday life, inviting readers to recognise emotions as a fundamental component of human understanding, actions and relationships.

Chapters highlight how the study of emotional geography provides crucial insights into pillars of daily life, such as power, work, care and social change. Drawing on feminist and embodied traditions, the book combines conceptual reflection, methodological innovation and lived experience to outline the impact of emotional geography on key challenges such as political unrest, the climate crisis, migration and technological change. Tracing the evolution of the field, the authors emphasise its future potential in research and practical applications, as well as its capacity to foster a more empathetic world.

A Research Agenda for Emotional Geographies is an illuminating read for scholars and students of human geography, the social sciences and humanities, and particularly those interested in working with emotions across contexts. Feminist, decolonial, migration and climate change researchers will also benefit from the book’s interdisciplinary approach.

The last decade has seen unprecedented changes in working forms, not the least through technological innovation while leisure time is equally reshaped by platforms. Although relatively new, the gig economy – temporary work mediated through platforms – is increasingly an important form of employment globally and consequently, the gig economy is represented in popular culture. Popular culture is part of social-technical-spatial relations making these important spaces in digital geographies. However, digital content, for example from streaming programs, is often not considered in labour geography studies. By conducting ethnographic content analysis and doodling ‘think-with’ work on Beforeigners, a piece of speculative fiction from Norway, I explore how storytelling conjoins parallel digital practices. I show storytelling as a kind of softening of ground narrating technological-spatial relations and demonstrates how, from this Nordic example, storytelling is part of the continuative geographical ordering of work forms in digital spaces and places. Exploring other sites of digital spaces highlights the ways digital geography is multi-layered, inter-relational and gradient, and demonstrates the need to go beyond established sites of inquiry to understand the gig economy as a social-technological-spatial relation.

Migrants constitute a sizable portion of vulnerable workers in digitally-mediated work, particularly in the gig economy. They face wide-scale labour exploitation as well as exclusions and further marginalization from existing labour markets and welfare systems. Policy intervention is a focal point of debate in the expanding gig economy literature. In Nordic countries, it is often assumed the welfare state will regulate the gig economy, but due to ambiguous understandings of what the gig economy is, debates are focused on topics such as taxation, often downplaying complexities. This study aims to explore how strategic silences towards migration underpin policy narratives relating to the foregrounding of gig economy in welfare contexts, specifically Sweden. Our approach highlights silence as an agentic and strategic process. Based on twenty-three selected Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU series) issued between 2016 and 2022, we first mapped the main themes regarding the gig economy in the Swedish policy arena. We show the Swedish state is shifting to recognize migrants and the gig/platform economy, but the role of structural inequalities remains ambiguous. We further critically analyzed contents of ten reports and show silence is strategic in two ways: first maintaining normative work forms as the key interest of the state and second, positioning precarious migrant labour as a sphere of exclusion. This study provides new perspectives and insights into the governance of the gig economy by highlighting the role of strategic production of silences regarding structural inequalities and the tensions within welfare-labour relations.

Big data are increasingly being used to understand complex social and economic challenges. While there is much to be learned from such approaches, in-place data remain necessary for a multidimensional understanding of neighbourhoods, and for sustainable and socially just policies. Rather than reinforcing methodological divides, the argument we set forth in this paper is that multiple forms and strands of inquiry illuminate complexities of space, place and community. Decision makers should consider how and why they may privilege certain forms of data, and instead tap into diversified ways of knowing. We reflect on the challenges and opportunities of crafting in-place data as a relational process integral for decision makers and policymaking. To do so, we discuss two case studies in Sweden and The Netherlands that demonstrate the importance of widening the scope of knowledge, and a willingness to decentre singularity and homogenous definitions of community and place.

Transnational corporations have been long recognized as the building blocks of global system theory and their impact is widely acknowledged and studied. By comparison, we have insufficient understanding of transnational practices ‘from below’. We argue that focusing on transnational migrant entrepreneurship is a novel opportunity to gain insights into the social and economic processes of ‘globalization from below’. Such processes refer to the dynamics and practices initiated by actors outside the hegemonic socio-economic spheres who, using various resources, move people, goods and ideas across national borders to create small-scale enterprises thus connecting distant places and people around the world. This special issue brings together a transdisciplinary group of researchers who examine the spatialities, mobilities and resources of transnational migrant entrepreneurs in Asia, Europe, North Africa, South America and the USA. The rich empirical base, coupled with diverse research methods, provides new insights into the phenomenon to scholars, policymakers and practitioners.

När man tänker på mat på landsbygden i norr är det sällan man tänker på ett brett utbud av rätter. Landsbygden ses traditionellt som statisk, oföränderlig och homogen.

Myten: Författarna Webster och Forsberg studerar matpraxis och thailändska migranters entreprenörskap på landsbygden i Sverige för att nyansera myten om att det bara finns traditionell svensk mat på landsbygden.

Metoder: Baserat på tidigare studier lyfter Webster och Forsberg fram lokala matfestivaler och att baka bröd i traditionella vedeldade ugnar. De hävdar att konsekvenserna av att inte erkänna det breda utbudet av matkulturer på landsbygden kan hindra möjligheter till migrant-företagande och integration. Att arbeta med mat kan förmedla skillnaderna mellan människor likaväl som lyfta fram gemensamma drag mellan människor när de äter och njuter av varandras mat. Medan Webster och Forsberg undersöker matbaserade projekt betonar de kopplingen mellan genus och mat inom landsbygdens socioekonomiska processer.

Ansatser: Föreställningen om landsbygdsidentiteter som representerar ett hegemoniskt ideal ses i hur matkultur förstås på landsbygden. Med den ökande landsbygdens mångfald är det naturligt att matkulturen också diversifieras. Mat erbjuder en möjlighet till integration och att stödja ett bredare utbud av småföretag. Det finns fortfarande relativt liten forskning om invandrar entreprenörskap på landsbygden, särskilt med fokus på kvinnor, men forskare börjar utmana denna klyfta.

Slutsatser: Konsekvenserna av att inte erkänna det breda utbudet av matkulturer som finns på landsbygden kan hindra möjligheterna till migrantföretagande och integration.