Introduction: Lockdown and the intimate

The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement and dispossession. Be it as a result of war, terrorism, natural disaster, or pandemic – lockdown is more than an intervention in physical space and infrastructure alone. It is also an intervention that mobilizes, and often relies on, the sphere of the intimate along different and often unequal geographies of vulnerability. In this Theme Issue, we build on feminist geopolitics and feminist political geography to examine the intimacies of lockdown, seen through the experiences of refugees, migrants, low-income residents, as well as within the contexts of war and terrorism. Here, the politics of embodiment, domesticity and affectivity is central for understanding how lockdowns actively shape and are shaped by intimate geographies, thus advancing the theorization of the lockdown more broadly. The contributions to this Theme Issue gather around the following questions: how does the spatial politics of lockdown mobilize the sphere of the intimate? More broadly, how does the intimate help forge possibilities and places of counter-narratives of solidarity, shared vulnerabilities and care in contrast to renewed militarization, rising authoritarianism, violence, and the expanding spatialities of confinement in everyday life

The space of encounter and the making of difference: The entangled lives of Alevi and Sunni neighbours in Turkey

The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only what is potentially transformative in encounters but also how encounters are conditioned by and productive of relations of power and inequality. Our study contributes to this reworking, and to feminist critiques of space and politics, by centring the spatiality of encounter in the entanglement of neighbours. Drawing on our focus group research (2013–2016) with Alevis and Sunnis in Istanbul and Malatya, we argue that difficult questions of difference, responsibility, and power come to the fore in neighbour relations. While our study underlines how Sunni supremacism and Alevi precarity are constituted in the everyday lives of neighbours, we also find that there is a transformational potential in these encounters that is not fully (re)absorbed into structures of Alevi–Sunni difference. We argue that, across the blurry boundaries of home and neighbourhood spaces, the unbidden intimacies of living in proximity (the drift of smells and sounds, the lines of sight that connect balconies and windows, the presence of neighbours at the thresholds and in the spaces of each other's homes) mean that encounters between neighbours both fuel and trouble the marking out of what is shared and what is separate, what is tolerable and what crosses a line. Our study thereby advances an understanding of the space of encounter, the making of difference, and the political and ethical significance of this entanglement

Rethinking material culture of sustainability: Commodity consumption, cultural biographies, and following the thing

This paper advances geographical perspectives on household sustainability by extending the range of insights from consumption scholarship that are brought to bear on the issue. Research that links consumption to the dynamics of variously sustainable practices currently dominate, resulting in a particular and partial reading of material culture. I suggest that geographical approaches to the social life of things may yield new insights into materiality and household sustainability. Specifically, I argue that ‘following the thing’ – which is typically focused on commodity chains – could usefully be extended into people's homes. This is not introduced as a way to acknowledge the connections between points in a network, rather, it is positioned as a set of theoretical and methodological resources that can be utilised to explore the movement and placing of things as they move through a critical juncture – in this case the household. To illustrate, I present material drawn from two empirical studies of households in the UK. The first is an ethnographically-informed study of how food becomes waste; the second is a quantitative survey of laundry habits. Attention is paid to the ways in which the ongoing categorisation and valuation of things shape their trajectories and move them in directions that give rise to (adverse) environmental impacts. To conclude I sketch out an agenda for future studies, consider how a focus on households can yield more comprehensive biographies of things, and address the implications of this analysis both for consumption scholarship and for engagement with sustainability research and policy beyond human geography

Between Fashion andTesettür

Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styles in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides insight into how women’s fashion and the question of tesettür become negotiable elements of everyday practice. Our analysis shows that while there may be no easy reconciliation between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettür and the spectacle of ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.</jats:p