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This paper aims to respond to the circumstances that have made hybridity both a popular term in cultural analysis and a contested, problematic concept. It promotes the need to look at what has been dismissed in discussions of hybridity, namely, mundane and un-exotic examples of cultural mix.

This study uses a conceptual and interpretive approach to theoretical and empirical work that engages with the theme of hybridity.

The findings highlight how a celebration of hybridity has limited the ways in which the concept can be used for empirical work. It proposes the paradigm of everyday hybridity to work with practical examples of cultural hybridity.

The implications are to decentre the Western bias that has theorised hybridity without exploring how the concept is relevant to other regions, such as East Asia.

The value of this work is in providing an audit of the concept of hybridity and a working paradigm for future qualitative research.

For geographers doing qualitative research, autobiographical narratives offer a discrete avenue into life experiences, everyday lived geographies, and intimate connections between places and identities. Yet these valuable sources remain mostly untapped by geographers and largely unconsidered in methodological treatises. This article seeks to elicit the benefits of using autobiographical data, especially with regard to stigmatised sexual minorities in Western societies. Qualitative research among gay men, lesbians and bisexuals (GLB) is sometimes difficult; due to the ongoing marginalisation experienced by sexual minorities in contemporary Western societies, subjects are often difficult to locate and reticent to participate in research. But autobiographical writing has a long history in Western GLB subcultures, and offers an unobtrusive means to explore the interpenetration of stigmatised sexuality and space, of GLB identity and place. A keen awareness of the power of geography of spaces of concealment, resistance, connection, emergence and affirmation underpins the content and form of GLB autobiographical writing. I demonstrate this in part through the example of my own research into gay male spatiality in Australia. At the same time we need to be aware of the generic limitations of autobiographies. Nevertheless, this article calls for wider attention to autobiographical sources, especially for geographical research into marginalised groups.

This paper aims to explore articulations of how individuals internalise official demands on handling COVID-19 and the function of social media in this process, and further to discuss this from a human rights’ perspective.

A thematic analysis of qualitative data from an international survey on COVID-19 and social media. The analysis was inspired by Berger and Luckmann's theory of reality as a social construction.

Articulations expressed an instant internalisation and externalisation of the officially defined “new normal”. However, negotiations of this “new normal” were articulated, whereby everyday life activities could proceed. Resistance to the “new normal” appeared, as routines and common sense understandings of everyday life were threatened. Health-care professionals were put in a paradoxical situation, living in accordance with the “new normal” outside work and legitimately deviating from it at work. The “new normal” calls for individuals’ “oughtonomy” rather than autonomy. Social media were used to push individual’s re-socialisation into the “new normal”. The latter both promoted and challenged human rights as the individual's right to self-determination extends beyond the self as it risks threatening other people's right to life.

With the means of a theoretically based thematic analysis inspired by Berger and Luckmann, the current study shows how articulations on COVID-19 and social media can both support and challenge human rights and reality as a facticity as dictated by dominant organisations and discourses in society.

This chapter develops Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis to investigate the ways super-diversity comes to life in the everyday city through the intersection of the spatial and temporal. The chapter explores the multicultural intimacies of streets in a London neighbourhood through a close ethnographic focus on rhythms and atmospheres using slow-motion video. The research contributes to an emerging field of visual ethnographic scholarship by presenting slow-motion video as a method to explore the ‘presence’ (Lefebvre, 2004) of super-diversity and conviviality on the street.

I argue that in slowing down the encounters of the street, slow-motion video shows the often overlooked sensible and affective elements of super-diverse urban space, the mundane interactions between bodies, materials and technologies that create a form of ‘convivial affect’. I argue that these everyday encounters are shaped by a situated politics of difference and yet are also mediated by wider rhythms and atmospheres, contributing to a sense of ‘social time’. I draw attention to both the human and non-human elements of the streets. These material and technological elements can uncover the wider discourses and circulatory regimes of atmospheres in urban super-diverse neighbourhoods, focussing on their relation to broader flows of capital, forms of postcolonial culture and translocality.

This research has implications for how we understand super-diversity and its manifestations in urban space. It encourages policymakers and academics to recognise the affective human and non-human encounters that are a crucial aspect of conviviality, the everyday ways we live together with difference.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

In Latin American cities a great part of the urban environment has grown through self-help processes leading to informal settlements. In the Mexican context, informal settlements are called “colonias populares” which means people’s or popular neighbourhoods. In the late 1960s Turner (1969) argued that popular neighbourhoods should be reconsidered as environments which are socially and culturally responsive to the needs of the inhabitants, as the architecture produced by low-income settlers is based on a system responsive to the changing needs and demands of the users. In these settlements the built environment is the result of the freedom available to inhabitants to take decisions and shape their own environment. This in turn gives place to a myriad of spatial expressions in which culture, identity and popular character are imprinted in both the private and public spaces. This paper explores these issues in the spaces between the dwellings in the public realm.

This paper explores the potential of Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis to understand data as an appearance assumed by the quantitative abstraction of everyday life, which negates a qualitative disjuncture between different natural and social rhythms – specifically those between embodied circadian and biological rhythms and the rhythms of working life. It takes as a case study a prototype performance research method investigating the methodological and practical potential of quantified self technologies to reconnect the body to its forms of abstraction in a digital age by means of the collection, interpretation and sonification of data using wearable tech, mobile apps, synthesised music and modes of visual communication. Quantitative data were selectively ‘sonified’ with synthesisers and drum machines to produce a 40-minute electronic symphony performed to a public audience. The paper theorises the project as an intervention reconnecting quantitative data with the qualitative experience it abstracts from, exploring the potential for these technologies to be used as tools of remediation that recover the embodied social subject from its abstraction in data for critical self-knowledge and understanding.