This article develops the notion of “sense of scale” to theorize the emotional, tactile, and affective (re)production of scalarity during the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic’s geographic upheavals – from personal proxemics to international travel bans – call for a return to scale that attends to its experiential qualities. Scale is continually conjured, apprehended, and (re)configured through proximal feelings and sensory encounters. After charting some conceptual foundations, subsequent sections discuss the relational transformation of the domestic, global, and urban scales under COVID-19. “Sense of scale” enables (post)humanistic theorizations of scale to take shape and also highlights the importance of scale for understanding everyday life.

This article explores the COVID-19 pandemic to extend the temporal horizon of (post-)disaster mobilities research. We are not only interested in the conspicuous disruption to mobilities wrought by disasters, nor the emergent modes of movement constituted in disasters’ immediate aftermaths. Rather, with special reference to Nepal, this article attends to the jagged and protracted process of remobilizing the world in the wake of dramatic events like COVID-19. In short, we are concerned here with the uneven politics of “getting back to normal.” Two dimensions of this are discussed via a critical reflection on the widespread “dimmer switch” metaphor of remobilization: (1) the uneven rhythms and refractions of remobilization, and (2) the hegemony of “normal” mobilities systems. Using “light” as an illuminating analytic, we renew calls to examine the disparate impacts of disasters themselves, and also to analyze the uneven politics of “getting back” to “normal” mobilities after disasters.

As tourists from China account for a larger and larger share of Nepal's tourism economy, Jyatha-a small neighborhood in Kathmandu-has absorbed a substantial portion of the Chinese businesses catering to this booming demographic. Its landscape is heavily populated with Chinese businesses, leading Nepalis (and others) to increasingly refer to the space with the English term "Chinatown." Drawing on Low's (2000) and Chuang and Trémon's (2013) conceptual frameworks of space, this article analyzes three central dimensions to the emergence of a Chinatown in Jyatha. First, it describes the social production of Chinatown space, the physical conversion of the material landscape. Specifically, I analyze the prevalence and prominence of commercial signs as a proxy for quantifying the degree of Chinese incursion into Jyatha. Second, the article turns to the social construction of Chinatown space, or the way in which the material space of Jyatha gets encoded with ambivalent meanings. Nepali narrations of the neighborhood highlight local anxieties regarding cultural autonomy and, more acutely, differential economic advantage. Third, the article discusses the social situation of Chinatown space, or the way in which the site of Jyatha gets discursively rescaled to address regional and global concerns. Nepalis frequently understand Jyatha to embody broader geopolitical narratives-regarding China's ascendance on the world stage, and especially as this relates to the Nepal's regional center of gravity vis-à-vis India. These three aspects-production, construction, and situation-converge in Jyatha. Through such practices, Nepalis simultaneously reiterate and contest the emergence of Chinatown. In so doing, they discursively challenge sociopolitical, economic, and spatial inequality at several scales. [Production of Space; Chinatown; Signs; Kathmandu] Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things … (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)The narrow labyrinthine streets of the former hippy enclave of [Thamel] in downtown Kathmandu used to be the place to go for mountaineering gear, cashmere shawls or thankas. Those shops are still there, but a mini Chinatown has appeared within the winding streets which are now dotted with Chinese-language signs, Chinese restaurants, and Chineseowned three-star hotels.

This article highlights the importance of various (im)mobilities which were induced by the massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25, 2015. Around 100 news articles published in the two weeks following the earthquake were collected and analyzed. After weaving these articles together into an overarching mobility-centric narrative, the politics of such (im)mobilities are critically considered. The final sections situate this empirical data within the theoretical "mobilities" literature to show how any given mobilities system is always constituted in relation to other (im)mobilities as well as a variety of geographical and political factors to produce a mutually constitutive, even dialectical, web.

This commentary offers a note on scalarity and rescaling during the COVID-19 pandemic. It argues that while plurality is pivotal for distinguishing scale from other geographic concepts, vertical relationality is only one axis along which this might be sufficiently accomplished. I raise the issue of scale's horizontal commensurability as a complementary means of approaching the domestic scale in the dramatic upheavals wrought by the current pandemic.

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