Recent debates around urban encounter, integration and cosmopolitanism and renewed engagement with contact theory have raised questions about the spaces of interaction that may enable meaningful encounters between different social groups. Reflecting on a participatory art project with young people of African and British heritage in north east England, we argue that discussion and practice around participatory action research, including the deployment of contact zones as theory and method, can cast some light on what fosters transformative spaces. Through analysis of two different approaches to community art used in the project, we show how elements of each enabled and disabled meaningful interaction between young people. We draw attention to the materiality of art (the tools) within participatory practices (the doing of it) in contributing to a space where interactions might take place, emphasising a complex interplay across/between actors, materials and space that frames encounters as emergent, transitory, fragile yet hopeful. We examine the potential of a focus on the material in thinking beyond moments of encounter to how transformative social relations may be 'scaled up', before considering the implications for research and policy. IntroductionRecently, increasing attention has been given to the spatialities of interethnic encounters, focusing on how the settings of contact between different groups, as well as their wider political and social contexts, play a key role in the experiences and outcomes of encounter 'contact theory' (after Allport 1954), focusing on the spaces of interaction that may enable 'meaningful encounters' between different social groups, particularly because separation and hostility between existing and newly arrived groups is a key current social and political issue of concern in the UK and elsewhere.While in this paper we emphasise that there can be no quick fix for 'integration', our perspective is a hopeful one. We discuss an example that begins to map out the detailed practices and spaces that might move beyond the reiterative and exclusionary processes that We aim to make three main contributions to academic and policy literatures in this paper.First, we wish to make an explicit link between spatiality, encounter and the notion of contact zones, emphasising contact zones as method as well as theory. We suggest that feminist and participatory epistemological perspectives are critical to conceptual work on contact zones, if we are to develop a more nuanced and ethical approach to research, policy and practice in this area. Secondly, we highlight the role of the physical nature of encounters in fostering or foreclosing interaction, suggesting that alongside enabling spaces for intercultural encounter, attention must be paid to the materialities of such encounters -or more specifically, the epistemological deployment of materials within arenas of social interaction. Finally, we argue that paying close attention to these 'geographies of matter' can help us think through issues ...

In this paper we offer a critique and an alternative to current proposals to include the economic and social impacts of research in the next UK audit of academic research. In contrast to most responses from UK academics, our argument is for impact; while the growing marketisation of knowledge is to be deplored, resources and activities within universities do have a vital role to play in progressive social change. The problem is that the current proposals will produce and retrench an elite model of power/knowledge relationships. We propose an understanding of impact based on the co‐production of knowledge between universities and communities, modelled in research practice in participatory geographies. This is more likely to result in more equitable and radically transformative impacts of knowledge, making us socially accountable rather than driven by economic accountancy.

This paper develops the concept of emotional citizenry, as a process grounded in the complexities of places, lives and feelings, exceeding any fixed status of citizenship to be achieved in the formal political sphere. Drawing on encounters between refugees, asylum seekers and more settled residents in a befriending scheme in Newcastle, England, it focusses on the emotional geographies of intercultural interactions produced through everyday spaces. Contact in the scheme involves difficult negotiations of difference, yet it is precisely the emotional that opens up the potential of/for making connections, and through which nuanced relationships develop, dualisms are destabilised, and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways. I argue that these emotional encounters evidence desires to (re)make society at the local level, beyond normalised productions and practices of citizenship as bounded in/outsiders, in which a politics of engagement is enacted. Analysis suggests that the felt, interpersonal dimensions of such praxis, the emotionality of these specific notions belonging and relationality, push at the concept of cosmopolitan citizenship to register something more. This paper contributes to debate on everyday practices of citizenship as already taking place, and poses questions to how individual relations may anticipate collective change in how we live together in an era of super-diversity.

This paper aims to better understand the role of emotions in academia, and their part in producing, and challenging, an increasingly normalized neoliberal academy. It unfolds from two narratives that foreground emotions in and across academic spaces and practices, to critically explore how knowledges and positions are constructed and circulated. It then moves to consider these issues through the lens of care as a political stance towards being and becoming academics in neoliberal times. Our aim is to contribute to the burgeoning literature on emotional geographies, explicitly bringing this work into conversation with resurgent debates surrounding an ethic of care, as part of a politic of critiquing individualism and managerialism in (and beyond) the academy. We consider the ways in which neoliberal university structures circulate particular affects, prompting emotions such as desire and anxiety, and the internalisation of competition and audit as embodied scholars. Our narratives exemplify how attendant emotions and affect can reverberate and be further reproduced through university cultures, and diffuse across personal and professional lives.We argue that emotions in academia matter, mutually co-producing everyday social relations and practices at and across all levels. We are interested in their political implications, and how neoliberal norms can be shifted through practices of caring-with.

In this paper, I wish to critically reflect on the role of emotion/s in how I position myself with regards to research, teaching and learning, drawing on experiences over the past three years as a human geography lecturer 'doing' research with refugees and asylum seekers in a local inner city area. While there has been increasing debate regarding what constitutes 'the activist academic', in particular deconstructing any dualism or border between 'academic' and 'activist', the motivation for undertaking such a role is generally ascribed to an 'ideological commitment' to social and personal change of one type or another. For me, such a commitment cannot be separated from how I feel about the issues that I research, learn and teach about. In particular, I explore how emotions relate across different spaces and places in my life to produce motivation for activism and how that activism -specifically the encounters with people through it -feeds back into emotional geographies across my professional (and personal) endeavours. More broadly, I'm concerned with the ways in which emotional becomings and the interconnectivities across spaces of activity/ism and everyday life play out beyond my own individual subjective experience, but rather are caught up in 'situated, relational perspectives' (after Bondi, 2005). I argue that recognising the significance of emotion has implications for how we conduct and disseminate research.

This essay draws on fieldwork with a befriending scheme that pairs refugees, asylum seekers and local residents in the north east of England. It explores the ways in which a 'quiet politics' of encounter, embedded in intimate relationships, is caught up in and productive of complex inter-scale geographies, highlighting the ebbs and flows across security and insecurity. Critically, it foregrounds the relationality of emotions in enabling and maintaining intimate-geopolitics.

This paper draws on research with people from African, Caribbean and Asian backgrounds regarding perceptions and use of the English countryside. I explore the complex ways in which the category 'rural' was constructed as both essentialised and relational: how the countryside was understood most definitely as 'not-city' but also, at the same time, the English countryside was conceived as part of a range of networks: one site in a web of 'nature places' across the country, as well as one rural in an international chain of rurals -specifically via embodied and emotional connections with 'nature'. I argue that alongside sensed/sensual embodiment (the non-representational intuitive work of the body), we need also to consider reflective embodiment as a desire to space/place in order to address the structural socio-spatial exclusions endemic in (rural) England and how they are challenged. I suggest that a more progressive conceptualisation of rurality -a 'transrural' open to issues of mobility and desire -can help us disrupt dominant notions of rural England as only an exclusionary white space, and reposition it as a site within multicultural, multiethnic, transnational and mobile social I explored issues regarding ethnicity, rurality and national belonging in contemporary England, and was tasked with writing a policy report alongside the thesis 2 . As I read the academic work around my research, I increasingly became aware of a dichotomy. There was a rich body of literature around ethnic identity, diversity, hybridity, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, etc., including critical perspectives problematising these concepts and how they play out in society, but always and only embedded in the urban sphere (eg. Alexander, 2000;Amin, 2002; Back and Solomos, 2003;Brah,et al. 1999;Hesse, 2000;Mirza, 1997;Parekh, 2000a;2000b). At the same time, especially within geography, there was interest in the ways in which rurality/rural space is implicated within national identity construction, notions of belonging and spatial practices 3 . In the English context, the national imagery of rural space appeared to exclude ethnic minorities, among other groups, from accessing the countryside, both physically and emotionally (Cloke & Little, 1997;Milbourne, 1997). The connection between the rural as the 'genuine' England and not multicultural was highlighted in the Henderson and Kaur, 1999;Kinsman, 1995;Malik, 1992). However, there had been a lack of empirical work at that time to examine these issues further: ethnic minorities were perhaps too easily theorised and written as excluded 'rural others'. Indeed, Little (1999:438) voiced concern regarding the use of the term 'rural others' in general, "the lack of theoretical discussion around 'the other' and 'the same'", the paucity of recognition of the power relations complicit in such a categorisation, and the "static treatment of both individual and group identity".

Duncan: I was invited to contribute to a two-day seminar on the theme of co-authorship and public geographies held on the 6 and 7 April 2006. When advertised, the call for participation noted how, "In the wake ofand alongside-Michael Burawoy's championing of a new public sociology, a variety of geographies are now emerging which call themselves 'public'". For example, Derek Gregory and Michael Dear have embarked on a very public geographies project, whose aim is to inject geographers' views on important debates into public debate; Noel Castree (2006) has been admiring the recent "public intellectual" writing of geographers David Harvey, Michael Watts and Neil Smith; and Kevin Ward (2005) has been asking what geographers can learn from debates about public sociology. A new field of "public geography" is, we believe, beginning to take shape. So, for this symposium, we have given a diverse group of speakers a simple brief: to talk on the theme of "my public geographies, our public geographies". I was asked to speak alongside Don