As the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus swept around the world in 2020, outpacing public health efforts to contain it, many everyday human mobilities were brought to an abrupt halt, while others were drastic...

In the midst of renewed geographical and geophilosophical interest in the Earth, the biosphere and, specifically, what has been called an ‘aerography’, this article explores how air might be made sense of as elemental. As a different way to apprehend elements to notions within the turn to a material–affective thing–power, assemblage theory or geophysical processes and complexities, the article explores air by apprehending it through chemical–alchemic notions of affinity and a political–mythic philosophical elementalism. In so doing, it is suggested that we might bring the air to account rather differently.

In this paper I seek to initiate a research agenda on mega-urban airs that comprehends their atmospheres as simultaneously meteorological and affective (McCormack, 2008), an agenda which seeks to apprehend megacity air/atmospheres in their vitality, corporeality and expressiveness. This paper attunes to the close and expressive substances that make up immersion in a material-affective ecology of a place, the qualities of the city that seep and imbue its material and biological fabric with affect. There is a growing body of work and literature to aid us from traditions in continental aesthetic theory, French urban sociology and architecture, and an emergent cultural geographic field of atmospheric enquiry. The paper develops such an approach to megacity air in three main ways. First, air tells us about difference. In the testimony of pollutants and choking effluvium, an analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity inequality. The atmosphere puts the megacity apart from other urban and political forms. Second, closely related to the issues that circulate around a geopolitics of verticality and the technocratic security concerns of volumetric conceptions of territory, air/atmospheres constitute an environmental ecology of security threats and crisis that thwart megacity life and justify environmental policies as ‘security’ (see Zeiderman, 2013). Third, the paper argues how megacities are increasingly productive of secessionary atmospheres, often by removal and exclusion, which are not entirely separate from other atmospheric security concerns.

This paper makes several moves towards the study of geographies of security through notions of atmosphere. Two related claims circulate through this paper: that security is becoming attuned to what we might call affective atmospheres, whilst it is itself becoming atmospheric. The paper proceeds to develop, first, a correlation of ideas across concepts of security, power, and affective atmospheres. The following section sees security understood atmospherically, before it goes on to explore how security is increasingly attuned to affective atmospheres as its object-target. Finally, by way of conclusion, the paper offers several manners of contestation and critique. Throughout, the paper draws on a variety of secondary literature as well as primary documentary research and analysis, focusing empirically upon a set of counterinsurgency practices known as ‘atmospherics’.

What characterizes emergency today is the proliferation of the term. Any event or situation supposedly has the potential to become an emergency. Emergencies may happen anywhere and at any time. They are not contained within one functional sector or one domain of life. The substantive focus of the articles collected in this special issue reflects this proliferation: they explore ways of governing in, by and through emergencies across different types of emergencies and different domains of life. In response to this proliferation, the issue opens up critical work on the politics of emergency beyond the ‘state of exception’ as dominant paradigm. Emergency is treated as a problem for government that calls for the invention of new techniques or the redeployment of existing techniques. Through this shift in emphasis, the articles in this issue disclose relations between modalities of power and emergency life that differ from the ‘lightening flash’ of a sovereign decision on the exception taken from outside of life, or the capacity to ‘mould’ an always-already emergent life from within life.

What makes the figure of the passenger distinctive as both a subject and an object of mobility and transportation systems? What distinguishes the passenger from other mobile subjectivities, from nomad, flaneur to consumer? How is the passenger represented, practiced and performed? How has the passenger and their experiences been conceived, imagined, manipulated, regulated and engineered? And what kind of human-technology assemblages do passengers enact? Through four short perspectives, this paper seeks to ‘profile’ the passenger as a distinctive historical and conceptual figure that can help to add greater precision to the analysis of our mobile ways of life. The passenger is explored as an object of speculative theoretical debate, a figure entangled in a host of identities, practices, performances and contexts, and an important way to illuminate key conceptual problematics, from representation to embodiment.