Research within literatures on multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism has moved beyond studying the institutional basis and discursive negotiations of differences towards an understanding of the embodied and practical dimensions of everyday social interactions. An emergent literature has also started to consider the role of vibrant material agents, atmosphere, and their environmental contexts in understanding diversity spaces. We wish to contribute to this literature through a visual and material ethnographic approach, taking two cafes in Copenhagen, Denmark as emblematic cases. We locate these sites in the particular socio-cultural space of Nørrebro – a neighbourhood characterised by the ethnic diversity of its inhabitants, but also by political tensions, government-supported gentrification, and community-driven restructuring and rebuilding. Taking an ecological approach to these spaces, we argue that socio-material arrangements may serve to solve or express diversity through the aesthetic organisation of human and non-human actors. We interpret such material forms as co-constitutive agents of diversity politics.

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Globalization is often linked to hybridity. This is a world 'where reggae emerges from the slums of Kingston, and mixes with hundreds of other local musical styles,

This article illuminates the affective potentialities of objects. We examine the circulation of Kurdish music cassettes in Turkey during the restrictive and strife-laden period of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We find that the practices comprising circulation – recording, hiding, playing, and exchanging cassettes – constituted tactical resistance and generated communal imaginaries. We illuminate the “emotional economy” that is animated by a mundane object: the cassette, through its circulation, becomes saturated with emotions, establishes shared emotional repertoires, and habituates individuals and collectives into common emotional dispositions. Cassettes thus play a part in shaping and reinforcing an emotional habitus that accompanies the emergence of a sense of “us,” the delineation of the “other,” and the relationship between the two. We thus demonstrate the entwinement of materiality and emotions, and examine how this entwinement generates emotional structures that shape and perpetuate the imagining of community as well as the enactment of resistance. © 2014 Taylor & Francis

In the past few years, self-tracking technologies have been celebrated for the possibilities they offer to 'optimize' fitness and wellbeing, yet also criticized for being rigid and isolating. In this article, we identify complex tracking arrangements that consist of a variety of data and multiple modalities of tracking emplaced within arrangements of actors and objects (digital/analog tracking devices and data output). We inquire into how these arrangements afford care. Based on our ethnographic research of gym culture in Denmark, we find that individuals make the technologies 'work' for them in ways that shield them from bodily or emotional distress. Fitness practitioners combine digital tracking technologies with analog methods and enrol other human actors in recording, interpreting, questioning and tinkering with their data; in other words, they perform data work in ways that mend or prevent ruptures and brokenness and thus afford 'care'. We highlight the role of the personal trainer, who often complements or salvages the outputs of digital technologies. We argue that tracking has the capacity to afford care and wellness when it is emplaced within socialities and when actors are able to exercise their capacities and knowledge in ways that mitigate the data outputs.