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.

This editorial outlines a research agenda for critical exploration of transnational youth mobilities centred on three concepts: emotions, inequity, and temporality. This agenda offers novel perspectives on the interplay between geographies of social difference and the multiscalar forces governing and being made through mobility.Emotions advance theorisations of agency by providing a generative lens to examine how aspirations, social relationships, and political subjectivities intersect to inform young people's lifeworlds and mobilities. Critical analyses of how youth navigate challenging structural conditions are shown to be sharpened by considering the mutually constitutive nature of inequity and (im)mobility. A temporal lens reveals how youth mobilities are driven, experienced, and shaped by structural and social dynamics including, but not limited to, precarity, border regimes, and intergenerationality. We conclude by charting how further explorations into the diverse emotions and temporalities of youth mobility, centred on questions of inequity, can significantly advance scholarly debates within and beyond population geography.

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The paper explores how children form their peer relationships in a small urban neighbourhood in Bratislava, and how their gender identities are affected by practices of friendship. Drawing on Hörschelmann and Stenning's (2008, Progress in Human Geography, 32, 339) idea of the 'ethnographic attitude' to researching 'post-socialist' change, the paper identifies links between children's everyday performances and broader structures in which these are embedded. Special attention is given to the spatial ranges of children's practices, developing an argument about the significance of children's neighbourhood as a pivotal spatial domain for the constitution of children's friendships.

This paper demonstrates why and how a fuller geographical perspective extends contemporary scholarship on human trafficking within and beyond the discipline.We employ a relational approach and draw on in-depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom (UK), to depict how the processes underpinning human trafficking are nonlinear and operate instantaneously at multiple intersecting scales and temporalities and through diverse mobilities. The analysis problematises the discrete and homogeneous notion of space coupled with a linear conceptualisation of time and, more specifically, the normative portrayals of recruitment, transit and exploitation as distinct and sequential phases of human trafficking. Instead, the individuated experiences of trafficked persons are examined in relational geographies of inequality, manoeuvring and mobilities. Such a conceptual shift ensures that efforts to understand and combat human trafficking address its effects as well as the wider social relations and structural conditions that facilitate exploitation. We conclude the paper by outlining how a relational-geographic perspective has the potential to foster new forms of dialogue and inquiry within and beyond the discipline. K E Y W O R D SEastern Europe, exploitation, human trafficking, inequality, mobilities, relational geographies 1 | INTRODUCTION Human trafficking is inherently spatial, comprising cross-cutting processes of exploitation within and across local, regional, national and international borders. Yet, academic, policy and media understandings of human trafficking tend to rely on a discrete and homogeneous conceptualisation of space coupled with a linear conceptualisation of time (Smith, 2017). Our aim in this paper is to contribute to critical debates over structural inequalities that underpin human trafficking (Anderson & Ruhs, 2010;Andrijasevic, 2010;Lewis et al., 2015;Piper et al., 2015) by offering a geographical conceptualisation of human trafficking that explicitly recognises the relational nature of space and time. Using in-depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom (UK), we examine why viewing processes such as recruitment, transit and exploitation as distinct and sequential phases of the human trafficking process is reductive. In turn, we reframe human trafficking as a relational composition that spans multiple spaces and temporalities.The paper is structured as follows. First, we outline relational perspectives on human trafficking within critical inter-disciplinary scholarship and suggest that this could be enriched by engaging explicitly with relational conceptions of space (and time). Second, we introduce the writings of Massey, Bergson and Deleuze and present the theoretical framework for ---