• ‘Green jobs’ (GJ) discourse circulates among climate policymakers and campaigners. • I show that the promise of green jobs has limited resonance for some communities. • It lacks resonance for people who are attached to traditional industries. • Repurposing people’s industrial attachments might sow the seeds of support for GJ. • This is important to achieve net zero transformations. ‘Green jobs’ discourse circulates with intensity among climate policy networks in the United Kingdom and internationally. Social actors assume that the promise of the mass delivery of green jobs will help to build public support for a net zero industrial transition among communities with affective ties to high-carbon industries. In this paper, I use interview and ethnographic data collected in a northern English town to critically examine this assumption. Drawing on conceptual work about the nature of ‘attachments’, I show that proposals for the delivery of new green jobs and industries are felt to lack credibility and have limited resonance with some communities. By making this argument, I put forward a novel analysis within energy and industrial geographies about the tension between imagined sustainable futures (envisaged by policymakers and environmental campaigners) and the materiality of attachments to traditional industries (experienced by communities). I conclude by exploring how low carbon infrastructures might be rendered more affecting. One response lies in recognising and repurposing people’s industrial attachments; this necessitates forms of investment attuned to place-specific sensitivities.

This article investigates the spatial narratives constructed by contemporary Chinese hip-hop music through the conceptual framework of imaginative geography. Drawing on works released after 2018, it examines how Chinese rappers localize classic hip-hop storytelling to engage critically with China’s distinctive urban and regional spatial formations and the lived realities of marginalized communities. Focusing on two key spatial formations, shequ (urban residential communities) and small towns, the study explores how these artists reconfigure stigmatized and othered spaces into sites of identity and resistance. Rather than replicating American narratives, these artists distinctly situated counter-cartographies that reflect entrenched urban inequalities, rural-to-urban migration, and systemic discrimination. The analysis thus highlights how hip-hop music becomes a vehicle for reimagining social belonging and spatial justice under China’s evolving urban order. By revealing these plural and contested geographies emerging from grassroots cultural production, this study contributes to debates at the intersection of urban geography, popular culture, and media studies.

Rapid successions of technological inventions have threatened to upend existing structures of work, prompting a need to rethink labour geography in the twenty-first century. In particular, the pressures that automation brings to workers raise some interesting questions about how feelings toward work are evolving, and how active appropriation and dispensation of personal affects may be needed for workers, especially blue-collar workers long caught up in technological revolutions, to get through increasingly precarious work. Deploying the concept of affective labour and drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 male airport workers, this paper aims to understand how working-class employees in one particular sector of aviation—baggage-and-cargo handling—precisely respond to these automative encroachments with these affective resources. It explores the potentiality of affective labour as a personal or group strategy, where people choose to make their bodies, dispositions and feelings matter more to legitimize their presence. We articulate these ideas through three different affective registers—expressed as sociability, tactility and responsibility—that the airport workers enact in the workplace. The paper seeks to make a departure from current debates on the utility of emotions and affects at work, by arguing that affective labour may sometimes serve less as a display of service or one’s craft, than a malleable resource that is used to hedge against times of precarity, especially among the working class.