A decade has passed since Katharyne Mitchell (1997) famously called for a reinsertion of geography into research and writing on transnationalism. This plea, for the ‘contextualization’of prevalent discourses around transnationalism, emerged from a concern that an overzealous and overly abstract celebration of travel and hybridity neglected the broader structures and unequal power relations that underpin contemporary forms of mobility (Mitchell 1997). Migrants were frequently seen as ‘transgressive’by simple virtue of their mobility and the materiality of their transnational practices was consequently lost from these accounts. Early work on transnationalism followed a coterminous fashion within the social sciences and humanities more broadly through its use of spatial metaphors (Voigt-Graf 2004). While these metaphors adopted the language of geography, little was said about the ongoing concerns of many geographers with the mundaneness of everyday human experiences and the ‘interconnectedness of material and metaphorical space’(Seager 1997; Smith and Katz 1993: 68).

This special issue seeks to open up a set of conversations between the concerns of recent work on transnational practices and debates in geography (and beyond) on the spatial construction of social relations. These ostensibly diverse bodies of work have sought to transcend the limits set by restrictively nation-centred accounts of the political, cultural and social. They have also sought to mobilize social relations without losing focus of the situated character of practices–grounded through particular sites, networks and flows. Both sets of work have been involved in reconceptualizing nations, regions and places as key sites in sets of flows and networks, rather than as fixed containers of political and cultural activity. Through the issue we seek to develop productive exchanges between these bodies of work. In this special issue we build on a number of interventions in transnational practices and the spatial construction of social relations (see Anderson 2002; Jackson et al. 2004; Olsson and Silvey 2006; Yeoh et al. 2003). We contend, however, that the implications of thinking about the spatialities of transnational practices have not been explored fully, either in theoretical or empirical terms. By spatialities we mean the diverse ongoing connections and networks that bind different parts of the world