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The idea of adapting and designing services and products to serve “special” needs either for the public good or for commercial purposes is fundamentally an idea anchored in US history. At root, it is a simple idea, albeit expressed in widely varying vocabularies across disciplines and professions. In the parlance of social work, public education, and public librarianship, for example, the idea has been repeatedly advanced over the years as a well-meaning reaching out to meet the needs of subpopulations not readily addressed by available service designs. In the parlance of the commercial sector, the idea has focused on market segmentation, dividing the population into finer and finer subgroups for the purposes of marketing products and services. One of the most recent labels for these activities has been marketing to audience “niches” in which the audience is identified “… as a certain definable market segment with demographic characteristics that make it attractive to advertisers.” (Fejes and Lennon, 2000, p. 37).

This chapter describes gender differences in Montevideo through the study of daily mobility. Generally, mobility studies do not account for gender differences more than in a superficial way, distinguishing basic travel patterns by sex. However, different patterns and mobility behaviours can obscure situations of deeply entrenched gender inequality that have direct consequences on the opportunities that men and women are able to reach. To disentangle these inequalities, this work addresses some mainstream mobility indicators classified by gender but also some specific indicators, with special attention to care mobility as a factor that can restrain women’s ability to move. Moreover, a tour-based analysis is performed to shed light on gendered schedules and mobility patterns. Results show that women’s mode share comprises a larger proportion of transit trips, they travel shorter distances – investing more time – and they contribute in a greater proportion than men to care mobility, especially among the lower quintiles of income. While men’s commuting patterns have a defined ‘home-based work’ profile, women have a higher level of heterogeneity in their daily itineraries. Access to private motorised means of transport is a key variable in explaining the configuration of mobility patterns, and there is a persistent gender gap in this matter. The chapter concludes that, as several authors have reported, gender is a marker in terms of mobility. It sets specific conditions for urban life in general and mobility in particular that, in turn, may be the cause of further inequality.

The ubiquity of digitally intermediated interactions is changing the ways in which social interaction creates the cognitive and institutional underpinnings of new markets. Logics that define markets used to be localized, but they now emerge from crowds that span – and persist – across time and space. This article builds a theory of how crowds emerge and evolve in a way that influences the emergence of shared logics and helps explain why some markets are viable while others are not. What is revealed is that a crowd has a hidden niche structure that determines the fate of a new market.

In this comparative study, we explore the ways eight queer university students from Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick, Canada, use cellphilm production (cellphone + film production + intention) to share their experiences, make calls for change, and forge solidarities across racial, cultural, and national contexts. Engaging in cellphilm production as a research method for social change, we ask: What are queer, trans, and non-binary students’ experiences in campus spaces? What are the commonalities and tensions that exist between their experiences? How might cellphilm production work to disrupt unsafe campus spaces and create transnational queer solidarities? Through cellphilm production, participants crafted narratives highlighting significant systemic barriers, and speaking back to micro and macro aggressions. Both participating groups expressed feelings of exclusion and institutional neglect and highlighted their university’s disregard toward accommodating physical spaces, such as washrooms, downplaying of verbal hostilities, and other microaggressions. Participants also noted that students were at the forefront of creating purposefully queer spaces. Our comparative study disrupts the erasure of the experiences of queer, trans, and non-binary university students in Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick and speaks back to hegemonic whiteness in the context of queer campus spaces in New Brunswick, Canada.