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The health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic affected worldwide communities and public social spaces. Mandatory at-home isolation for 2 years, followed by libraries reopening after demanded security adjustments, changed Brazilian public libraries’ workplace dynamics, which now rely mainly on labor and engagement via social networks. Remarkably, a hybrid quality emerged and became the norm in everyday professional practices, generating a new ethos in the epistemic construction of the field of public librarianship. In this chapter, the authors aim to review the concept of the public library and its workplace dynamics after the changes triggered by a new post-pandemic environment, searching for answers to the following question: Have Brazilian public libraries become more or less inhabited as the result of the pandemic crisis? Applying a social and descriptive approach to examine the idea that bonding relationships with public social spaces contribute to building groups’ and communities’ identity, enhancing their history, relations, and memory, the authors debate if public libraries are anthropological inhabited places or non-places, proposing a perspective that connects the public library to the development of the individual and helps to understand space-time appropriation, focusing on identity construction. Exploring this framework, the authors identify the need to review the concept of the public library to represent its contemporaneous aspects of time, space, and collectivity and to include the many creative, affective, and symbolic dimensions embodied by all the individuals the library serves, based on the new experiences driven by disuse or resumption of use due to the pandemic.

Even before the global pandemic crisis, cosmopolitanism was regarded as ‘a noble but flawed ideal’. A moral perspective, despite the efforts of theorists who worked towards cosmopolitan democracy, has little impact on the larger political landscape. After a full year of ‘social distancing’ that transformed our world, the question arises – what will happen to the idea that so strongly relies on human commonality, togetherness, and sociability if all those features are severely lacking in our everyday lives? Will this prolonged ‘state of exception’ redesign our society and our political arrangements in such a manner that the idea of cross-border solidarity becomes not just unattainable, but utterly unimaginable? Will the global society remain just a dream from some earlier, more naïve times? Or is it still possible to be a cosmopolitan, ‘a king of infinite space’, even when we are forcefully sequestered in our tiny nutshells? The chapter will confront this changing socio-political landscape in order to provide an examination of changes in the cosmopolitan idea in general – and probably to give a little hope for an uncertain future.

Currently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and several outer space industry multibillionaire entrepreneurs – e.g., Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), to name a few – are actively engaged in outer space research that reports innovative advances, such as outer space mining, outer space tourism, outer space medicine labs, outer space terraforming of Mars and moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extraterrestrial survivability. All these advances induce serious ethical concerns of human identity and dignity and destiny, human rights and privileges over earth and her resources, and cosmic sustainability. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth and cosmos are meant solely for man's use) and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic, and pro-human project. Critical thinking invites sustainability development to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and transhuman developments. While outer space research certainly offers great hopes of newer living spaces and resources for mankind already strapped by depleted terrestrial habitable spaces, we believe that this capital-intensive “elitist” unregulated outer space research industry may benefit a chosen few at the expense of polarizing mankind in terms of one's undeserved financial capacities to afford extraterrestrial spaces and privileges while endangering Nature by deploying massive terrestrial energy resources for outer space rocket launches causing trailing cosmic debris and planetary pollution. We frame this complex problem into terrestrial humanist issues versus extraterrestrial transhumanist issues, each domain triggered by pro-planetary versus pro-cosmic breakthrough technologies, thus creating a fourfold framework that enables us to explore a distributed ethical strategic understanding and ethical resolution of outer space ethical concerns.

In this article, the authors – a social studies methods professor and geography research associate – make the case for considering the integration of Holocaust geographies into the middle and secondary curriculum, potential challenges that teachers may have in teaching Holocaust geographies are addressed.

Using an experience in delivering professional development on Holocaust geographies to teachers to frame the discourse within the article, the authors contend that a study of Holocaust geographies tests geography as a discipline, addresses current problems and supports student inquiry. Therefore, the inclusion of the Holocaust in the geography curriculum is both needed and valuable.

Examining the Holocaust spatially using geographical skills moves students away from the potential limits of studying the Holocaust temporally using only historical skills. Thus, the distance between past and present, although not ignored, is narrowed through the inquiry into spatial patterns and characteristics, providing the potential to bring greater focus on present-day antisemitism, persecution, genocide and authoritarianism.

Educators are encouraged to take up work that intersects the civic goals of both geography and Holocaust education, yet literature on these intersections is sparse. We call upon Holocaust education and geography education organizations to develop and provide support for teachers around Holocaust geographies.