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This chapter argues that Black women, despite their marginalization, should consider the radical possibilities inherent in their rise to become leaders. Here, we use an intersectional lens to explore leadership and address how identity, bias, invisibility, and disinvestment confront Black female leaders as they progress through childhood, adolescence, early career, and executive ranks. Ultimately, we offer recommendations relative to practice, for educational and work settings, research, and policy.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold: in the first part, we will provide comprehensive, state-of-the-art urban and visual studies across the domains of visibility, urban aesthetics and the legitimate use of the urban. We will show that what we see is foremost what is accessible and legitimate as a vision, while the urban provides multiple realms of invisibility that are often neglected or rendered invisible. Art, architecture, urbanism and place-making will be used as examples of these dynamics.

In the second part of the chapter, we will present a research study on the decolonial practices of re-signification of colonial urban traces. Despite the dominant representation of Italians as ‘good people’ (a local version of ‘white innocence’), in recent years, Italy has witnessed a new interest stemming from bottom-up local movements dealing with colonial legacy in the urban space. We will show a research example (‘Decolonising the City. Visual Dialogues in Padova’) based on participatory video, arts-based methods and walking methods.

Employing virtual ethnography and narrative analysis, this chapter uses data drawn from the online social media site, Tumblr, to explore a group of Tumblr users who mostly identify with the complex intersectional identities of LGBTQ+ disabled people of color.

This chapter suggests that narratives are skillfully constructed by this group of Tumblr users in ways that counteract felt or expected experiences of exclusion, invisibility, and stigmatization within this identity-based community. The posters represented here are combating this invisibility and marginalization. They narrate themselves into existence by attaching their experiences to two well-known and recognizable social problem narratives. One is the “Pride/Community and Self-love” narrative, commonly associated with LGBTQ+ pride and LGBTQ+ communities. The other is the “Our Lives Matter/Deserving of Life” narrative, commonly associated with communities and social movements such as Black Lives Matter. Posters are artfully constructing their own community narratives by drawing from these culturally circulating and available narrative resources. When these two popular narratives are deployed in this way, they are counternarratives that are doing both resistance work and community/identity-building work. The ultimate effect is that the counternarrative they construct unites quite a diverse group of people through experiences of shared exclusion.

This chapter extends the scholarly conversation on both narratives and disability by suggesting ways in which counternarratives about individuals with complex intersectional identities can be constructed in virtual communities. In so doing, the chapter brings poorly represented perspectives into discourses on disability and narratives. The study also contributes to the literature on the importance of emotion, specifically by highlighting the deployment of love and anger to counteract experiences of shame and marginalization.

The Fijian LGBTQI+ movement has significantly grown, shaped around a more significant Pacific identity. The participation of queer activists from the Indo-Fijian community, which represents about 35% of Fiji’s population, is limited, and the struggles, needs, and aspirations of this LGBTQI+ community are mainly invisible. This invisibility is framed within Fiji’s political conflicts. However, there is also a form of self-censorship due to cultural and religious barriers, as well as to dynamics that speak about the trauma of the indentured system and postcolonial violence. Contemporaneously, non-political spaces provide avenues for visibility. While some Indo-Fijian religious contexts welcome gender and sexual diversity forms, these are becoming visible aided by popular social media platforms and Bollywood cinema’s influence. This project explores the dynamics of the Indo-Fijian queer community within Fiji and its broader LGBTQI+ movement, aiming to identify barriers specific to their community and strategies for recognition, visibility, and participation in advocacy and activism. The project is approached as activist research and includes interviews and group discussions with Indo-Fijians self-identifying LGBTQI+.

The shift in policy discourse towards individualism is affecting service provision and access, which has become increasingly conditioned on individual agency and the “deservingness” of the recipient. Gendered and intersectional experiences of homelessness and excluded populations less likely to be living on the streets remain overlooked and unaddressed. This study thus aims to uncover what drives “invisibility” in services for women experiencing multiple disadvantage and the gendered constraints the women are facing when exiting and navigating multiple disadvantage.

The paper draws on in-depth interviews with women who face severe and multiple disadvantage and their support staff. Data is also gathered through survey data and observations with a wide range of frontline service providers, as well as support notes and numerical progress data recorded by one of the service providers.

Contradicting the common assumption that people act as rational actors in their interaction with services, the author found that women’s decisions to (dis)engage may be blinded by forces of multiple disadvantage and mistrust. These are often developed as a result of systemic and gendered constraints that limit women’s capabilities and exercise of choice. Barriers in service access often amplified the personal barriers they were facing and reinforced women’s decisions to not engage with services.

The author hopes that this paper sheds light on the particular set of barriers women with multiple disadvantage face, which will be vital to reach women who face severe disadvantage and provide more effective policies, care and support.

This study gives voice to a particular hidden population: women with multiple disadvantage. It contributes to existing frameworks on agency and choice by understanding gendered barriers behind service engagement and how services themselves may be contributing to women’s invisibility.

Questioning gender is about taking an active, critical role in the technological design of our daily behaviour. It is a deconstruction of the oppositions that exist in the discourses of Ambient Intelligence designers, the ICT industry and computer scientists. What underlies the assumption that Ambient Intelligence will, by disappearing into our environment, bring humans both an easy and entertaining life? The gender perspective can uncover power relations within the promotion and realisation of Ambient Intelligence that satisfy an obvious wish for a technological heaven. The deconstruction of the promise of progress and a better life reveals what is overvalued, what is undervalued and what is ignored. This paper is a deconstruction of the view, currently prevalent in the discourses of Ambient Intelligence; a view of humans and the way they live. A view that will influence the way women and men will be allowed to construct their lives.

The purpose of this paper is to move away from the studies that have to date only focused on “visible women” (those who are running businesses as owner‐managers or as active partners, i.e. as copreneurs) to a focus on those that are largely invisible. These are the women who are involved in small firms but who are not copreneurs, and who do not have clearly acknowledged and/or formalised roles.

The paper is based on data collected as part of a research programme that involved 250 in‐depth interviews carried out with owner‐managers in manufacturing and service firms throughout New Zealand over a two‐year period.

The findings from the interviews suggest that there are many women playing critical roles in New Zealand small firms whose contributions are unacknowledged, and which may be also unseen and unpaid. These women (typically as wives of owner‐managers) are contributing invaluably to the futures and fortunes of those firms – albeit from “behind the scenes”.

In the paper, a descriptive typology of the roles that wives play in New Zealand small firms is put forward. The typology provides a starting point for those wanting to explore similar dimensions of female “invisibility” in other contexts, and will contribute to the body of knowledge related to gender in the context of small firms.

The purpose of this paper is to bring a new scientific theory into practice in the hotel industry.

In‐depth open‐ended interviews were used with eight hospitality practitioners, consumers, and academic researchers.

The article lays out current practices of security and privacy measurements in the hospitality industry and points out the related limitations. More importantly, it provides insights to hotel operators on possible future applications of a new scientific invention and how it could help alleviate the limitations found in the existing security and privacy measures.

The paper raises the awareness of a new scientific breakthrough that sheds new lights to security and privacy strategies in hotel operations. Hotels, which are able to react quickly to gain the first‐mover‐advantage in leading the industry on the application of such technology, will certainly gain tremendous publicity, and more importantly will be the first to create a new level of confidence in the market on security and privacy strategies implemented in their daily hotel operations.

This paper communicates a recent scientific development and its possible applications in the hotel industry. In this way, it bridges the gap between a scientific invention and its real‐world application. It is expected to provide insights for hoteliers who are interested in technology applications.

Since Michael Burawoy’s 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, there has been a growing interest among sociologists in “public sociology.” Though controversial in the discipline, public sociology parallels several other “engaged” forms of sociological inquiry, such as service-learning, collaborative research, participatory research, civic engagement, action research, and others. While forms of public sociology are growing among sociologists, there is little linkage with the symbolic interactionist tradition in the discipline. The ethnographic case study presented here attempts to make a link between public sociology and symbolic interactionism. Beginning in 1994 to the present, the author has been involved in the formal and informal recognition efforts of the Pee-Dee Native-American tribe in the author’s home state of South Carolina. The Pee-Dee finally gained state recognition in 2006. The struggle on the part of the tribe to gain state recognition began formally in the early 1970s. The central social issue for the tribe has always revolved around their perceived lack (primarily on the part of the dominant group) in terms of cultural and historical identity. The paradox for the tribe is found in the contradictions between their actual lived historical experience, beginning in colonial times, and the historical interpretation, on the part of earlier historians of the southeast, that the smaller tribes simply “vanished” after 1775. The paradox is also furthered by the stereotypes of what constitutes “real Indians,” which, in many ways, inform the formal recognition requirements by the state. The chapter begins with an exploration of the historical, colonial context, followed with the ethnographic story of my time with the Pee-Dee in the field and our struggle to collaborate on finding a working interpretation of the tribe’s historical and cultural existence as a people. The chapter ends with some thoughts on how a critical symbolic interactionism can promote a successful public sociology project.