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This chapter is dedicated to understanding the idea of international as a key notion to the development of globalisation and to promoting the rescaling of spaces and subjects in contemporary higher education. The author discusses the concept of scale as a performative device that activates the capacities of bodies. Instead of seeing scale as a naturalised and hierarchical structure of spatial distribution, the author understands it as an ensemble of discourses and practices that produce scalar effects. Globalisation uses scale to promote the idea that subjects would become ‘international’ by being linked to privileged spaces and bodies in the Global North. In this sense, globalisation is not merely about nodes where certain flows converge. Rather, the author understands it as the political conditions that control and constrain the space for certain flows to occur and not others. Using assemblage analysis, the author presents and analyses three scenes taken from his ethnographic records that have as a guiding line the materialisation of the international. These scenes report the experience of being a Latin American doctoral student attending a congress in the United States, a tense situation experienced at a Chilean university academic event, and the unpretentious manifestation of an elaborate idea of internationality from a personal experience of a trip to India. The results point to three elaborations of the international: an optimistic view of a shared world, a geopolitical internationality and the production of a global corporeality.

Our present quest for sustainable cities requires a holistic understanding of city construction and people’s well-being. Feminist scholars have shown that urban space does not attend to women’s needs. This study focuses on women’s everyday life in Athens, Greece in late-1980s. This is a unique spatio-temporal point since it is located at the edge of several prevailing dichotomies – geopolitical, cultural and temporal. It examines how women use, experience and reconstitute public spaces in the city and aims to understand both how public spaces – with their material and social dimensions – restrict women’s lives, and how women reappropriate and (re)constitute urban space. It is based on in-depth interviews with women from three areas of Greater Athens, with different social class profiles. It focuses on neighborhood as a physical space, women’s social networks in the neighborhood and women’s mobility. The main findings include that the nexus of gender and class is inscribed in public spaces so that these restrict women and their right to the city; the organization of public spaces ignores women’s reproductive responsibilities; women participate in the public sphere, but gender hierarchies have not been eliminated; while local social networks are fundamental for women in their efforts to reappropriate public spaces. It concludes that the transition to sustainable – enjoyable – inclusive cities will benefit from incorporating women’s experiences and needs; adopting a socio-spatial perspective that focuses on everyday life; a focus on social reproduction too; and an explicit aim to eliminate gender hierarchies (rather than inclusion).

This chapter is born out of concern about the perception of the physical and symbolic place of the live-in housekeeper, both in socioeconomic, and historical terms, as well as the architectural and social dynamics of the home. An intersectional and teleological analysis of the intrinsic devaluation of paid social reproduction work is carried out, based mainly on gender, race, and class inequalities. Ultimately, the chapter tries to locate the position in which the maid finds herself in the domestic environment, both in family relationships and in the symbolism inherent to the concept of the maid’s room. Based on sociological, philosophical, and anthropological analysis, the ambiguous place of domestic workers becomes clearer, promoting a reflection on the very concept of family and household. Thus, the chapter proposes to achieve a hermeneutic dive into the experience of this working class, revealing a hierarchical system beyond the socioeconomic, but above all, of their subjectivities.

This chapter presents an interpretation of gentrification and touristification as gender-related issues. The underlying question driving this discussion is: How can we envision feminist cities when certain forms of feminism today are strongly intertwined with consumerism? In the context of ghost cities or neighborhoods, Airbnb and digital nomads dominate, skyrocketing prices make life unaffordable, support structures vanish in favor of place branding, and oppressive security practices are normalized. The chapter examines the history of neoliberal deactivation in Rome’s Ostiense neighborhood. It explores the resistance by places of liberation, such as the occupied former barracks of Porto Fluviale, which serves as a residence for homeless families. It delves into the genuine transformation of the area into an open-air museum exploited for tourism and the occupation of a former nightclub turned into a meeting space for marginalized individuals to ensure their safety through acts of resistance. The territorial appropriation dynamics driven by neoliberal forces have altered geographies, resulting in an emotional detachment that renders the city unlivable. The chapter touches upon the transformation of soulful places into sites of emotional resistance, illustrated through Sara Ventroni’s poem dedicated to the Gasometer. This suburban colossus has indelibly shaped the area’s cityscape since the early 20th century, constantly caught between branding and resistance. Drawing from these experiences and insights, a new theory of the city is proposed, one rooted in the principle of care.

This chapter discusses what special education means for students with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) including what is being done and how traditions are maintained. More specifically, this chapter explores the importance of advancing values for the diverse population of students with visual impairments, focusing on cultivation of supportive, inclusive, and collaborative educational environments that continue to stand the test of time. This chapter highlights the increasing heterogeneity of this population of students and specific instructional strategies to support the cultural and linguistic diversity of learners with visual impairments in today's classrooms. This chapter also discusses the significance of promoting core concepts that are rooted in a traditional and specialized instructional framework for students who are visually impaired.

This chapter examines the concepts of race and racism, critically reviewing their historical and contemporary applications in everyday life as well as in academic and policy debates. Racism has been extensively researched, with various theories and conceptualisations developed across social science. However, there is a great deal of disagreement regarding its nature, contemporary significance and empirical validation. This chapter examines these and attempts to synthesise some of the common definitions of racism provided in the literature. It explores related concepts and underlying themes pertaining to expressions of race and racism. Furthermore, it unpacks current knowledge about racial issues and discusses recent advances in the conceptual understanding of various forms of racism. It also elucidates the social, political and analytical applications of racism as a concept and the significance of racism in contemporary societies. The chapter concludes by highlighting how racism is a dynamic phenomenon, continuously evolving with the social, political and technological transformations in contemporary societies.

This chapter approaches issues of ecospirituality through Gender and the Environment analytical lenses. We propose the need to actively queer human/Nature relations and understandings by exploring studies related to ecospirituality, Earth relations, and gender dynamics. The chapter considers ecospirituality as ritual practices, material cultures, codified ethics, and/or cosmological structures related to a category of “the sacred,” which influence how various gendered and sexed bodies interact with the non-human world. Here, we propose that ecospiritual categories can shape the ways that humans conceive of their humanness and their sexed and gendered bodies. Within the context of religion/Nature interactions white evangelical masculinist subcultures in the United States are considered as an example that demonstrates the paradoxical characteristics of the gender binary and human/Nature dualisms. The chapter proceeds to offer queered ecologies as alternative narratives that can assist the larger Gender and Environment discourse in better understanding ecospiritual practices and worldviews, and how the latter can contribute to prosustainable lifeways as a viable alternative to masculinist hegemonies that are continuing to predominate the ways that many humans – especially those in the Global North – understand and relate to the natural world at great cost to life on the planet.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.