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Migration has a strong political significance and a crucial constitutive role for identity. The liminal status and exclusion of migrants delimits the inside/outside of political communities and allows for the constitution and coherence of identity. Migration is also a challenge: while it is often presented as a managerial issue related to states’ economic and labour considerations, it essentially challenges and undermines their national and cultural self-image. Migration management also reflects the values and qualities communities identify in themselves; thus immigration policies put communities and states to the test for the way such values are upheld. This contribution explores migration’s constitutive role for European identity and the challenges it presents it with. Explaining the securitisation of migration management in Europe and its racial and dehumanising characteristics, it argues that the two-tier human rights system created in the European space affecting migrants undermines European identity value claims and threatens to undo them. It claims that the time has come to acknowledge European identity’s historical constitution in colonialism, and to envisage it as a fluid, open-ended project accommodating in earnest racial and cultural diversity, pluralism and difference.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

Cultural visibility is closely linked to physical and social mobility, and access to – or denial of – free movement through private and public spaces powerfully shapes individual and social identities. As Liam Kennedy has shown in the context of urban space, “the operations of power are everywhere evident in space: space is hierarchical – zoned, segregated, gated – and encodes both freedoms and restrictions – of mobility, of access, of vision” (2000, pp. 169–170). A consideration of how film articulates a relationship between space and identity might thus begin by breaking down the concept of space itself into three distinct yet interconnected areas of analysis: first, the notion of socially produced space, as shown in the work of Henri Lefebvre and others; second, the idea of audience space or the architectural space of the theater; and finally, the theory of film space or the space of the screen. Given this essay’s limited scope, the latter will be examined in more detail than the first two, but I would like to stress the underlying interconnectedness of the three. While, for example, formalist studies of film aesthetics may be just as valuable as in-depth studies of changing viewing habits, audience demographics, and exhibition technologies, film interpretation should strive to keep in view the variety of spatial formations and conditions that might come to bear on any particular visual text.

It is a rare challenge in academia to be asked to write about yourself, and rarer still to engage with the multiple (social, spatial, political, embodied and private) selves that impact on our practice. In this chapter I consider how who we are in academia is not simply a matter of adopting a professional role but rather involves identity management and negotiation practices to obscure, perform or disclose identities in professional contexts. This chapter is informed by my first ethnographic research project at a non-profit youth media centre in New York City; a study exploring innovative visual pedagogies for investigating how pre-service student-teachers articulate their views about the effects of poverty on educational attainment and my practices as a teacher educator on the MSc Transformative Learning and Teaching: a two-year, initial teacher education programme designed from a social justice perspective and working to produce graduates who position themselves as activist teachers. In this autoethnography I explore the complex temporalities of my academic identities, arguing the need for a critical spatial practice.

For the last three decades, due to socio-economic and political processes such as Europeanisation and globalisation, Croatia has faced a population decline, leading to an increased number of abandoned settlements. During the COVID-19 crisis, rural areas in Croatia became areas of interest and rural tourism increased. However, the increased interest did not result in the revival of abandoned settlements but rather just in the construction of new facilities. According to statistical data, the majority of abandoned settlements are in regions with the highest tourist traffic or along the traffic corridor from continental Croatia to the Adriatic Sea. The superponing of statistical demographic data, tourism data, the spatial distribution of abandoned rural settlements, sectoral development plans, regional spatial characteristics, and types of construction related to tourism resulted in a proposal of a conceptual model for the reconstruction and inclusion of abandoned rural architecture and infrastructure settlements in the development of rural tourism.

Concerning the growth of certain tourist regions in Croatia, to achieve sustainability and resilience in managing territory, abandoned rural locations and infrastructure should be included in sectoral regional development plans in order to strengthen rural identity by preserving architectural heritage, landscape attractions, symbols, and all other identity contributors.

Because of the recent interest on the globalization process generated by global restructuring, the local as the site where this change occurs has emerged as a principal entity for study. Divergent opinions have developed that either downgrade the importance of the local and focus instead on flows, transnational social structures, and translocal spaces or that highlight the centrality of the local as a cause or as a result of globalization, thereby maintaining the traditional focus and emphasis on place as either container, process, or setting.⁴

Post-war Italy faced a transition from industrial reconstruction to a phase of mature capitalism characterised by massive internal migrations towards the north of the country. A rapid urbanisation process created large dysfunctional areas at the periphery of the main re-industrialising cities like Milan, Genoa and Turin. In particular Milan has been defined as the capital of the Italian economic miracle (Foot, 2001). But during the 1950s Milan's extended industrial areas were subjected to main socio-spatial transformations: from being a mix of industrial and rural communities just after the war, the peripheries of Milan turned into deprived areas lacking basic services and infrastructure during the 1970s, when social conflicts were increasingly rising. From 1968 to 1977 Milan was also one of the main stages of a cultural revolution that in Italy uniquely assumed deep political implications by undermining the fundamental institutions of the state (Balestrini & Moroni, 1988).