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The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the contradictions inherent to balconies. Despite the attention given to these architectural elements on that moment, there is a knowledge gap concerning the preferences and expectations of the inhabitants in relation to them. For this reason, this paper aims to conduct a critical literature review of the publications about the inhabitants’ perceptions of balconies in order to identify the most relevant criteria to consider during the design process.

The analysis was based on the post-occupancy evaluation (POE) criteria (technical, functional and behavioural).

The results highlighted the relevance of the behavioural criteria for the valorisation of the balconies by the inhabitants and presented indications to the research about these liminal spaces and the design practice of housing buildings.

According to the authors’ best knowledge, this study represents the more holistic study of the kind.

Focussing on the perspective of business event leaders, this study aims to explore the future of transformative experience (TE) events, recognising a paradigm shift from organising conventional events to designing and guiding TEs in the meetings, incentives and conferences as exhibitions (MICE) context.

Using a qualitative interview-based design, insights from 20 international business events industry leaders were gathered and analysed by using thematic analysis through a multi-step process with MAXQDA.

The findings discuss the future of transformative events by identifying the paradigm shift towards TE in business events and outline key dimensions of the leader’s and team’s mindset and skills. Five design principles for TE events in the MICE sector are identified: design for change; emotionally experiential environments; personal engagement; responsibility; and transformative measurement.

The study offers a snapshot of how transformative events of the future could be designed and suggests a series of practical insights for MICE event leaders and organisers seeking to leverage events as a catalyst for intentional transformation, positive impact and long-lasting change.

The study adds to the emerging body of knowledge on TEs and contributes to an extended stakeholder perspective, namely, that of business event leaders and their teams who are instrumental in facilitating transformative events. An original framework for designing TE MICE events is offered as a theoretical contribution.

Institutional framings of doctoral education mostly do not recognize the existential dimension of doctoral experience. This paper aims to offer an expanded understanding of experiences of doctoral researchers in the humanities with the concept of entangled becoming. This concept is developed through an existential lens by using Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy – particularly his emphasis on emotions such as passion, anxiety and despair – and Denise Batchelor’s derived concept of vulnerable voices.

The conceptual framing is used for an empirical study based on ethnographic interviews with 10 doctoral researchers and supplementary observational notes from fieldwork at a university in Denmark. Two of the interview cases were selected to showcase variation across lived experiences and how doctoral researchers voice their entangled becoming.

Common experiences such as loneliness, insecurity(ies), vulnerability(ies) or passion for one’s research were identified across the interviews. On the other hand, this study shows that each doctoral journey in the humanities envelops a distinct web of entanglements, entailing distinct navigation, that makes each case a unique story and each doctoral voice a specific one.

Combining an existential philosophical perspective with a qualitative study, the paper offers an alternative perspective for doctoral education. It connects the humanities doctoral experience to the broader condition of human existence and the sophisticated uniqueness of each researcher’s becoming.

This chapter provides a close reading and critical analysis of work by two New York City-based Afro-Dominican artists, Joiri Minaya (1990) and Josefina Báez (1960). The author argues that Báez' “Carmen FotonovelARTE” (2020) and Minaya's “Containers” series (2015–2020) play with the trope of repose and mixed-race beauty to chart pathways of Afro-Latina representation that are shaped by yet that radically challenge the colonial script of the mulata. The artists create a space of refusal that transforms repose into a powerful site from which to articulate, problematize, and dismantle oppressive, reductive systems of representation.

The purpose of this article is for three teacher educators to reflect on their use of mapping and mapping-adjacent activities in university courses vis-à-vis the development of their own critical praxis toward spatial justice. The authors focus on how the centering of geospatial literacies through spatial justice issues impacts the development of criticality for preservice teachers and their teacher educators.

The paper opted for collaborative reflections about our teacher educator praxis through self-study and critical friends. Three teacher educators wrote vignettes about their experiences with place-based mapping approaches in teacher education coursework.

The paper suggests that mapping activities (broadly defined) create space(s) for courageous conversations on difficult topics (e.g. race and social-economic status). These spaces are not only between teacher and student but also can be extended to teacher educators by focusing on critical and collaborative self-study.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to use critical and collaborative reflection to inform their own praxis.

The paper shares pedagogical approaches and reflections for highlighting geospatial literacies and critical place consciousness within teacher education.

This has significance as there is a relative dearth of literature detailing how critical teacher educators can learn with and from each other when working to focus place-based learning in the context of teacher preparation.

In this study, I use currere to examine excessive entitlement in my own high school education. By “excessive entitlement,” I emphasize teachers' actions and systemic conditions related to an excessive educational mindset justifying (and manifesting) self-infallibility. Teachers displaying excessive entitlement might take for granted, for example, the correctness of their actions, closing self-awareness, and more equitable relations with others (especially students). On a structural level, it includes, for example, societal norms, school policies, educational traditions, and often laws. Specifically, I present findings examining three levels of curriculum – the formal or explicit, the implicit or hidden, and the null or present/absent. I offer my own story as a case study of how schools and teachers may silence and erase student identity and culture as well as how more inclusive and dialogic teaching approaches (and methods of inquiry) can counteract and offer alternatives to such oppressive forces. My framework includes professional ethics, moral ethics, and social justice ethics. Looking back at my history as a gay high school student, I discovered that my school's explicit curriculum provided teachers with a safe haven for bigotry and hostility toward LGBTQ students (as well as female students and students of color), and its hidden curriculum projected messages that privileged such a curriculum (and denigrated epistemologies more on the margin). It was only in the null curriculum that I began to experience a sense of liberation and inclusion and an awareness of the multiplicity of epistemology and ontology.

This chapter argues that football is central to specific regional, hegemonic masculinities within colonial histories and continuities in South India. Through ethnographic narratives of a prominent football figure associated with the Malabar Special Police, this chapter shows how different performances of a particular mode of masculinity draw power from multiple sites such as regional class networks, colonial legacies, and postcolonial sport. This work demonstrates how a (post) colonial space shores up the powers associated with a male sporting figure. The regional format of a sport is as important as the global format in producing regional, hegemonic masculinity. Analysing the powers and aura associated with this sporting figure helps one to understand the specific meanings of desire and aspirations for status and stability among a section of men in a South Indian context.

In this chapter, we purport that “excessive entitlement” is directly linked to concepts of self/identity with the belief that how we come to regard self in relation to the Other is implicitly and explicitly taught. We view excessive entitlement as a manifestation of the privilege and infallibility of educators who take for granted the correctness of their actions. Through a critical examination of personal stories, theoretical literature, and common school practices, we create a collage of thoughts that highlight some of the complex factors that intersect with excessive entitlement, albeit considering what may be determined “excessive” and by whom.

We use a dialogic format, in this chapter, but do not engage in an actual duoethnography. We address the following questions: How does one (a) create an ethical habitus, constantly being aware of one's responsibility toward the Other, (b) reflexively and humbly practice self-accountability in a manner that recognizes one's positionality and status that is grounded in historical privileged, personal power dynamics, and systems of oppression, (c) develop dialogic ways of being in a neoliberal ethos of systemic accountability within prescriptive curricula, and (d) as teacher educators, assist students in understanding and practicing such dispositions.

We discuss how developing dialogic ways of being, treating others with respect, practicing humility in the face of other people, and learning to respect and build on difference disrupt excessive entitlement. We also explore complexities around the attempt to create “safe spaces” for students, given risks of self-deception and appropriation of students' meaning-making.

Tracing the development of a parallel-engaged pedagogy of care that extended and adapted the critical and transformative pedagogies of Freire, De Sousa Santos and hooks to the South African context. The development of this transformative pedagogy addresses the local conditions of an architectural design studio at a postcolonial, post-Apartheid and post “Fees must Fall” protests South African university. This pedagogy used practice-based design research to build a more conscious, critical and careful design practice in both students and educators.

The pedagogy was developed through participatory action research, over five years, from 2019 to 2023 including two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Parallel and active engagement of students and educators within a nurturing and caring environment evolved from year to year, through a conscious and critical reflection on the process. Student surveys, reflective essays and focus groups unearth the impact of the parallel-engaged pedagogy of care.

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care was shown to support and scaffold students becoming more conscious, critical and careful in their design practices validating diverse lived experiences as generative for design and important for social justice and transformative equity.

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care is part of a global shift to more transformative pedagogies that address student diversity and decoloniality.

Through dismantling traditional hierarchical teaching modes, the pedagogy is more student-led, agile and adaptable. Through centring and demonstrating care in the pedagogy, students are encouraged to develop both self-care and care in their design practice. This is especially critical in the South African context where the cultural capital of the institution, with its roots in colonial and Apartheid education differs from that of the majority of students of colour.

Taking the Mamá Fit memes and other social media eruptions as a starting point and delving deeper into popular print media, this chapter traces the racialized and gendered practices that constitute fitness in El Salvador in a diasporic context. Importantly, the word fit is now often expressed in English, captured in the names of commercial gyms and diet advertisements; the use of this word signals an important cultural change in conventional understandings of the body in a Spanish-speaking society. By charting the emergence of this new health/beauty norm in a transnational domain, this chapter explores the relationship between shifting patterns of gendered body discipline and changes in El Salvador’s location within the global political economy. This chapter argues that fitness discourse has become a subtle, but powerful, conduit for coloniality during a renegotiation of the meaning of gender to fit a neoliberal reality. The argument ends by pointing in the direction of future research to explore how this discourse is experienced in embodied practice with potentially contradictory impacts in Salvadoran society.