This chapter examines the modes of learning associated with a practice deeply embedded in Brazilian society: football (soccer). Recognizing its unique position in the country – as part of everyday life, with minimal formal instruction, varying levels of participation, and strong historical, cultural, and identity dimensions. The ethnographic analysis focuses on the participation contexts of young footballers in the periphery of a Brazilian metropolis (Belo Horizonte, MG). Drawing on the perspective of learning as inherently embedded in social practices (Lave 2019), the chapter explores both the formation of young footballers and the historical development of the practice itself. By focusing the analysis on learning, it articulates the concepts of access and participation, seeking to trace the dynamics of football practices while acknowledging the foundational complexity that characterizes them. The aim is to foreground the discussion on how each participant is constituted, simultaneously and through the very relationships to which they contribute.

This chapter arises from the challenge of understanding how children of different ages participate in household care in Belo Horizonte (Brazil). We analyse their different learning trajectories based on in-depth interviews conducted in their homes. We explore interconnections between children’s experiences and inequalities related to gender, race, and social class. We used illustrated cards from a children’s board game to approach the material possibilities within the domestic space. We examine questions about children’s access to different household spaces and to participation in some household tasks and not others. These conditions shape how they learn to participate and even not to participate, rather than simply failing to learn how to participate. These differences reveal fundamental aspects of care practices – caring for oneself, caring for others, and caring for the world we live in.

This chapter examines William Burroughs as a radical world builder within science fiction, exploring how his early and late works engage deeply with the genre’s tropes – time travel, space opera, interplanetary conflict, and dystopian urban control. From the Cut-Up/Nova trilogy to The Wild Boys and the Red Night trilogy, Burroughs constructs fragmented urban landscapes and hybrid futures that destabilize genre conventions and resist linear narrative. Situating Burroughs among proto-SF, Golden Age authors, and the New Wave of the 1960s, Hougue explores how his stylistic innovations – especially the cut-up method – helped redefine the speculative tradition. Clémentine Hougue traces Burroughs’ influence on writers like Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker, showing how his mutating urban imaginaries prefigure cyberpunk and experimental SF. Moving from dystopian insurrections to utopian reimaginings of space and time, Burroughs’ work becomes a site of poetic and political speculation, operating at the boundaries of genre and form.

From the mid-nineteenth century on, the nation’s authentic character was sought among the ‘timeless’ countryfolk rather than in its ancient ancestry. Paradoxically, this turn from ‘past to peasant’ took place during a period of accelerated, technology-driven and urbanizing modernity, as more unrestricted, commercially driven, mass-appeal cultural media became available. This chapter traces the interaction between the modern city and the timeless country, from world fairs to the art theatres of the fin-de-siècle. The chapter concludes by outlining how the new modern and decorative arts (Arts and Crafts, art nouveau) functioned as carriers of progressive national revival movements in Europe’s sub-imperial capitals, from Dublin and Barcelona to Prague and Riga; and how their anti-imperial emancipation agenda was uneasily poised between progressive cosmopolitanism and nativist essentialism.

The chapter retraces how a collective of Moroccan sociologists in Rabat reconceptualized the meaning of social emancipation in the spaces of the city. The 1965 Casablanca riots and subsequent state repression accelerated the demise of a vision of Moroccan class struggle embodied by Mehdi Ben Barka. This chapter explores how these sociologists departed from class analysis and proposed new new theorizations of Moroccan society as illustrated by Paul Pascon’s notion of the “composite society.” This chapter also tells the story of the periodicals that enabled these debates and such epistemological innovations—BESM, Lamalif and al-Asas— gave them cover to think, but also became sites of insulation. This was illustrated by the coverage of the “youth question” and these sociologists’ gradual struggle to explain younger generations’ discontent. By the late 1970s, these sociologists had unwillingly joined the country’s bourgeoisie. The chapter then ends with sociologist Fatema Mernissi as a counterpoint, who consciously trying to disrupt the boundaries and sought to foreground the voices and agency of subaltern women.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Science, technology, and medicine (STM) and the European city are inextricably linked. In the mid-nineteenth century this intricate relationship became dialectic. The urban space not only served as a facilitator of knowledge production and circulation, but was also transformed by STM.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.

In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.

The early modern Japanese city, in the paradigmatic form of the castle town (jōkamachi), gave spatial form to the social distinctions of status group (mibun), and it evolved through complex negotiations between multiple status communities, each with its own social logics and visions of urban life. This chapter sketches these spatial structures and social processes through a study of the shogunal capital of Edo, focusing on the triangular negotiation between three sets of agents: the shogunal administration, the propertied townspeople, and the diffuse occupational collectives of the unpropertied urban margins. This triangular negotiation is illuminated through a historical survey of the Edo firefighting system, revealing the ways in which the early modern city was shaped by competing interests and claims over space. Particular attention is given to the diverse forms of social agency that interacted in the urban process, complicating a binary model of governmental authority and popular subversion.

This chapter shows that due to the old configuration of the Mediterranean city and decades, if not centuries, of political corruption, Mediterranean detectives are confronted with a problematic urban environment, which they blame on political greed and laissez faire capitalism. Alongside this negative perception of urban development, through their work and private life, Mediterranean detectives attempt to resist a dominant culture of exclusion, and experience and build transcultural spaces where history and culture are shared. The Mediterranean detective feels a sense of belonging to the different communities that populate the Mediterranean city. By interacting with different people and ethnicities, and by inhabiting inter-class, transcultural and inter-ethnic places, the Mediterranean detective constructs an urban environment that overcomes stereotypical representations of the city as a dangerous and divisive place. Finally, this chapter shows that a focus on the Mediterranean Sea, as an ‘in-between’ space of both clashes and exchange, adds a new literary map in which traditional postcolonial distinctions between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are overcome.