EDITORIAL

Editoria

Rethinking the Politics of the International Student Experience in the Age of Trump

We are living in troubling and uncertain times. Xenophobia is on the rise as right-wing, authoritarian nationalism has witnessed significant electoral gains and the very ideals of democratic inclusiveness and international pluralism are under direct attack. With the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the country with the largest share of international students globally is increasingly becoming an unwelcoming place to study abroad. On January 27, 2017, Trump issued an executive order prohibiting entry of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen), and severely restricting the admission of refugees, into the United States. This initial attempt at a “Muslim travel ban” was subsequently blocked by the federal courts, yet the ongoing efforts of the current U.S. administration to discriminate against Muslim travelers at the border have had a chilling effect on international travel more generally

Serving Us Rights: Securing the Right to Food in Canada

In recent decades, Canada has consistently failed to uphold basic human rights, including the right to food. This has caused widespread and persistent household food insecurity (HFI) which has become a serious, albeit overlooked, public health concern. Working from a political economic perspective, this article situates HFI within the context of the poverty resulting from neoliberal “rollbacks” to the welfare state. The majority of community and policy responses to HFI focus on the production or redistribution of food, which misses the underlying issue of inadequate income. These responses may even perpetuate food insecurity by offloading safety net functions onto corporations and communities that cannot compensate for welfare programs. In order to strengthen income-based responses to food insecurity, we recommend policy interventions under the “right to food” framework, which places primary responsibility on the state. But unlike traditionally legal conceptions of the right to food, we emphasize its utility as a tool for mobilizing civil society, which is a powerful yet underutilized source of accountability to state obligations. This approach therefore combines political action with policymaking, and civil society with senior governments, in the collective realization of the right to food

Naming rights, place branding, and the tumultuous cultural landscapes of neoliberal urbanism

In recent decades, urban policymakers have increasingly embraced the selling of naming rights as a means of generating revenue to construct and maintain urban infrastructure. This practice of “toponymic commodification” first emerged with the commercialization of professional sports during the second half of the 20th century and has become an integral part of the policy toolkit of neoliberal urbanism more generally. As a result, the naming of everything from sports arenas to public transit stations has come to be viewed as a sponsorship opportunity, yet such naming rights initiatives have not gone uncontested. This special issue examines the political economy of urban place naming through a series of case studies that consider how the commodification of naming rights is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the geographies of toponymic commodification as an emerging research focus within the field of critical urban toponymies and propose several theoretical approaches that can enhance our understanding of the commodification of naming rights as an urban spatial practice. We then discuss the main contributions in this special issue and conclude by exploring potential directions for future research on the geographies of urban toponymic commodification

Fonds Clémançon. II. Archives photographiques. Vues d'ensemble des salles de spectacles. Théâtres, cinémas et autres établissements situés à Paris. Cinéma Le Français. Coupe longitudinale

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Containing the Multitudes

A growing body of scholarship has examined different aspects of the international student experience in higher education institutions, yet few studies have critically interrogated the very concept of the “international student” itself. In this article, we consider the different ways in which politico-legal practices of boundary-making have produced categorization schemes that demarcate the boundary between the national “Self” and the international “Other.” These legal categories of the “domestic” and “international” student serve as the discursive grid through which student populations are rendered legible by university administrators, student affairs practitioners, and scholars. We argue that the socio-cultural worlds of international students are not reducible to the homogenizing logics of politico-legal and institutional categorization, and that they should be reimagined through a pluriversal lens – where multiple worlds of difference can co-exist in spite of persistent efforts to contain the multitudes within the rigid, fixed, and mutually exclusive categories of the nation-state