Abstract This article reflects on the generative potential of visual methods to collectively construct and re-construct intergenerational urban memories related to five social and physical spaces that have been shaping, and are shaped by, the Chilean community in Vienna, Austria. The article draws from the research project ‘Alltagsgeschichten (ver)orten / Mapas Parlantes’ (Locating everyday stories/Talking maps), which aimed at documenting place-based historical narratives of Chileans who arrived as refugees in the 1970s and 1980s fleeing Pinochet’s dictatorship. The five spaces were investigated by the Collective Viena Chilena through participatory mapping walks followed by focus group workshops with sixteen members of the Chilean community. They were designed, implemented, documented, and communicated using visual methods such as drawing, photography, video-making, and zines production. To explore the generative potential, the article reflects on three types of ‘bridges’ that were built through the visual process and its outputs, which were maps, zines, two short videos, and a public exhibition: (1) scalar bridges between personal micro-histories of the protagonists and the collective histories of a place, as well as between solidarity practices of the Chileans in Austria and in Chile; (2) temporal bridges between different generations of Chileans; (3) methodological bridges, as the process articulated interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives of the Chilean community and the Collective Viena Chilena. Together, these bridges contribute to a visual critical pedagogy, constructing and re-constructing living memories of how everyday urban spaces reflect and archive experiences of exile, migration, and transnational solidarity.

Abstract Digital literacy is increasingly recognized as being key to advancing the digital inclusion of adults across societies. While recent scholarship has illuminated the needs of adult learners seeking to acquire digital skills, less attention has been paid to the role played by people in the community who support adults’ digital learning. This study investigates the practice of ‘digital mentoring’ as a key enabler of adult digital literacy in community contexts in Australia. A co-design methodology, informed by a Community of Practice sociocultural approach, was applied to investigate how practising digital mentors work with members of the public to help them develop relevant digital skills. Through workshops, telephone interviews, and mind-mapping activities, the researchers and participants co-designed a Digital Mentor’s Handbook. This article extends this work by situating the applied research in national and international digital inclusion, adult learning, and community development scholarship and practice. Specifically, in the absence of existing explicit research on digital mentoring, this article builds on the scholarship of ‘mentoring’ more generally to propose both a definition of digital mentoring and eight principles of effective digital mentoring. The article’s contributions lie in providing one of the first scholarly accounts of digital mentoring as essential to advancing digital inclusion. It also presents eight principles of digital mentoring, packaged in a handbook, to help meet the changing, nuanced, and underserved needs of digital mentors in their communities.

Abstract This paper introduces the Strengths, Gender, and Place (SGP) framework, a novel evaluative tool designed to assess community engagement in development programmes. Developed in response to calls for decolonized and locally-led development in the Pacific and beyond, the SGP framework comprises fifteen indicators across three dimensions. These dimensions evaluate the extent to which programmes leverage local strengths, address gender inequities, and implement place-based approaches that respect local knowledge and practices. The framework was applied to thirty project reports from four major development organisations in Papua New Guinea's Western Province. The study also incorporated insights from twenty semi-structured interviews with key informants, which further enriched the findings. The results revealed significant shortcomings in current community engagement practices in the region, with a heavy reliance on external resources and expertise, failure to achieve gender equity targets, and a lack of meaningful co-design with communities. The SGP framework offers a practical tool for donor agencies and practitioners, providing a robust measure to evaluate and improve community engagement in line with contemporary demands for strengths-based, gender-sensitive, and place-based approaches to development.

Abstract Improving well-being did not use to be a controversial idea in community development. Yet, in recent years, the growing focus on well-being at the policy level has made many become critical of the term. Well-being has been employed to support government neo-liberal agendas by emphasizing individual responsibility over social justice. On this framing, improving well-being is thought to shift community development practice from challenging injustice to helping people feel and cope better with their lives. This article argues that, despite attempts to associate well-being with individual responsibility, the greater focus on well-being at the policy level is something to celebrate. This article draws upon the philosophy, psychology and sociology of well-being to make two arguments. The first argument is that conceptualizations of well-being are diverse and contested, and as such, it is important not to associate well-being with the narrow conception one is critical of. The second argument is that a greater focus on well-being can help communities challenge the reduction of welfare spending. Well-being, instead of de-politicizing development, can help reinforce its political stand. This article advocates for the use of pluralistic understandings of well-being within the framework of the capabilities approach to ensure community development advances social change.

Abstract This paper learns from the Spatial Academy at Universidad de Las Américas in Santiago de Chile, reflecting on it as a model of radical pedagogy that challenges traditional architectural training within contexts of neoliberal inequality. Through the use of interviews with teaching staff and documentary analysis, it identifies its practice as a pedagogical anarchitecture, going back to Gordon Matta-Clark’s nomenclature, an approach that dismantles individual authorship, technical solutionism, and disciplinary authority. Its core is the design-build project, wherein students and communities co-design ephemeral interventions that prioritize relational processes over physical products, thereby activating collective memory and territorial conflicts. This pedagogy operates through four shifts: (i) from individual authorship to collective production; (ii) from the object to the process; (iii) from technical solutions to conflict as a driving force; and (iv) from rigid curricula to critical action. This experience offers a replicable framework for the Global South by training architects as socio-spatial mediators capable of contesting urban injustices through situated and collaborative practices.

Abstract This article critically examines the pedagogical potential of a territorially grounded approach to human rights education. To do so, it analyses the work of the Luiz Gama Human Rights Clinic (CDHLG), created in 2009 by law students at the University of São Paulo to reconnect legal education with the surrounding urban reality and the lived experiences of homeless populations in downtown São Paulo. Anchored in the theories of situated learning and education as the practice of freedom, and grounded in social constructionist epistemology and action research, this study explores two pedagogical experiences developed by the CDHLG between 2021 and 2023: (i) field visits conducted with the São Paulo City Council’s Human Rights Commission to observe public services for homeless people; and (ii) the development and implementation of Walking with Maria, an educational game based on local narratives. Data were collected through participant observation and field notes. Findings demonstrate that a territorially engaged legal education can foster experiential, critical, and politically committed learning. CDHLG’s work also shows that integrating community voices and spatial context promotes collective knowledge production and inspires innovative methodologies for human rights education and advocacy. The article argues that such practices hold transformative potential for human rights education and underline the importance of bridging academia and territory through sustained dialogue and social engagement.

Abstract This editorial introduces a Special Section that repositions radical pedagogy at the centre of contemporary territorial contestations. It argues that the current polycrisis—climate, political, and economical—acts as a potent social catalyst, intensifying inequalities and transforming territories into arenas of struggle where fundamental rights are at stake. We contend that in this context, pedagogy is not a secondary concern but a primary site of political praxis. The editorial develops a conceptual framework for radical pedagogy that, whilst rooted in Freirean critical consciousness, is necessarily extended through decolonial, intersectional, and feminist theories. This framework emphasizes an education that is embodied, place-based, and attentive to the affective dimensions of learning. The contributions gathered here offer grounded case studies that demonstrate how these pedagogies function in practice, forging tools for resistance, solidarity, and self-representation. Ultimately, this editorial reflects on the inherent tensions of this work—navigating the lines between conflict and care, and between education and activism—to advocate for a critical pedagogical praxis capable of building more just, collaborative and resilient futures from the ground up.

Abstract In this article, I explore how caste-oppressed Dalit and Bahujan trans and gender-variant people in India are organizing for equity and distributive justice by raising the demand for horizontal reservations. Through sustained, equity-centred activism, they are laying legitimate claims on just redistribution by insisting that the Indian state make caste central in imagining and devising affirmative action policies for the most impacted, multiply marginalized, and historically oppressed Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, and caste-oppressed Muslim trans and intersex people. Through protests, demonstrations, judicial activism, public statements, press releases, signature campaigns, media appearances – and through organizing efforts centred around redistribution – caste-oppressed trans activists have been demanding that the Indian state implement reservation policies to actively enable the continuation of life, sustenance, and prosperity of not just upper caste trans people belonging to the middle classes but also Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, and caste-oppressed Muslim trans and intersex people who are structurally immiserated and are also primarily working class and lack generational wealth. I observe that anti-caste, equity-focused activism and organizing, prominently led by caste-oppressed Dalit and Bahujan trans and gender-variant people, is putting pressure on the Indian state to provide multiply marginalized trans and intersex people with life-sustaining and life-enhancing opportunities. And by doing so, they are also resisting caste-denialism – as well as the tokenization of trans lives – prominent within upper caste and upper and middle class queer and trans activist spaces in India today.