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This article looks at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international students, focusing on Portuguese-speaking African and Brazilian students during the lockdown of spring 2020. Using evidence from interviews conducted with 27 students domiciled in Portugal, we illustrate some of the challenges faced by students when coping with the pandemic, including difficulties in meeting the cost of tertiary education and the centrality of working to sustain their stays abroad, alongside the emotional impact of prolonged domestic confinement and separation from families. We also consider the paradoxes of online teaching, which have made visible the digital gap between local and international Global South students in the context of their stays. In this sense, pre-existing inequalities are more at the centre of students' concerns than new issues raised by COVID-19, a pandemic that served to reveal former injustice in the context of global capitalism. In our conclusion, we argue that there is a need for greater recognition of the vulnerabilities facing certain African and Brazilian students at Global North universities in the context of contemporary neo-liberalism, including their dependence upon precarious work. Policy responses include the need for a more serious involvement and responsibility by both home and host higher education institutions in the lives of their students abroad.

Previous studies have shown how student circuits of consumption are mediated by the interest of commercial actors. However, little attention has been paid to the connections between international student stays and the tourism sector: how they intersect with each other? Our fieldwork in Lisbon (Portugal) showed the central role of student organizations in commercializing the leisure time of international students, approaching them to 'circuits of travel' and consumption populated also by tourists. Filling a gap in the literature, we conceptualize international students as consumers surrounded by entertainment industries, pointing out the centrality of touristic infrastructures and destination marketing in articulating their stays. Therefore, we argue that these organizations, in their partnership with tourism and leisure sectors, are contributing to the socio‐spatial segregation between local and international students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ambivalent role of a grassroots cultural and activist association and its forced displacement between two districts as a result of the rapidly advancing frontier of gentrification in the city of Lisbon (Portugal). Strong institutional and private pressures led to the eviction of the association from its former location in the now gentrified Bairro Alto and its relocation to Intendente, a formerly degraded and excluded area currently undergoing a transition to marginal gentrification. By combining documentary research of secondary sources and exploratory ethnography that includes interviews with key informants, this article examines how the association has navigated between resistance against urban neoliberalism and its own (unwanted) contribution to the dynamics of marginal gentrification. It concludes by highlighting the need to deepen analysis of the ambivalent nature of activist associations campaigning for the right to the city, while providing clues for understanding how grassroots organisations resist, survive and/or collaborate with the manifold processes of urban change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]