Analysing the public character of Brazilian Pentecostal counselling sessions in urban Mozambique, this paper aims to examine the configurations of exposure through which counselling acquires and produces sociocultural forms of intimacy. During 'therapy of love' sessions held by the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, strict bodily acts need to be performed publicly to authorise love. Drawing on the notion of religious habitus, the paper focuses on how the performativity of Brazilian Pentecostal counselling practices responds to and shapes a public culture of love and intimacy among upwardly mobile women in urban Mozambique, and how the performative scripts converts carry out during therapy result in ambiguous relationships.

Scholars of Pentecostalism in Africa have repeatedly shown that this religion generally attracts younger generations who perceive the Pentecostal theology of liberation from the bonds of kinship, tradition, and elders as very powerful. This article contributes to the existing scholarly field by examining how different generations of working women and female students in Mozambique find the Afro-Brazilian Pentecostal teachings and practices attractive, particularly when it comes to reshaping their relationships with kin, (ancestral) spirits, and men. It considers how AfroBrazilian Pentecostalism is helping both younger and older women to reorder their relationships. Drawing on the concept of heterotopia, the role of age is highlighted to demonstrate that AfroBrazilian Pentecostalism actively seeks to erase important generational hierarchies and differences, turning them into spiritual issues that affect all women regardless of age or generation.

This article discusses the forceful transformation of the female body in Brazilian Pentecostalism in urban Mozambique and argues for an understanding of Pentecostal conversion as embodying spiritual warfare. Presenting the case of avenging spirits, such as the spirit spouse, it explores how spirits interfere in women's new socio-economic positions and intimate relationships. Pentecostal women learn to stay in control of their body under guidance of the Holy Spirit and a 'violent' war against the spirit spouse unfolds. The prevalence of 'violence' implies that we should critically question a perception of conversion as bringing healing and harmony.

Introduction to Sensing Urban Values. This special issue assembles a set of papers that respond to a neglected, undertheorized yet crucial question relating to spatial politics and urban renewal: How do economic and non-economic values depend on and co-constitute each other in different urban contexts? In response, the contributors to this special issue build on recent critical reassessments of value; they explore how the spatial and cultural politics of value unfolds in contemporary urban environments globally. They examine cases that traverse Poland, South Africa, Malaysia, Germany, and The Netherlands. The papers demonstrate a theoretical and empirically engaged concern with themes such as the cultural dimensions of place-making processes in contemporary cities; how identity, memory, heritage, and value-making processes may matter for the production of urban spaces today through sensing; aesthetic reorganizations of places, movements, and interactions with urban matters; and through storytelling. Taking up the theme of urban valuation with a multisensory approach has prompted the contributors to explore the multiple and translocal ways through which urban valuations unfold, are performed, and are experienced. This approach reveals the multiple valuations of spaces—not only economic but also symbolic—that inform the struggles for social and spatial justice in cities across the world as well as their scholarly examinations.

This article offers insight into how housing, renovation, and gentrification are more than matters of upgrading material dwellings and neighborhoods, but they substantially engage residents’ very notions of who they are and how they are perceived. Using the lens of valuation, gentrification is presented as much more than an exclusionary market relationship but as a process that shows how human perspectives on selves emerge and transform along with housing discourse and relations and informs feelings of socio-spatial (in)justice. The case is the ongoing transformation of the working-class garden villages in postindustrial Amsterdam North, an area that has become subject to active urban redevelopment since the 2000s. The material upgrading of the industrial spaces and social housing makes tangible the long-term active residents’ historically sensorial relations with the built environment, around which their sense of self was shaped. Long-term residents and their children increasingly demand that the ongoing spatial improvement of the area does justice to the deeply embodied history of social emancipation in the garden villages.

Brazilian Pentecostals are establishing new transnational Christian connections in Africa. Focusing 1)11 Mozambique, this paper examines the specific logic of cultural mixing that is emerging in the South-South contact of African and Brazilian Pentecostals. This South-South connection is based on a particular framing of the transatlantic history in Afro-Brazilian concepts of evil, such as macumha andßiticaria. The South-South transnational features of Afro-Brazilian Pentecostalism enhance a need to spiritually scrutinize, combat and transcend aspects of'African culture' in the reproductive sphere of marriage, sexuality, family, money and work. Upwardly mobile Mozambican women, who are conquering new cultural positions, are finding this South-South transnational Pentecostal space attractive. Afro-Brazilian Pentecostalism and upwardly mobile women tind and reinforce each other in their capacities to challenge and move frontiers in the national sphere around reproductive issues. However, the powerful atmosphere of conquest that South-South Pentecostalism consequently creates has to be carefully manoeuvred by the women to not let their accusations oi feitiçaria rise against themselves.

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