Prison unrest raises a governance tension between restoring institutional order and protecting the rights, safety, and dignity of persons in custody. This study examines how publicly visible digital sources framed the July 2026 Negombo Prison unrest in Sri Lanka during a 48 h observation period. The primary corpus comprised 47 items from Facebook (25), YouTube (8), X (8), and public blogs (6), analyzed through cross-platform digital discourse analysis. Six dominant frames were identified: immediate casualty and incident reporting; accountability, family information, and institutional inquiry; security and alleged criminal causation; overcrowding and systemic prison conditions; humanitarian condolence; and officer-centered mourning or victimization. No single frame exceeded 25.5% of the corpus, indicating narrative plurality rather than one controlling interpretation. Proximate criminal explanations coexisted with structural accounts of prison governance, while concern for incarcerated persons’ rights coexisted with recognition of prison officers’ deaths and occupational vulnerability. Facebook engagement was highly concentrated, showing that visibility should not be equated with frame prevalence, endorsement, or public opinion. The study concludes that institutional legitimacy during custodial crises is negotiated through overlapping claims concerning order, proportionality, accountability, victimhood, and reform.
Generic survey measures of consumer boycotting and demonstration participation cannot identify whether respondents acted for climate-related reasons. This study therefore separates climate-specific orientations from general political participation repertoires and examines how both vary by migration generation and origin. We analysed European Social Survey Round 11, edition 4.1 (N = 50,116 across 30 participating countries); because the original submission used an edition 3.0 subset (N = 46,162 across 28 countries), we also report common 28-country sensitivity analyses. The primary analytic sample comprised 48,914 native-origin, first-generation African, other first-generation, second-generation African-origin, and other second-generation respondents. Weighted linear probability models included host-country fixed effects and design-based standard errors using sampling strata and primary sampling units. First-generation African immigrants showed no statistically detectable adjusted differences from native-origin respondents in climate responsibility, climate worry, or belief in the human causation of climate change. They had lower adjusted probabilities of consumer boycotting (−10.07 percentage points, 95% CI [−15.25, −4.89]) and demonstration participation (−4.09 points, 95% CI [−7.81, −0.37]). A fully interacted stacked tactic model showed that income decile was more strongly associated with boycotting than with demonstrations (income decile × boycott = 0.79 points, 95% CI [0.35, 1.23]), whereas subjective income difficulty did not differ by tactic. Adding income terms reduced the African immigrant boycott coefficient by only 0.62 points on a common analytic sample. The results do not measure climate activism. They indicate no statistically detectable differences in measured climate orientations, but lower first-generation participation in general political repertoires; income is related to boycotting but is insufficient to explain group differences.
Thailand has become a prominent destination for contemporary Chinese mobility through international education, employment, entrepreneurship, family relocation, retirement, and lifestyle-oriented movement. However, these pathways are usually studied separately, obscuring how education, work, legal status, digital infrastructures, everyday adaptation, and belonging interact over time. This article reports a structured integrative review of 53 empirical, theoretical, methodological, and policy sources identified through targeted searches of publisher platforms, scholarly discovery services, Thai journal repositories, and institutional sources, supplemented by citation chaining. The synthesis develops a framework of layered belonging under negotiated mobility. Mobility begins with aspirations and capabilities situated within a regional opportunity structure; educational and other entry pathways provide uneven access to linguistic, social, and professional resources; and the conversion of these resources is mediated by language, digital and interpersonal networks, institutional support, and everyday competence while being filtered through visa rules, work authorization, employer dependence, occupational access, and public narratives. Belonging is therefore differentiated across six interdependent dimensions: affective-place, relational-social, functional-everyday, professional-economic, legal-institutional, and future-temporal. This framework explains why migrants may feel emotionally at home and socially connected in Thailand while remaining legally temporary, professionally dependent, or uncertain about long-term residence. The review clarifies the added value of the framework relative to place-belongingness, integration domains, social anchoring, and differentiated embedding; proposes six empirically testable propositions; and identifies implications for universities, employers, public agencies, and migrant-serving organizations.
What is “new” in the New European Industrial Policy (NEIP), for whom, and to what extent? While recent scholarship has documented the “return” of a more interventionist, selective and strategically oriented EU industrial policy, this article asks whether these changes amount to a transformation of the policy model or rather to a reconfiguration of pre-existing policy logics. More specifically, it examines whether the expansion of financial resources, strategic objectives and sectoral priorities has also altered the institutional conditions through which firms, projects and territories gain access to public intervention. The article applies Documentary Process Tracing (DPT) to a corpus of EU industrial-policy documents from 2000 to 2026, comparing successive Commission cycles across five analytical dimensions—objectives, instruments, conditionality, governance and selectivity—alongside their dominant legitimating frames. The NEIP therefore represents neither simple continuity nor a complete paradigmatic rupture. Rather, it constitutes a process of functional verticalisation in which stronger strategic direction coexists with institutional mechanisms inherited from earlier phases of European industrial policy. The findings suggest that assessing the novelty of the NEIP requires moving beyond the question of whether industrial policy has “returned” and examining how its new strategic priorities interact with the pre-existing conditions that shape access to public intervention.
The Social Representations of Childhood Questionnaire (CRSID) explores how pre-service Early Childhood Education teachers understand childhood and translate these ideas into pedagogical approaches. This study sought to obtain a shorter, reliable version that can be readily used in initial teacher education. The original 31-item instrument was administered to 242 first-year university students (M_age = 18.94; SD = 1.70; 90.5% women). Analyses were conducted in JASP and R (psych, lavaan) using diagonally weighted least squares on a polychoric correlation matrix with oblimin rotation. Items with loadings below 0.40 or high uniquenesses were progressively removed. The final version includes 17 items grouped into three dimensions: Adultcentrism (5 items), Directive Teacher Role (6 items), and Rights and Facilitation (6 items). Sampling adequacy was satisfactory (KMO = 0.765; χ2(136) = 1149.9, p < 0.001), and parallel analysis supported the three-factor solution. Fit indices indicated an acceptable model, explaining 39.5% of the variance. Reliability coefficients were within acceptable ranges (ω = 0.67–0.73; α = 0.65–0.73). Differences emerged in two factors depending on prior experience with children. Overall, the reduced CRSID offers a consistent and workable tool for teacher education, although some refinement remains advisable.
The objective of this study is to examine, through a narrative literature review and a qualitative cross-case comparison, how women’s cooperatives and cooperative-linked financial mechanisms contribute to women’s financial inclusion and economic empowerment under different institutional and socioeconomic conditions. The study synthesizes evidence from successful initiatives, including the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, digital savings cooperatives in Indonesia, and M-Pesa-enabled cooperative models in Kenya, women-oriented banking in Rwanda, Cooperative Home Care Associates in the United States, and women’s cooperatives in Türkiye. The findings indicate that cooperative systems enhance women’s access to financial services, strengthen financial and digital capabilities, support income generation, and foster leadership and economic participation. However, persistent barriers, including limited digital access, inadequate financial literacy, and restrictive socio-cultural norms, continue to constrain the effectiveness and scalability of these models. The study concludes that strengthening women’s cooperatives through targeted policy support, capacity-building initiatives, and digital financial inclusion strategies can significantly improve women’s economic empowerment while contributing to more inclusive financial systems and broader sustainable development objectives.
This study is based on heritage education as the ideal framework for laying the foundations of a democratic, participatory citizenship that is committed to its community and to social and ecological justice from an early age. Thus, with the aim of improving teacher training, this research seeks to identify the conceptions held by trainee Early Childhood and Primary Education teachers regarding controversial heritage, heritage education and its link to citizenship education. To this end, a quantitative questionnaire was administered to 328 students on the Early Childhood and Primary Education Degree programmes at the University of Huelva (Spain). The data collected were analysed using Excel and JASP, with a system of categories serving as a framework for interpretation. The results indicate that trainee teachers consider it appropriate to address controversial heritage from the earliest educational stages and conceptualise citizenship through a combination of civic responsibility, sustainable development, and ecosocial transformation. Differences between degree programmes were limited to a small number of items and showed small effect sizes; these differences should be interpreted cautiously because prior training in heritage education was unevenly distributed across the two programmes.
Loneliness and social isolation in later life are important public health concerns, and information and communication technology (ICT) may support everyday functioning and social participation among older adults. However, mean-based analyses may obscure variation in associations across outcome distributions. Using quantile regression, we examined the associations of smartphone ownership with health-related quality of life (SF-36v2: PCS, MCS, and RCS) and social connectedness (LSNS-6) among 919 community-dwelling senior club members in a regional Japanese city; regression analyses used 839 complete cases. Coefficients were estimated at the 20th, 40th, 60th, and 80th conditional quantiles. Smartphone ownership was associated with RCS at the 20th (β = 3.72), 40th (β = 4.42), and 60th (β = 2.21) quantiles, but not at the 80th quantile (β = 1.41), and coefficients differed significantly across quantiles (F(3, 3353) = 3.97, p = 0.008). The 20th-, 40th-, and 60th-quantile coefficients and the Wald test remained significant after Holm adjustment. Smartphone ownership was not associated with PCS, MCS, or LSNS-6 at any quantile. The smartphone ownership × gender interaction for RCS was non-significant at all quantiles, providing no evidence that this association differed by gender. These findings indicate that the association between smartphone ownership and role/social functioning varies across its conditional distribution. Because the study is cross-sectional and actual smartphone use was not measured, causal interpretation is not warranted. Longitudinal studies measuring patterns of smartphone use are needed.
Drawing on a design-based intervention in active European citizenship education, this article explores the extent to which participatory citizenship education equips primary pupils with the necessary democratic resilience in the digital age. It argues that teachers’ constant search for consensus in the primary classroom has become a democratic liability in a digital public era of polarisation. My Big Friendly Guide to the EU which was implemented across five Irish primary schools in 2018–2019 with 458 pupils aged five to twelve, examines what participatory European citizenship education looks like in practice. Data shows that knowledge gains were substantial, ranging from 16 to 66 percentage points across identity, institutional, and national indicator domains. Yet qualitative observation reveals a consistent finding that teachers, who largely felt they had insufficient substantive knowledge of the EU, pushed towards consensus when discussions generated unresolved disagreement. The article discusses how the piloting of this educational programme in participatory citizenship education highlights gaps in pupils’ democratic resilience. It argues that a solution could be integrating Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy and Ruitenberg’s application to pedagogy. This would ensure that pupils are equipped to resist platform polarisation and algorithmic selection. It further contends that this dual approach cannot be achieved without structured teacher training in powerful knowledge on the European Union and agonism, which a digitally aware civic education requires.
This exploratory study primarily aims to identify and characterise profiles of digital competence and information evaluation among secondary-school students, considering their academic performance in Geography and History. It also examines gender differences in online information practices and associations between Internet use, academic performance, and information-searching and evaluation skills, including the recognition of fake news and hate speech. A quantitative methodology was employed, combining descriptive, inferential, and correlation analyses with two-step cluster analysis. The non-probabilistic convenience sample comprised 72 third- and fourth-year secondary-school students from a public rural school in Toledo (Castilla-La Mancha, Spain). Cluster analysis identified three provisional profiles: a larger profile characterised by lower reported technical competence and moderate academic performance; a second profile with higher reported digital competence and notable academic achievement; and a third combining strong academic performance with lower reported digital competence. Information-searching skills, technical knowledge, and fake news detection were the variables contributing most to profile differentiation, whereas time spent online had the lowest importance. Fake news detection was also significantly associated with academic performance. Gender comparisons showed higher reported technical competence and information-searching and verification skills among male students, while differences in fake news and hate speech recognition were not statistically significant. Given the small, single-school convenience sample and reliance on self-reported measures, these findings should be interpreted cautiously and not generalised beyond this context.
Technostress has emerged as a central psychosocial risk in digital environments, yet existing bibliometric research provides only partial accounts of its development. This study offers an updated mapping of the global intellectual structure of technostress based on 1135 articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection as of October 2025. Using Price’s, Lotka’s, Bradford’s, and Zipf’s Laws, alongside co-authorship and keyword co-occurrence analyses, the study examines patterns of scientific growth, author productivity, and conceptual concentration. Results reveal exponential growth, highly unequal authorship distribution, and strong terminological concentration. Four stable thematic clusters were identified: foundational theory, workplace technostress, psychological consequences, and excessive technology use. Emerging topics, including artificial intelligence, digital stress, and information overload, indicate a shift toward broader socio-technical interpretations. Keyword networks further reveal a consistent relationship between technological overload, technostress, impaired performance, and reduced well-being. Despite its growing maturity, the field remains conceptually fragmented and lacks an integrative framework encompassing cognitive, behavioral, organizational, and AI-mediated dimensions. These findings highlight the need for interdisciplinary collaboration and interventions that address both individual capacities and contextual conditions to advance digital well-being and foster socially sustainable and resilient digital environments.
Background: Loneliness in older adults is a global public health problem. Although robust evidence exists regarding its consequences, the evidence base is marked by a bias towards high-income countries and urban contexts. The rural Peruvian Amazon is a territory virtually absent from the scientific literature on ageing and loneliness. Methods: We conducted a descriptive–interpretive qualitative study based on 34 semi-structured interviews with adults aged 60 years and over, recruited through Cáritas-Requena. Analysis followed the reflexive thematic analysis framework. Purposive sampling with maximum variation criteria was employed. The study was complemented by a quantitative characterisation using the Barthel Index, the LSNS-6 scale, and the DUKE-UNC-11 questionnaire. Results: Four themes emerged: (1) structural and functional conditions as the substrate of loneliness; (2) family reconfiguration driven by internal migration, with notable prominence of skipped-generation households (grandparents caring for grandchildren); (3) lived experiences of emotional and social loneliness, including a contextual pattern of feeling lonely despite the physical presence of others, which we descriptively label “paradoxical loneliness”; and (4) coping resources, including faith, work, neighbourhood networks, non-human companionship, and habituation. The descriptive relational measures showed different distributions: objective social isolation (LSNS-6 < 12) was observed in 12.5% of participants, whereas low perceived functional social support (DUKE-UNC-11 < 32) was observed in 68.8%; these measures assess distinct constructs and were used solely to contextualise the qualitative findings. Conclusions: Among the service-connected older adults included in this study, loneliness was shaped by the interaction of family reconfiguration, material and health-related conditions, and locally available coping resources. The experience of feeling lonely despite the physical presence of others was compatible with Perlman and Peplau’s cognitive discrepancy model and is presented here as a context-specific interpretive pattern rather than as an independent dimension of loneliness.
Despite persistent inequalities and severe resource constraints in South Africa’s education system, some rural public schools continue to achieve strong academic results. This study investigates how curriculum accessibility and pedagogical strategies influence academic performance in public senior secondary schools in the Amathole West Education District in the Eastern Cape Province. Drawing on Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the study examines how teachers negotiate structural inequalities through adaptive pedagogical practices. A qualitative research design was used that involved in-depth interviews with teachers, principals, and education officials. The findings reveal that collaborative learning, scaffolding, inquiry-based teaching, and informal resource sharing practices play a critical role in sustaining academic success in resource-constrained contexts. The study argues that teacher agency and community participation function as important mechanisms that mitigate structural inequalities in rural schooling. The paper contributes to debates on educational inequality and sustainable development by demonstrating how localized pedagogical strategies can support academic success in marginalized schooling environments.
Health systems are fundamental to ensuring the right to health and maintaining the stability of welfare states. In this broad framework, this narrative review takes a look at Italy and China—two countries with very different historical backgrounds and institutional paths—as they deal with challenges like demographic aging, increasing chronic illnesses, and ongoing disparities in access to care. This paper aims to examine the most relevant peer-reviewed studies, as well as current legal and policy documents, in order to outline a comparative overview of the approaches to financing, coverage, and service provision in Italy and China, two very different countries. The Italian National Health Service, financed through general taxation and designed to be universal, aims to ensure equitable access to healthcare while having to contend with significant regional differences and financial difficulties. On the other hand, China, which operates with a mixed model, has rapidly expanded its insurance coverage using a variety of schemes and embracing technological advances, which has enabled large-scale access to healthcare, although considerable differences remain between urban and rural areas and provinces. When compared, each system shows particular strengths: Italy’s local care networks and focus on continuous services offer a model for inclusive welfare, while China’s use of digital tools demonstrates how innovation might help overcome obstacles in settings with limited resources and maintain continuity of care. There is a noticeable overlap in how both countries handle chronic diseases and their shared concern for equity in health policy. Considering these points, mixed approaches that combine universal coverage, financial viability, and flexible use of technology could provide useful ideas for crafting more fair, effective, and resilient health policies in various settings. Rather than proposing direct policy transfer, the comparison identifies context-dependent strategies that may inform future healthcare reforms.
Temporary foster placements and recent European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and Supreme Court decisions on Article 8 raise questions about how child welfare services (CWS) balance reunification goals and children’s need for stability. This study examines how CWS managers conceptualise the right to family life and mobilise these constructions when negotiating temporality and contact. Drawing on a social constructivist perspective and critical discursive psychology (CDP), I analysed 19 semi-structured interviews with 15 managers from across Norway using a three-step CDP procedure. Four interpretative repertoires emerged: an expanded rights repertoire that broadens notions of family and child participation; a legal guidance repertoire that treats ECtHR and Supreme Court rulings as resources legitimising reunification; a juridical pressure repertoire describing how legal expectations constrain professional judgement and can lead to increased contact despite welfare concerns; and a temporality and stability repertoire that emphasises tensions between presumptions of temporariness and attachment-based arguments for permanence. The findings suggest that legal texts function as negotiable discursive resources that both empower and constrain practice, creating ethical and practical dilemmas for managers.
One respondent says antibiotics kill viruses. A second says they do not know. A third says cancer cures are hidden for profit. A standard literacy score counts all three as one deficit. This exploratory study asks whether they behave alike. In a July 2025 Romanian telephone survey (analytic N = 1007), six factual, two worldview-linked and two conspiratorial anti-science (CAS) items were analyzed separately, treating “don’t know” (DK) as a third response. The response patterns did not converge. Factor analysis of substantive answers retained two factors, not one, and the six-item core’s weighted internal consistency among answerers was 0.379. DK responding formed a coherent cross-item pattern, but less uniform than the full-sample alpha of 0.926 implies: it falls to 0.803 once the 135 all-DK respondents are set aside. CAS endorsement converged with generic conspiracist belief and tracked institutional distrust, where factual accuracy did not. Education and internet frequency mainly differentiated DK responding; economic security and democratic satisfaction were associated with lower CAS endorsement. Against Eurobarometer 95.2 (2021), Romanian factual accuracy sits about two items lower than the EU27 average excluding Romania, and CAS endorsement is roughly 1.7 times as high, in both Romanian waves. Uncertainty, error and conspiratorial belief remain conceptually distinct.
Social movements increasingly rely on digital platforms to mobilize support, raise awareness, and coordinate collective action. At the same time, however, the rise of online activism has intensified concerns regarding “slacktivism”, namely forms of symbolic and low-effort engagement that fail to translate into consequential social action. Existing theoretical accounts have explained this phenomenon in terms of impression management, in-group enhancing, or moral licensing, but have paid little attention to how publicly expressing support for a social cause through online behaviors should undermine actual action, while overlooking the role of audiences in such a process. Drawing on symbolic self-completion theory (SCT), the present paper proposes a complementary motivational perspective. Specifically, we argue that publicly displaying identity-relevant symbols (e.g., posts supporting social causes) within like-minded online networks may generate a premature sense of completeness regarding an aspired-to identity (e.g., being a gender equality advocate), thereby reducing motivation to pursue difficult, high-effort behaviors required for genuine social change. Furthermore, we conceptualize social media echo chambers not merely as informationally homogeneous environments, but as non-dissenting validators of one’s identity goal symbols. By prioritizing symbolic recognition over cross-group dialogue and intervention, social media echo chambers may inadvertently undermine the social progress they purport to promote.
Beyoğlu emerged as one of the principal centers of Western influence in the late Ottoman Empire due to the presence of Levantine communities and European institutions. This study investigates the role of the Sixth Municipal Department, the first modern municipal organization in the Ottoman Empire, in shaping urban governance, architecture, and cultural transformation in Beyoğlu. Using a historical-analytical approach, the research examines Ottoman archival documents, travelogues, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, architectural evidence, and secondary literature. The findings demonstrate that Levantines occupied influential positions within the municipal administration and significantly shaped urban development through investments in transportation, lighting, sanitation, public spaces, and architectural projects. However, municipal services were distributed unevenly and primarily benefited affluent Levantine and European residents, while poorer Muslim and non-Muslim neighborhoods received limited attention. The study further reveals that the Sixth Municipal Building, designed in a European Neo-Classical style, symbolized the institutional and architectural dimensions of Ottoman Westernization. Beyond urban administration, Levantine influence contributed to transformations in social life, consumption patterns, language, and architectural culture. The article concludes that the Sixth Municipal Department played a pioneering role in the emergence of modern municipal governance in the Ottoman Empire, while simultaneously reflecting the social inequalities and cultural dynamics that accompanied the Westernization process.
This article analyzes the explicit and implicit presence of social justice in the graduation profiles of Social Work programs at Chilean state universities, as well as the way in which its distributive, recognition, and participatory dimensions are articulated within the declarative curriculum. An exploratory qualitative design was developed based on a comparative documentary analysis of twelve official graduation profiles, retrieved from institutional sources and analyzed through a matrix grounded in a plural conception of social justice. The results show that explicit references to social justice are exceptional and that, more frequently, it is expressed indirectly through references to human rights, public policies, diversity, human development, citizenship, or territory. The distributive dimension shows the greatest operational development, especially through public policies, program management, state action, social equality, and intervention in vulnerable contexts. The recognition dimension appears mainly at a declarative level, linked to diversity, pluralism, interculturality, and gender. The participatory dimension is the least operationalized, with limited references to deliberation, democratic governance, or shared decision-making. The study identifies three profile typologies: distributive-institutional; rights-, diversity-, and recognition-oriented; and relatively integrated profiles of plural social justice. The findings suggest that strengthening curricular coherence may require moving from general normative statements toward competencies, learning outcomes, and assessment criteria capable of integrating redistribution, recognition, and participation in professional education.
At the height of the second Trump presidency, the elaboration of violence in Latiné/x immigrant communities has taken a familiar discursive shape: as disappearance. The enforced disappearance, a name for the arrest, detention, and abduction of persons, followed by denial of the act(s), has been leveled against numerous Black and brown communities. From legal concessions granting immunity to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to racially profile individuals, to a widespread surge in deportations, detentions, and deaths, there is a need for culturally congruent and flexible forms of solidarity that honor waywardness. For if disappearance is an attack on and through visibility, clandestine communication plots and echolocates resistance at the periphery of visibility’s enforcement. In this essay, I forward clandestine communication as a theory and tactical stratagem that maps the transmission of vernacular discourse according to fugitive strategy. Stratagems articulate tactics of trickery often found in gossip/chisme/kikis, redaction strategies, sonic upheaval, and whisper networks. But as a theory, clandestine communication charges community-engaged research with being actively political by considering the theoretical, methodological, analytical, and material tactics of fugitivity as significant to the ways we identify power and resistance in our communities. In drawing from queer, trans*, and feminist of color (QTFOC) genealogies, clandestine communication denotes flexible forms of solidarity that scaffold these fugitive vernacular practices. This theoretical paper thinks with Latiné/x immigrant communities by arguing that community defense initiatives, such as neighborhood defense workshops and rapid response networks, outline participatory and ephemeral (or less visible) ways that vernacular communities can co-create clandestine networks of care. Ultimately, this essay calls for greater consideration to be given to the everyday, defiant ways that community-engaged research is premised on the pragmatism of trust and hiddenness.
