This qualitative study addresses a significant gap in existing literature concerning the emotional, psychological, and academic consequences of gender-based violence (GBV) among high school learners in Eswatini, a context where culturally embedded norms and systemic challenges may shape how GBV is experienced, disclosed, and addressed. While prior research underscores the detrimental effects of GBV, limited attention has been given to learners’ accounts within Eswatini’s socio-cultural landscape. Employing a qualitative descriptive design, data were collected from 36 learners (18 girls and 18 boys) across six high schools. Thirty learners participated in six focus group discussions, with five learners in each group, while an additional six learners participated in individual semi-structured interviews. No participant participated in both methods. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis. Three overarching themes were developed inductively: (1) emotional trauma and demotivation, characterised by feelings of worthlessness, fear, anxiety, and withdrawal; (2) psychological effects, including anxiety, shame, isolation, and psychological distress; and (3) a decline in academic performance and engagement, reflected in perceived difficulties with concentration, attendance, participation, motivation, and academic performance. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model was subsequently used as an interpretive lens to examine how individual, interpersonal, institutional, community, and broader societal contexts shaped participants’ accounts. The study also considers similarities, differences, and contradictions in girls’ and boys’ accounts and recognises that participants occupy different positions in relation to GBV, including experiences of victimisation, witnessing, and acknowledgement of harmful behaviour. Because the study is qualitative and cross-sectional, the findings describe participants’ perceived relationships between GBV and educational and psychosocial experiences rather than establishing causal effects. The study highlights the importance of trauma-informed school environments, accessible psychosocial support, effective safeguarding and referral mechanisms, gender-responsive prevention, and coordinated interventions across ecological levels.
As sports content platforms increasingly occupy a central role in consumers’ media consumption and fitness-related activities, understanding the factors that encourage sustained user engagement has become an important research concern. Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been widely recognized as a strategic tool for enhancing consumer perceptions and organizational reputation, prior research has focused primarily on traditional sports organizations and general commercial settings, with limited attention given to its influence within digitally mediated sports content platform environments. Therefore, this study investigates the relationships among CSR, empathy, attitude, and usage intention in the context of sports content platforms. Data were collected in Republic of Korea from 225 university students who regularly use sports content platforms. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the proposed conceptual framework. The findings reveal that CSR positively influences empathy and attitude, while empathy positively influences attitude. In addition, attitude is positively associated with usage intention. However, CSR does not directly influence usage intention, and empathy does not exhibit a direct relationship with usage intention. These results suggest that users’ continued engagement with sports content platforms is shaped more by evaluative attitudes than by direct emotional responses or perceptions of social responsibility alone. The study contributes to the literature by extending CSR research beyond traditional sports organizations into digitally transformed sports content platform environments and by identifying the psychological mechanisms through which CSR shapes user behavior in digital sports media environments. It also offers practical guidance for platform operators seeking to strengthen long-term user relationships through socially responsible initiatives.
Social inclusion has become a widely shared normative commitment across research on education, health and development, yet its enactment often remains uneven and difficult to sustain. This concept paper develops the idea of “Lost in Inclusion” to examine how inclusion is translated, unsettled and partially lost as it moves across theory, method and territory. Drawing on practice vignettes from four years of a transdisciplinary community-based research project in rural Bolivia, the article explores three sites of tension: the encounter between epistemic openness and academic demands for certainty; the translation of participation into intervention-oriented action; and the recognition of children and young people as knowledge producers. Rather than treating barriers as pre-existing obstacles, the article argues that barriers may emerge through the very practices intended to enact inclusion. It distinguishes between where inclusion gets lost, as inclusive commitments become legible within institutional and methodological logics, and how researchers and partners may become lost in the pursuit of inclusion itself when its normative force makes tensions difficult to question. The article proposes a relational and ethically reflexive approach to inclusion-oriented research, in which success depends less on eliminating tension than on protecting the conditions that keep participation and recognition open to negotiation.
Global concern surrounding declining outdoor play, physical activity, and children’s engagement with natural environments has prompted increased interest in nature-based early childhood education (ECE). Within such settings, outdoor spaces are positioned as central to learning, supporting embodied and authentic interaction with the natural world. Despite expansion in provision, limited research has examined how parents and practitioners conceptualise the value of nature-based ECE or how their perspectives intersect across ecological contexts. This qualitative study investigated the key perspectives of parents and practitioners in nature-based ECE settings in England. Following institutional ethical approval, 16 participants were recruited: seven parents (all female) of children aged three to five years attending nature-based ECE settings and nine practitioners (eight females, one male). Data were generated through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes were identified: Protecting children’s rights; Nature as a context for whole-child development; Risk, resilience, and physicality; Communities of learning; and Beyond the setting: systemic pressures and parental fears. Choosing nature-based ECE reflects a proactive, health-promoting decision grounded in parental values concerning children’s rights to nature and outdoor play. Practitioner commitment was similarly values-driven, centred on children’s freedoms and positioned in tension with prevailing societal norms. Key findings illuminate practitioners’ concerns regarding the perceived absence of outdoor-based provision across mainstream ECE and schooling, highlighting the need for clearer regulatory frameworks to establish quality outdoor play in nature as a systemic entitlement.
Cultural resources embedded in local traditions are increasingly recognized as contributors to sustainable community development. Even so, the mechanisms through which these resources support sustainability remain insufficiently understood, particularly in living heritage communities. Empirical evidence explaining how cultural resources are translated into sustainable community outcomes through Dynamic Capabilities and Cultural Innovation Ability also remains limited. This study examines how Cultural Capital and Dynamic Capabilities contribute to community sustainability through Cultural Innovation Ability in Buyei Tie-dyeing communities in Guizhou Province, China. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, 503 valid questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM), complemented by semi-structured interviews and a focus group discussion. The empirical results demonstrate that Dynamic Capabilities exert a substantial direct effect on Local Community Sustainability (β = 0.429, p < 0.001), while Cultural Capital emerges as a critical determinant of Cultural Innovation Ability (β = 0.468, p < 0.001). Cultural Innovation Ability partially mediates the relationships of Dynamic Capabilities and Cultural Capital with Local Community Sustainability. The study focuses on respondents’ perceptions of community-level processes within this evolving heritage context rather than directly examining how heritage meanings are negotiated, reproduced, or transformed among different actors. The structural model explains 50.1% of the variance in Local Community Sustainability, indicating moderate explanatory power. The findings suggest that Cultural Capital alone may be insufficient to generate stronger sustainability outcomes unless communities can mobilize and transform it under changing conditions. Cultural innovation serves as a key mechanism linking cultural resources to community sustainability. The study contributes to the literature by extending Dynamic Capability Theory to community-based heritage settings and by identifying Cultural Innovation Ability as an important mechanism linking cultural resources to sustainable community development.
This systematic review adopted a dual-perspective approach to examine how community dance is conceptualized and operationalized in the literature published between 2000 and 2026. The review was reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020, with eligibility and search concepts informed by SPIDER. Searches of five bibliographic databases and Google Scholar produced 423 records, of which 30 peer-reviewed articles were included in a thematic and cross-cutting narrative synthesis. Explicit accounts framed community dance through macro-level aspirations toward cultural democracy, equity, social connection, and eco-social sustainability. Implicit operational accounts emphasized micro-level relational, embodied, and pedagogical processes through which these commitments may be pursued, including process-led participation, de-centering of authority, challenges to normative body ideals, non-clinical well-being, and, in a smaller subset, trauma-informed principles. The realization of democratic and inclusive aspirations varied by context, facilitation, participant experience, and institutional conditions. Across both strands, the lived body occurred as an interpretive link between embodied knowledge, participation, and psychosocial well-being. Community dance is provisionally conceptualized as an anti-elitist, leisure-based, process-led participatory practice that seeks to create democratic spaces where diverse bodies share creative agency and relational justice may be pursued in practice. This definition aims to clarify the field’s conceptual identity, offering a cohesive epistemological foundation for future research, policy, and pedagogy.
Social media has become a central arena for civic activism, yet relatively little attention has been paid to the specific claims activists make to justify their actions and legitimize their public role. This study distinguishes between two complementary forms of claim-making in digital activism: advocacy claims, which seek to persuade and mobilize support for a cause, and representation claims, through which activists position themselves as speaking or acting on behalf of others. Using the Justice for Roman Zadorov movement as a case study, the article examines how these claims are constructed through both textual and visual communication. The study employs a netnographic approach based on seven years of online observation (2015–2022), systematic content analysis of posts published in fifteen Facebook groups dedicated to the campaign, and ongoing interactions with group administrators and leading activists. The analysis focuses on recurring rhetorical and visual patterns used to construct legitimacy, mobilize participation, and challenge institutional narratives. The findings demonstrate that activists simultaneously advanced multiple advocacy claims, including support for Roman Zadorov, justice for Tair Rada and her family, and broader criticism of the Israeli criminal justice system. At the same time, representation claims emerged from a diverse range of actors, including family members, legal professionals, experts, acquaintances, and ordinary citizens, each claiming authority to speak on behalf of different individuals, communities, or principles of justice. By distinguishing analytically between advocacy and representation claims, the study contributes to scholarship on digital activism and social movement communication, offering a framework for understanding how activists construct legitimacy, authority, and collective identity through multimodal communication in social media campaigns.
Migrant workers have become a structural feature of agriculture across the global core, yet whether this dependence is deepening has not been established over a long time series or tested against a major shock. This article revisits the question through a longitudinal comparative case study of seven core states—the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Spain and Italy—selected on a most-dissimilar-systems logic and read through the world-ecology framework, in which cheap food rests on cheap labour. Drawing on primary statistical portals and administrative registers, it reconstructs the legal channels of entry into agricultural work and traces their evolution across roughly a decade and into the post-pandemic period, correcting and completing the evidentiary base of earlier studies. In every case, the dependence has persisted or intensified: where it has not continued to rise, it has settled at a historically high plateau, and nowhere has it reverted to its earlier level. It held, moreover, under conditions designed to curtail it—anti-immigrant administrations and COVID-19 border closures—as states reconfigured their migration channels to preserve the supply. The findings confirm that the migrantisation of agricultural labour is a structural and expanding condition of accumulation in the global core.
This paper examines social and economic disparities between immigrants and natives in the UK using the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study. The analysis compares foreign-born and UK-born respondents across multiple indicators of integration rather than relying on a single labour market or social measure. Social integration is captured through social networks within the UK, community involvement and a composite measure of neighbourhood embeddedness based on respondents’ sense of belonging, trust, reciprocity and local attachment. Economic integration is examined through unemployment, homeownership, job security and work autonomy. Using correlated random-effect models, the paper shows that immigrants report lower neighbourhood embeddedness, weaker UK-based social networks and lower levels of community involvement than natives. Immigrants also have a higher likelihood of unemployment and lower homeownership, job security and work autonomy. Additional subgroup analysis indicates that several disparities are larger for non-white immigrants, although non-white immigrants appear more similar to natives in neighbourhood embeddedness. The findings underline the importance of treating integration as a multidimensional process in which relative advantage in one domain may coexist with disadvantage in another.
This study investigates the role of meta prejudice (majority group members’ perception that they are disliked by immigrants) in shaping Finnish acculturation preferences toward immigrants, specifically support for assimilation and integration. Drawing on Intergroup Threat Theory and the emerging literature on intergroup meta perceptions, we explore whether symbolic and realistic threats mediate the relationship between meta prejudice and acculturation attitudes. Using a sample of 604 native Finns, results from hierarchical regression analyses indicate that meta prejudice positively predicts support for assimilation and negatively predicts support for integration. Parallel mediation analyses reveal that both symbolic and realistic threats partially mediate the relationship between meta prejudice and support for assimilation. However, only realistic threat significantly mediates the relationship between meta prejudice and support for integration. These findings underscore the importance of meta perceptions and perceived intergroup threat in shaping public attitudes toward immigrant acculturation. The study offers theoretical and practical insights for improving intergroup relations and fostering more inclusive integration policies in increasingly diverse societies.
This study comparatively analyzes the effectiveness of social reintegration in the Spanish civilian and military prison systems, using re-imprisonment recidivism as an inverse proxy indicator. Official administrative data for the 2009–2019 period were analyzed for the civilian system (n = 19,909) and the military system (n = 644), the latter comprising 539 released individuals with complete outcome data and 105 transferred to the civilian system whose post-release outcomes were unavailable. To address this missing information, a sensitivity analysis was implemented under three transparent, a priori scenarios (conservative, intermediate, and optimal). The civilian reintegration rate was 80.02%, whereas the military rate ranged from 95.19% to 98.14% across scenarios. The military advantage was substantial and consistent (absolute risk difference +15.17 to +18.13 percentage points; all p < 0.001; large effect sizes). However, the two populations differ markedly in prior criminal history, offense type, and risk/protective factor profiles; the observed gap therefore reflects the combined effect of population selection and institutional factors and should be interpreted as descriptive rather than causal. These findings establish a robust empirical phenomenon and generate testable hypotheses for future comparative and quasi-experimental research on penitentiary effectiveness.
This study investigates how athletes describe relational experiences at and beyond the Arctic Winter Games (AWG). Utilizing a qualitative approach, we analyzed interviews and open-ended survey responses from young athletes at the 2023 AWG, as well as interviews with former athletes returning to the 2023 Games in a supportive or leadership role. Our analysis shows that the AWG offers a range of social and cultural opportunities that make the event especially conducive to cultivating relational experiences. We highlight athletes’ accounts of friendship and network formation, feelings of enchantment, and resonance encounters, alongside collective encounters characterized by a sense of communitas. We also highlight post-liminoid legacies in former athletes’ accounts, including enduring memories, sustained social ties, and an ongoing sense of belonging and community. Taken together, the findings suggest that the AWG’s liminoid, festive, and community-oriented character helps suspend ordinary routines and soften everyday distinctions in ways that make meaningful relational encounters more likely.
Black women faced disproportionate social, emotional, and structural burdens during the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, yet their mental health experiences remain underexamined. This study explores how Black women understood, navigated, and coped with these intersecting crises. Seven Black women in North Carolina participated in a seven-session virtual photovoice study, including four photo discussion sessions. Participants generated four photo assignments, took photos, and discussed them using the SHOWeD framework. Recorded discussions were analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Sort and Sift, Think and Shift, with participants supporting theme development. Narratives revealed multi-level mental health impacts: at the individual level, caregiving overload, compounded grief, and constant vigilance; at the interpersonal level, invisibility, racial misreading, and everyday racism that intensified distress and made help-seeking itself a labor of confronting providers’ biases; at the community level, trauma from witnessing racial violence and pandemic loss; and structural factors such as inequity, food insecurity, and policing as primary drivers of mental health strain. Participants employed healing as resistance through faith, nature, sister circles, and culturally concordant care. Black women’s mental health during the dual pandemics is inseparable from structural racism and gendered labor; healing is individual and collective, and crisis preparedness requires system-level change driven by Black communities.
Women’s empowerment through social entrepreneurship has become an important strategy for promoting social inclusion and sustainable rural development, particularly in culturally distinctive communities. However, limited evidence explains how individual and environmental factors encourage women to transform social entrepreneurial intentions into concrete actions. This study aims to investigate the determinants of social entrepreneurial behaviour among entrepreneurs committed to empowering Madurese women. It examines the moderating role of environmental munificence in the relationship between social entrepreneurial intention and behaviour. A quantitative approach was employed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to analyse survey data collected from 143 entrepreneurs on Madura Island, Indonesia. The findings indicate that empathy and self-efficacy positively influence social entrepreneurial intention, whereas moral obligation has no significant effect. Social entrepreneurial intention significantly predicts social entrepreneurial behaviour, and environmental munificence strengthens this relationship by providing supportive conditions for entrepreneurial action. These findings highlight the importance of combining individual capabilities with enabling social environments to foster women’s empowerment. The study contributes to research on gender, rural development, and social entrepreneurship by providing evidence from an underexplored cultural context and offering practical implications for policymakers and community development initiatives.
Democracy is commonly equated with elections, representation, and procedures for authorizing rulers. This article challenges that assumption by defining democracy as collective authorship: the shared capacity of those who live under laws to participate in making them in complex modern polities. Representation, even when electorally authorized, separates citizens from lawmaking power and institutionalizes heteronomy rather than self-rule. I develop an authorship principle grounding legitimacy in shared exposure to the consequences of law and a complementary exclusion rule—the reversed ideal speech situation—according to which those not affected by a law must not exercise binding authority over it. Drawing on historical cases and contemporary policy domains, the article shows that modern systems concentrate authority in actors insulated from the effects of their decisions. Democracy, it argues, is representation constrained or displaced whenever authority migrates away from consequence-bearing agents.
Digital technologies and data-based approaches do not only increase the amount of information available to institutions and the public, they also transform the conditions through which social reality is classified, made visible, ordered, interpreted and governed. This article examines this transformation through AI4Alfieri, a project developed in Italy, at the Luciano Gallino Laboratory of the University of Turin in collaboration with the Fondazione Centro di Studi Alfieriani in Asti, and devoted to generative AI for the mediation of Vittorio Alfieri’s life and work. Specifically, it presents a virtual conversational agent and one embodied in a social robot (Pepper or NAO). The project is analysed as a reflexive case study of a technology in the making, with autoethnographic elements. The empirical corpus comprises a development diary, code and design artefacts, prompts, logs, architectural diagrams and laboratory tests; the study does not evaluate effects on museum visitors. From analysis of the design process, the article advances the interpretive thesis that embodied generative AI makes cultural mediation a problem of distributed accountability: knowledge is governed by the corpus, speech by prompts and retrieval, action by deterministic policy, presence by the body, legitimacy by the institution, and auditability by infrastructures. The paper proposes an exploratory S0–S4 governance stack for embodied generative agents and formulates hypotheses for future research on how data-based cultural mediation may reallocate epistemic authority, institutional legitimacy and design responsibility.
The workforce in Portugal, as in other European countries, is ageing, posing challenges for human resource management. Although older workers are frequently subject to stereotypes concerning lower motivation and productivity, previous research has reported associations between chronological age, emotional intelligence, and work engagement. However, limited evidence is available on whether specific dimensions of emotional intelligence account for the association between age and work engagement. Addressing this gap, the present study examined the distinct mediating roles of four emotional intelligence dimensions in the relationship between age and work engagement. A multiple mediation model was tested using cross-sectional self-report data from 377 workers aged 18 to 63 (M = 39.42, SD = 11.62) working in different sectors in Portugal. The analyses included descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and estimates of direct and indirect associations. Chronological age showed a modest positive association with work engagement. Among the four emotional intelligence dimensions, only regulation of emotions was positively associated with work engagement after accounting for chronological age. None of the indirect effects through emotional intelligence were statistically significant. These findings do not support the proposed mediating role of emotional intelligence but indicate that chronological age and regulation of emotions were independently associated with work engagement in the present sample. By examining the four dimensions of emotional intelligence separately, the study provides a more differentiated account of their associations with work engagement and offers a rationale for future longitudinal and experimental research.
This study examines organizational hypocrisy (OH) in relation to counterproductive work behavior (CWB) and investigates the indirect roles of organizational silence (OS) and job withdrawal behaviors (JOW). Drawing on Social Exchange Theory, the study proposes that perceived inconsistencies between organizational values and actual practices are associated with employee silence, withdrawal, and counterproductive work behavior. Data were collected from 437 employees working in Saudi Arabian five-star hotels and Class-A travel agencies and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results revealed that organizational hypocrisy was positively associated with organizational silence, job withdrawal behaviors, and counterproductive work behavior. Organizational silence showed significant positive relationships with both job withdrawal behaviors and counterproductive work behaviors, while job withdrawal behaviors were also positively associated with counterproductive work behavior. Furthermore, statistically significant individual indirect associations through organizational silence and job withdrawal behaviors, as well as a sequential indirect association through both variables, were identified within the proposed model. The findings extend Social Exchange Theory by providing support for an interconnected pattern of associations between perceived organizational hypocrisy, organizational silence, job withdrawal behaviors, and counterproductive work behavior. Rather than establishing a progressive temporal sequence, the results are consistent with the theoretically proposed ordering of these constructs within the model. This integrated perspective contributes to the literature by documenting individual and sequential indirect associations within a unified theoretical framework in the tourism and hospitality context. Given the cross-sectional design, however, the findings do not establish causality or confirm the temporal ordering of the examined variables. The findings also offer practical insights for managers seeking to strengthen organizational authenticity, encourage employee voice, and address employee disengagement and counterproductive work behavior.
Grounded in Social Cognitive Theory, this study investigates how digital technologies shape employees’ work experiences and social life in digitally transforming hotel organizations. Specifically, it examines the role of digital empowering leadership in fostering digital work engagement through the mediating mechanisms of digital self-efficacy and digital thriving at work within five-star hotels in Egypt. As digital technologies increasingly redefine how employees interact, collaborate, and derive meaning from their work, understanding the human and social consequences of digital transformation has become a critical research priority. Data were collected from 394 full-time employees working in five-star hotels in Egypt and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with WarpPLS software. The findings reveal that digital empowering leadership significantly enhances employees’ digital work engagement, digital self-efficacy, and digital thriving at work. Furthermore, digital self-efficacy and digital thriving at work positively influence digital work engagement and partially mediate the relationship between digital empowering leadership and digital work engagement. By highlighting how digitally enabled leadership shapes employees’ psychological capabilities and flourishing in technology-rich workplaces, this study contributes to the growing literature on the social implications of digital technologies in organizational settings. The findings underscore that successful digital transformation extends beyond technological adoption to encompass employees’ empowerment, well-being, and meaningful engagement in digital work environments. Practical implications are provided for hotel managers seeking to cultivate human-centered digital workplaces that support employees’ social and psychological flourishing amid ongoing technological change.
Social media have become central tools for government communication; however, they also present significant accessibility challenges for people with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments. This study analyzes inclusive communication and digital accessibility practices in the official Facebook accounts of six Ecuadorian public institutions. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining documentary analysis, a focus group with visually impaired users, and content analysis of 2429 Facebook posts published between 2023 and 2025. The analysis was conducted using four dimensions: propositional communication, copywriting, images, and videos. The results show that most publications only partially comply with accessibility criteria. While progress was identified in the use of clear and accessible language in textual content, significant deficiencies persist in multimedia content, particularly in the lack of alternative text, subtitles, and audio descriptions. The study concludes that inclusive communication in Ecuadorian public institutions remains fragmented and is not yet implemented as a cross-cutting public communication policy.
