‘If You Were Always with Them, You Were Their Friend’

The article explores how the dominant discourses of identity politics in the Sri Lankan conflict have silenced people in northern Sri Lanka and closed spaces for political participation. In order to understand the discursive processes and their material outcomes, the article addresses in particular the role of young people in northern Sri Lanka and explores their relationship to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The author examines the LTTE's discourse on gender, young people, nationalism, and governance through the lens of two books written separately by Anthon Balasingham and by Adele Balasingham. Birds of Freedom, the LTTE's women's wing, is shown to be an example of how the warring parties have monopolized liberation discourse through the uncompromised nationalism of a militant movement. The article discusses how this dominant discourse informs young people's lived experiences, material realities, and life opportunities for participation as social actors in their communities in the Jaffna peninsula. A particular feature of people's everyday lives in northern Sri Lanka is described as a complex citizenship characterized by the presence of several governing and uncompromising actors to whom people must relate. The latter part of the article analyzes the way young people in the north of Sri Lanka relate to this context of complex citizenship, with particular reference to the LTTE.

PurposeOur aim was to examine whether quality of life which was repeatedly assessed over time is related with the comprehensive assessment of quality of life (QoL) and thereby to validate a brief QoL assessment.MethodThis longitudinal study used a comprehensive assessment of quality of life at baseline (QUALIDEM; 37 items) to validate an eight-item version of QUALIDEM to assess momentary quality of life which was repeatedly administered using a tablet device after baseline. In all, 150 people with dementia from 10 long-term facilities participated. Momentary quality of life and comprehensive quality of life, age, gender, activities of daily living (Barthel Index), Functional assessment staging (FAST), and Geriatric Depression (GDS) have been assessed.ResultsComprehensive and momentary quality of life showed good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha of .86 and .88 to .93, respectively. For multiple associations of momentary quality of life with the comprehensive quality of life, momentary quality of life was significantly related to comprehensive quality of life (B = .14, CI .08/.20) and GDS (B = − .13, CI − .19/− .06). More specifically, the comprehensive QUALIDEM subscales ‘positive affect’, ‘negative affect’, ‘restlessness’, and ‘social relationships’ showed significant positive associations with momentary quality of life (p < .001).ConclusionWe found that momentary quality of life, reliably assessed by tablet, was associated with comprehensive measures of quality of life and depressive symptoms in people with dementia. Broader use of tablet-based assessments within frequent QoL measurements may enhance time management of nursing staff and may improve the care quality and communication between staff and people with dementia.

Surveillance Enabling Technologies and Peer Scrutiny: Impacts on Young People's Interpersonal Relationships

A review article devoted to the book of Andrzej Blikle – Doktryna jakości. Rzecz o skutecznym zarządzaniu. As pointed out by the Author, the book is a case of a work rare on the Polish publishing market, written by an outstanding scientist, who successfully runs a business activity. The combination of practical experience with theoretical knowledge gave a result that may be satisfying both for practitioners as well as theorists, and also those who want to get to know the ins and outs of an effective and efficient business management. The Author of the review believes that it is an important voice for shaping an inclusive socio-economic system, which constitutes a value in itself. Although the book is mainly concerned with business management, its message has a much wider dimension and is concerned with real measures of wealth, money and people’s lives. The book was awarded The SGH Collegium of Business Administration Award “For the best scientific work in the field of business administration in the years 2014-2015”.

With the rapid development of new technologies such as cloud, edge and mobile computing, the number and diversity of available services are dramatically exploding and services have become increasingly important to people's daily work and life. As a consequence, using service label recommendation techniques to automatically categorize services plays a crucial role in many service computing tasks, such as service discovery, service composition, and service organization. There have been many service label recommendation studies that have achieved remarkable performance. However, these studies mainly focus on using the text information in service profiles to recommend labels for services while overlooking those social relations that widely exist among services. We argue that such social relations can help to obtain more precise recommendation results. In this paper, we propose a novel Social Relation aware Service Label Recommendation model called SRaSLR, which combines text information in service profiles and social network relations among services. A deep learning based model is constructed based on feature fusion of the two perspectives. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world Programmable Web dataset, and the experiment results show that SRaSLR yields better performance than existing methods. Additionally, we discuss how service social network affects service label recommendation performance based on the experiment results.

This paper explores the ways that young people express their agency and negotiate complex lifecourse transitions according to gender, age and inter- and intra-generational norms in sibling-headed households affected by AIDS in East Africa. Based on findings from a qualitative and participatory pilot study in Tanzania and Uganda, I examine young people's socio-spatial and temporal experiences of heading the household and caring for their siblings following their parent's/relative's death. Key dimensions of young people's caring pathways and life transitions are discussed: transitions into sibling care; the ways young people manage changing roles within the family; and the ways that young people are positioned and seek to position themselves within the community. The research reveals the relational and embodied nature of young people's life transitions over time and space. By living together independently, young people constantly reproduce and reconfigure gendered, inter- and intra-generational norms of ‘the family’, transgressing the boundaries of ‘childhood’, ‘youth’ and ‘adulthood’. Although young people take on ‘adult’ responsibilities and demonstrate their competencies in ‘managing their own lives’, this does not necessarily translate into more equal power relations with adults in the community. The research reveals the marginal ‘in-between’ place that young people occupy between local and global discourses of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ that construct them as ‘deviant’. Although young people adopt a range of strategies to resist marginalisation and harassment, I argue that constraints of poverty, unequal gender and generational power relations and the emotional impacts of sibling care, stigmatisation and exclusion can undermine their ability to exert agency and control over their sexual relationships, schooling, livelihood strategies and future lifecourse transitions.

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Abstract: Based on qualitative and quantitative research with 1,080 youth in the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre, this article analyzes the role of music in the constitution of young people's everyday lives. Focusing on how youth obtain, store, and listen to music, as well as on how they describe the presence of music in their lives, we argue that music – facilitated by digital technology – permeates and gives meaning to young people's lives in a way more pervasive than ever before, to the extent that, in their words, it constitutes the ‘soundtrack’ of each individual life. We propose to understand this puzzling statement through a material culture framework, and to do so we ask: how do youth currently give meaning to music as a key feature of life, and how do music and the objects through which it is experienced constitute life as such?

The intensive use of interactive media has led to assertions about the effect of these media on youth. An increasing number of studies refute these assertions. Despite the enrichment of the debate with empirical data, current research tends to focus on computer and Internet use and skills. Elsewhere we argued that research shouldn't look at the use per se, but rather at the ways interactive media function in young people's activities from the perspective of a changing society. This perspective allows describing possible consequences of societal tendencies for young people's everyday life; it allows describing the social and cultural functions of interactive media as part of young people's behaviour and systems of values and beliefs. This paper presents a quantitative study on the social and cultural functions of interactive media in young people's lives. Rather than following the assumption of a homogeneous generation, we investigate the existence of a diversity of user patterns. Results from a pilot-study show that contemporary youth can be divided into categories of interactive media use and of interactive media users. These results call for a better understanding of these categories and the characteristics of their members. The research question for this paper by result can be formulated as: Can patterns be found in the use of interactive media among youth? We answer this question by a survey among Dutch youngsters aged 9-to-23. The respondents were all students in education levels ranging from primary education to higher professional education. Four clusters of interactive media users, namely Traditionalists, Gamers, Networkers and Producers were identified using cluster analysis. Four clusters of interactive media use, namely browsing, performing, interchanging and authoring were identified as well. Behind these straightforward clusters, a complex whole of user activities can be found. Each cluster shows specific use of and opinions about interactive media. This allows for studying the intricate relationship between youth culture, interactive media and learning. With our analysis of both a) use and b) opinions and preferences, our study provided a deeper understanding of the social and cultural functions of interactive media. Furthermore this study revealed the existence of a diversity of interactive media users, rather than one uniform group, as is often assumed in the literature.

Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the US child population. The complex and nuanced manner in which immigrant children's lives are shaped by issues of legal status, citizenship, state-sanctioned violence and belonging should be of great interest to educators, policymakers and researchers in the US and across the world. However, little attention is given in literature to impact of specific immigration policies on young people's development and socialisation. Perhaps that's because it's a time expensive task and one that requires a deep understanding of child-centred research. Into this gap steps Silvia Rodriguez Vega with her new book, Drawing Deportation. Built on 10 years of work with immigrant children in Arizona and California, she analysed 300 drawings, theatre performances and family interviews to engage with accounts of children's challenges with deportation and family separation during the Obama and Trump administrations. Through children's drawings and stories Rodriguez Vega exposes the destructive consequences of legal violence, structural racism and lack of safety in these young people's lives. Even though they may have been born in the US or may have US citizenship, they still feel endangered if they have one undocumented parent whose status dictates the way family can live their lives. A young participant in the study, Sergio ‘states that in Arizona, just looking Mexican is enough reason to be arrested and detained or deported via racial profiling’ (p. 75). On holidays and special occasions, immigrant families often stay home because they can be easily pulled over for a routine check at alcohol checkpoints, which can then lead to interrogation about status and potential deportation. The artwork shows that children are highly aware of this risk. The book includes multiple examples of what sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis (2011) called ‘everyday bordering and politics of belonging’. The ‘technologies of everyday bordering’ are in place to supposedly ‘make people feel safe by keeping those who do not belong out’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018, p. 230). Drawing by a participant in the study, Sandra from Arizona (figure 3.4 in the book) shows an acute representation of the border by a young person. A short dialogue between the two characters is depicted in two word-bubbles. As ‘an authority’ character points to the border, the smaller character says, “But I'm a citizen”; the authority replies, “you look Mexican.” Sandra underlined the words “citizen” and “look” in red. ‘Linking these words communicates the difference between being a citizen and looking like one’ explains Rodriguez Vega (p. 80). In my view, the drawing also shows the omnipotence of de- and re-bordering that involve displacement, relocation of borders and border controls, influence these young people's everyday lives by challenging their sense of belonging, disabling their feeling of safety and raising their sense of precarity. Further, Rodriguez Vega argues that children understand and internalise violence, racism, hate and death and may mirror back what they experience in their lives. In the environment marked by destruction and dehumanisation, violence becomes cyclical and children can become powerful messengers and reproducers of hate. But she counters this possibility by showing children as agents of their own stories who reimagine destructive situations in ways that adults sometimes cannot, offering us alternatives and hope for a better future. In her work, she is clearly inspired by notable educators such as Paulo Freire, to demonstrate how art can be a healing praxis ‘for children to calm their fears and explore positive solutions’ (p. 117). Her book results in an explicit message to transform schooling and teacher's training in super-diverse societies such as the US or the UK where more non-traditional, art-based methods of teaching, civic education, social-justice-oriented learning and culturally relevant curricula are needed. My final point from across the Atlantic is to observe growing research that conveys experiences of migrant children and youth in contexts of the Global South and North, which is increasingly published by international journals in the field demonstrating that these young people's views are becoming recognised as relevant to mainstream academic developments. Connecting to the large volume of scholarship that exists in the interdisciplinary area of migrant childhood and youth studies beyond the United States would have made Rodriguez Vega's contribution more universal and recognisable as it is a fascinating, timely and beautifully written book that speaks beyond its context.

New media studies are now benefiting from a burgeoning of empirical studies and theoretical analyses from diverse academic disciplines seeking to locate new media, especially the Internet, within longstanding traditions of social science research. By reviewing and reflecting upon findings from UK Children Go Online, a multimethod research project examining the role of the Internet in children's and young people's everyday lives, the present article takes the opportunity to draw out some general conclusions, and associated puzzles, to guide future research. These contribute toward an emerging framework for understanding questions regarding new media access, use, and consequences within the social, cultural, and political parameters of young people's lives. A range of research findings are discussed that illuminate the shifting balance of opportunities and risks posed by the Internet for children, youth, and the family.

Despite society's current preoccupation with interrelated issues such as obesity, increasingly sedentary lifestyles and children's health, there has until now been little published research that directly addresses the place and meaning of physical activity in young people's lives. In this important new collection, leading international scholars address that deficit by exploring the differences in young people's experiences and meanings of physical activity as these are related to their social, cultural and geographical locations, to their abilities and their social and personal biographies. The book places young people's everyday lives at the centre of the study, arguing that it this 'everydayness' (school, work, friendships, ethnicity, family routines, interests, finances, location) that is key to shaping the engagement of young people in physical activity. By allowing the voices of young people to be heard through these pages, the book helps the reader to make sense of how young people see physical activity in their lives. Drawing on a breadth of theoretical frameworks, and challenging the orthodox assumptions that underpin contemporary physical activity policy, interventions and curricula, this book powerfully refutes the argument that young people are 'the problem' and instead demonstrates the complex social constructions of physical activity in the lives of young people. Young People, Physical Activity and the Everyday is essential reading for both students and researchers with a particular interest physical activity, physical education, health, youth work and social policy.

With the ever-changing and ubiquitous media environment as a backdrop, this article analyzes how young people respond to television and new media and how media is used in their everyday lives, in their social relations, and in building an identity. The analysis is based on findings from a user study of 10 to15 year-olds in Norway. The respondents were recruited among active Internet users, and since they were early adopters of new technology, they can be considered a vanguard. Starting with a broad outline of some essential earlier studies on young people's use of media in Europe and in the United States, the results of this study are presented and ideas for further development are discussed. Media, and in particular visual and social media, play an increasingly important role in young people's lives. But a shift is about to happen in their relationship to the media; from being an audience and users to becoming participants and creators as well. This article is a contribution to the previous rather poor research on these ongoing changes.

An indelible memory of visitors to Willowra Aboriginal community in Central Australia is the sound of donkeys braying as they roam the village in search of sustenance and are chased by barking dogs. While Warlpiri people view donkeys as an integral part of their sonic landscape, outsiders typically perceive the animals as a noisy, land‐management ‘pest’ and want them removed. Recently, the arrival of a stranger in a truck towing a donkey trailer provoked concerned discussion. Talk intensified when, for a few days, the donkeys disappeared, and the silence of the donkeys echoed throughout the community. Tracing emergent social relations and mimetic connections that entangle donkeys and people in the Willowra region, this paper explores why donkeys matter to local Warlpiri, sensorially and otherwise. I contrast Warlpiri coexistence with donkeys to the treatment of donkeys by conservationists as feral animal and by capitalists as commodity. Linking the silence of donkeys at Willowra to the global trade in ejiao, a glue made from donkey hides used in Chinese medicine and cosmetics, I engage with Michael Taussig's (2019) ‘The cry of the burro [donkey]’ to examine differing senses of being and predicaments that the sound of donkeys evoke cross‐culturally. I conclude with a call to listen differently to other‐than‐human beings when considering multispecies assemblages. Attending to the sonic range of donkeys as an expression of their agency, I suggest that we learn from Warlpiri and heed the cries of donkeys and their global silencing if we are to ensure our mutual survival.

Domestic gardens represent a site for enacting embodied identity and social relationships in later life, and negotiating tensions between continuity and change. In the context of dementia, domestic gardens have significant implications for ‘living well’ at home, and for wider discussions around embodiment, relational selfhood and agency. Yet previous studies exploring dementia and gardens have predominantly focused on care home or community contexts. In light of this, the paper explores the role of domestic gardens in the everyday lives of people living with dementia and their households, using qualitative, creative methods. This includes filmed walking interviews and garden tours, diaries and sketch methods, involving repeat visits with six households in England. Findings are organised thematically in relation to different ‘ways of being’ in the garden: working in and doing the garden; being in and sensing; and playing, empowerment and agency. These different ‘ways of being’ are situated within relationships with household members, neighbours and non-human actors, including pets, wildlife and the materiality of the garden. Garden practices illustrate continuity, situated within embodied biographies and habitus. However, identities, practices and gardens are also subject to ongoing readjustment and reconstruction. The conclusion discusses implications for extending literature on gardens and later life, describing how social and material relationships in domestic gardens are renegotiated in the context of dementia, while highlighting opportunities for ‘play’, active sensing and agency. We also explore contributions to understandings of dementia, home and place, and implications for garden design and care practice.