Complex Social Practices Research Articles

Regional ecosophy: a Guattarian approach to the border landscapes of the Irish Northwest

In this paper, we propose that landscape architecture is uniquely equipped to shape highly contested and politicized border regions. We contend that recognizing landscape architecture’s agency to contribute to national and international politics may enable the field to intervene in contemporary theoretical discussions within urban and regional studies that are otherwise dominated by geography and urban planning. Through the example of the Irish/Northern Irish border region in the face of Brexit, we discuss the limits to city planning and policy designations—such as that of city-region—in addressing the complex economies and ecologies of similar geopolitical landscapes. We also highlight environmentalist planning and design’s limitations in addressing the complex social practices and subjectivities that weave together regions like the Irish Northwest. Our alternative is a fieldwork-based “ecosophical” approach capable of addressing Félix Guattari’s social, environmental, and subjective ecologies in an integrated manner. With this, we establish how such an approach can offer a more nuanced set of tools to design and plan for larger regional landscapes.

Estimation of carbon footprint of Indian households in Kalyani subdivision of district Nadia, West Bengal, India

The present study aims to assess the contribution of Indian households to the increase in carbon footprint. Hence, this cross-sectional study was conducted in the Kalyani subdivision of Nadia district, West Bengal, India. Data were collected from 610 households, comprising 299 rural and 311 urban households, to analyse energy consumption patterns for various purposes. To summarize the dependent and continuous data, descriptive statistics were employed, while for inferences, independent sample t-test, Pearson correlation and regression were used. A significant difference was observed in total annual household carbon footprint between the urban and rural households due to varied energy consumption (t = 15.60, p < 0.05). The urban households were emitting twice (2325.20 kgCO2e) as much as the rural ones (1125.77 kgCO2e). It can also be inferred that emission was determined by the increase in household size, income, and improvement in the standard of living. Thus, in addition to several determinants, a complex cultural system, social practices, and awareness of green consumerism should also be incorporated and studied through an interdisciplinary approach to reduce the overall household carbon footprint.

Influence of Masculinity and Femininity on Alcohol Consumption in Young People: A Scoping Review

Introduction: Alcohol consumption is a complex social practice that plays a role in building and consolidating friendships, as well as creating gender identities. The latter determines the limits of behaviors and defines what is considered appropriate or inappropriate in our daily routine; therefore, alcohol consumption patterns are not independent of gender. Objective: To identify and describe available evidence on the influence of gender on youth alcohol consumption. Materials and method: A review was conducted under JBI and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines. Original full-text articles published between 2018 and 2023 in the VHL, PubMed, EBSCOhost, Web of Sciences, Epistemonikos, ScienceDirect, and ProQuest databases, without language limitations, were analyzed. The search categories were “Alcohol Drinking” AND “Young Adult” AND “Gender Identity” OR “Gender role”. Results: A total of 403 records were identified, but only 12 studies were included in the synthesis. The main results of these studies showed that both gender identity and gender roles influence alcohol consumption in young adults. Social gender norms may pressure young women to maintain a physical image and young men to maintain a normative public image. Conclusions: Social gender norms influence alcohol consumption behaviors; therefore, it is necessary to take these gender differences into account in nursing interventions and prevention strategies.

Markets and Metis: Reading Hayek with Scott

ABSTRACT Both James C. Scott and Friedrich Hayek articulate critiques of centralised state planning that are fundamentally epistemological in character. In particular, both emphasize the loss of knowledge resulting from attempts to achieve synoptic legibility of complex social practices. Yet while Hayek’s critique of central planning leads to an emphasis on the indispensability of the price system, Scott argues that capitalist markets are also mechanisms of perverse simplification. This paper explores the roots of this disagreement and seeks to articulate the insights that emerge from reading Hayek and Scott together on questions of markets, knowledge, and the state.

Veiling and Head-Covering in Late Antiquity: Between Ideology, Aesthetics and Practicality

Abstract In Late Antiquity, as today, women’s veiling was a contentious topic. Early Christian churchmen wrote about it at length, exhorting women to cover and criticizing those they considered were not veiling appropriately. According to these writers, veils were an essential garment tied to Christian modesty and religious ideas about female submission to male authority. Modern scholarship has tended to side with these clergymen, often claiming that with the rise of Christianity came the social expectation that adult women cover their heads. However, veiling had been a part of life in the Mediterranean for centuries, and the frustration and frequency with which churchmen urged women to veil suggests that contemporary practices often diverged significantly from their expectations. This article examines veiling and head-covering as a complex social practice shaped by numerous intersectional and situational factors beyond religion, including status, practicality, fashion and social context. It explores a wide range of visual and material culture to illuminate the diversity of veiling beyond the diatribes of churchmen. Throughout, how we understand veiling in the past is brought into dialogue with scholarship on modern Islamic veiling to address biases towards veiled women and to find new ways of centring women’s experiences and everyday practices.

Be Rising Multitude: Zombie Invasion and the Problem of Biopolitics in Max Brooks's World War Z

This essay outlines the transnational history of the zombie, arguing for the figure’s revolutionary potential. Approaching the zombie as a complex social practice, I recall its ritualistic African and Haitian roots, the figure’s transposition from Haitian folklore into American ethnographic writings, and its later Hollywood reconfigurations. Insisting on the zombie’s proto-biopolitical character, I propose to see the figure’s continued cultural currency as predicated on its articulation of political dynamics in the globalized world. Noting the historically inscribed rebellious potential of the zombie, I hold that the newest zombie novels suggest that the zombie horde can be seen as a new political subject in the era of late capitalism—the multitude, heralded by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The transnational nature of the zombie multitude is explored in this essay in the context of Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), which capitalizes on the possible awareness-raising potential of the modern pop-cultural evocations of the zombie.

Three Generations of Free Colored Women in St. Croix. 1750–1850

This paper explores the lives and agency of three generations free colored women on St. Croix, an island in the Danish-Norwegian West-Indies from the period 1760–1850. Different social strategies these women adopted in finding and defining their identities in a racially prejudiced society and how their social networks and family bonds affected their choices and lives have been studied. By applying a combination of prosopography and microhistory, new insights, and perspectives of free colored women's agency is gained. This paper suggests that free women of color were resourceful and independent and consciously employed complex social practices to climb the social ladder.

Human self‐domestication and the evolution of prosody

AbstractHuman self‐domestication refers to a new evolutionary hypothesis about human origins. According to this view, humans have experienced changes that are similar to those observed in domesticated mammals and that have provided us with many of the behavioural, and perhaps cognitive pre‐requisites for supporting our complex social practices and advanced culture. At the core of this hypothesis is the claim that self‐domestication is triggered by (and entails) a reduction in reactive aggression responses. The human self‐domestication hypothesis has been recently used to explain how grammars became more sophisticated via a cultural mechanism. Nonetheless, less research has been done in the domain of phonology, even though animal evidence suggests that domestication favours call complexity too. In this paper, we hypothesise about the effects of our increased self‐domestication on human prosody. We argue for a progressive complexification of prosody that parallels (and might be involved in a positive feed‐back loop with) the complexification of grammar in response to a reduction in reactive aggression. We build on evidence of diverse nature, from language typology to brain function to language acquisition studies.

Care as a Thick Ethical Concept

Philosophers who study care—most often, care ethicists—are involved in an ongoing discussion about the concept of care. Despite the significant progress made in this discussion, certain conflicting images of care seem to persist in the literature. On one hand, as feminist theorists across disciplines have highlighted, care is a complex social practice that is mired in inequality and injustice. The deeply gendered nature of caring and the unequal division of care-work creates and cements structural inequalities. On the other hand, care is also thought of as a moral value or an ideal. The ethics of care—a moral theory with decidedly feminist roots—is predicated on the idea that caring is somehow morally valuable. A discrepancy thus arises: care is a social practice that compounds injustices. But it is also a moral value. What is it about care that makes it malleable to such variations? To pick out this complexity and capture the conceptual nuances at play, this paper suggests that we frame the concept of care as a thick ethical concept. I will first demonstrate why this framing is helpful. Then, I will provide accounts of the descriptive and evaluative elements of the concept of care. I hope to show that it is through a thick conceptual framing that we can make sense of care—both as a complex social practice and an important moral value in the worlds that we inhabit.

Mobile researchers, immobile data: Managing data (producers).

Scientific institutions have increasingly embraced formalized research data management strategies, which involve complex social practices of codifying the tacit dimensions of data practices. Several guidelines to facilitate these practices have been introduced in recent years, for example, the FAIR guiding principles. The aim of these practices is to foster transparency and reproducibility through 'data sharing,' the public release of data for unbounded reuse. However, a closer look suggests that many scientists' practices of data release might be better described as what I call data handovers. These practices are not rooted in the lofty ideals of good scientific practice and global data reuse but in the more mundane necessities of research continuity, which have become more urgent in light of increasing academic mobility. The Austrian scientists interviewed for this study reinterpreted defining features of research data management - such as ensuring findability - as techniques for managing the effects of researcher mobility. This suggests that the adoption of Open Science practices might be dissociated from its stated epistemic goals, and explains why many Open Science initiatives at present are administratively strong but normatively weak.

Black Seed Dreaming: A Material Analysis of Bruce Pascoe’s “Dark Emu”

Indigenous Australians are outstanding for the way their ontologies and practices do not rely on a Western dichotomy that opposes material and spiritual realms. Their multiple totemic visions of the Dreaming space-time always state a material actualisation in landscape and the reproduction of all forms of life based on the pluriversal agency of animals, plants, minerals, rain, wind, fire and stars. Such cosmovisions resonate with current debates in the fields of critical posthumanism and new materialism through an Animist materialism. Indeed, Indigenous Australian’s complex social practices offer ways of thinking and being for the whole planet in this time of climate crisis. This is particularly crucial for the tropical world which is so strongly impacted by climate change. Indigenous Australian cosmovisions offer to tropical studies a way of thinking politically about climate and the materiality of life. Thus, Tropical Materialisms are enhanced by the vast body of Indigenous experiences and creative productions in and beyond the tropics. The material analysis of the Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, demonstrates how the book dared to challenge the Western written history, and to show a new relationality of being of humans with the more-than-human world.

Postmodern Ethics, Premodern Farce

Postmodern Ethics, Premodern Farce

Discursive construction in multilingual crisis risk communication: An analysis of ‘A letter to foreign nationals’ messages in China’s COVID-19 fight

This article examines the discursive construction of a specific letter-style multilingual crisis message released by local governmental institutions during China’s battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a sociocognitive analysis of a collection of 33 English-language messages, the analysis revealed the structural features of the message and the discursive strategies in constructing and negotiating the identities of the message’s addresser and the addressee. It was found that the discursive relationship between the addresser and the addressee was established on an ingroup-outgroup distinction mediated by neutralising strategies to reduce authoritative imposition and image-enhancing strategies to promote a responsible government. The findings suggest that multilingual crisis communication is a multivocal, complex social practice shaped by genre, textual, media and contextual factors. These findings will provide insights into the crisis discourse as an emerging topic of interest and help inform multilingual communication strategies in and beyond the context of a public health emergency.

“I'm a jack of all trades! ”: Life and work of Maria Souza

This article reflects on the female role in the Lower Amazon from the perspective of gender based on the history and life memory of Maria Souza, a woman living in the region of Valéria, whose traditional knowledge, life trajectory and work constitute a possibility of listening to the voices of Valéria, voices that come from the headwaters, the forests, the rivers, the lake, the stream, the ancestral memory, the maternal voice of the Great Mother, of mother nature. Maria Souza, is a woman farmer, fisherwoman, midwife, bezendeira, healer, owner of a saint's feast, parceleira, mother, wife and as she says “I'm a dick for every job”. This expression shows the potency of this Amazonian woman. Her life trajectory, struggles, resistance and work in the region of Valéria are portrayed in this study from the perspective of oral history and history of gender relations, with the aim of making visible the complex social practices of women from traditional communities of the Lower Amazon, in the time contemporary. &nbsp

Improving access to pre-exposure prophylaxis for adolescent girls and young women: recommendations from healthcare providers in eastern Zimbabwe

BackgroundIn sub-Saharan Africa, adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) are at high risk of acquiring HIV. A growing number of sub-Saharan African countries are beginning to avail pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, but with limited success. Unpacking strategies to overcome barriers to the uptake of PrEP is critical to prevent HIV amongst AGYW. This article explores health professionals’ views and recommendations on what is required to increase uptake of PrEP.MethodsThe study draws on interview data from 12 providers of HIV prevention services in eastern Zimbabwe. The healthcare providers were purposefully recruited from a mix of rural and urban health facilities offering PrEP. The interviews were transcribed and imported into NVivo 12 for thematic coding and network analysis.ResultsOur analysis revealed six broad strategies and 15 concrete recommendations which detail the range of elements healthcare providers consider central for facilitating engagement with PrEP. The healthcare providers called for: (1) PrEP marketing campaigns; (2) youth-friendly services or corners; (3) improved PrEP delivery mechanisms; (4) improvements in PrEP treatment; (5) greater engagement with key stakeholders, including with young people themselves; and (6) elimination of costs associated with PrEP use. These recommendations exemplify an awareness amongst healthcare providers that PrEP access is contingent on a range of factors both inside and outside of the clinical setting.ConclusionsHealthcare providers are at the frontline of the HIV epidemic response. Their community-embeddedness, coupled with their interactions and encounters with AGYW, make them well positioned to articulate context-specific measures for improving access to PrEP. Importantly, the breadth of their recommendations suggests recognition of PrEP use as a complex social practice that requires integration of a combination of interventions, spanning biomedical, structural, and behavioural domains.

Introduction

Introduction

Differentiated meanings of education in the reintegration of ex- combatants in Colombia

ABSTRACT With the purpose of ending wars, international organizations and governments promote reintegration projects that seek to transform combatants affiliated with illegal armed groups into citizens through education. The assumption behind these efforts is that through education, ex-combatants will become economically independent, overcome marginalization, experience personal transformations, and integrate into communities. This paper questions this optimistic narrative of education by highlighting the differentiated meanings of education for ex-combatants reintegrating in urban Colombia. Listening to the voices of ex-combatants who have engaged in technical and vocational education programs, this paper compares policy narratives with ex-combatants’ narratives regarding the role of education in the reintegration process. The analysis reveals how for ex-combatants, education is a complex social practice that redistributes resources and contributes to positive psychosocial and empowerment transformations. At the same time, it is a process of insertion into an individualistic system and adaptation to unequal participation within the country’s socio-economic hierarchy.

Digging into the extremes:A case study of figured worlds of early literacy instruction among homeroom teachers in more or less successful co-taught classrooms

Co-taught classrooms offer increased opportunities for differentiated, engaging and effective instruction. However, the inclusion of another professional in the classroom may collide with teachers’ taken-for-granted perspectives on what a teacher, a student, literacy activities or a classroom in early literacy instruction are or should be. Aiming to shed light on the relationship between such perspectives and students’ learning outcomes in co-taught classrooms, the present study takes a step back to investigate figured worlds (Gee, 2011) of the social practice of early literacy instruction, as held by homeroom teachers. In-depth individual interviews with six homeroom teachers in classes with very strong versus very poor reading development in first and second grade are investigated using a discourse-analytical approach. The extremes are found to differ in their understandings of students, teachers, classrooms, activities, organizational structures, instructional differentiation, and student engagement. Juxtaposing understandings of all of these elements shows that there are fundamental differences between those extremes in terms of their figured worlds of early literacy instruction as a complex social practice. This finding suggests that an awareness of homeroom teachers’ figured worlds is required when discussing the potential for enhancing student learning through co-teaching.

Sustainable Public Transport Service Adapted for People with Disabilities and Reduced Mobility in the Municipality of León, Guanajuato, Mexico

Urban mobility makes it possible to incorporate new perspectives that make it possible to question and problematize the way in which social links and relations between city dwellers are shaped. In this way, mobility constitutes an increasingly massive, recurrent, and complex social practice, strongly conditioned by the existing levels of inequality and particularly those that entail processes of social exclusion. In the present research, the efficiency of the modality of adapted public transportation for people with disabilities in the city of León, Guanajuato, Mexico, which came into operation in 2012, receiving the 2019 Building Equality Award from the International Center for the Promotion of Human Rights and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is analyzed. The management, design, and implementation of Inclusive Urban Transportation (TÜI), demonstrated how the articulation of actors (public, private, and civil society) are of vital importance for the success of the project. In this sense, it is important to count on the permanent participation of focus groups that identify and understand the real needs of users with reduced mobility. The results achieved allow establishing an evaluation that contributes to detect and mitigate the conditions of vulnerability, risk, and segregation of people with disabilities.

Making Farm-to-Fork Front-of-the-Pack: Labelling a Sustainable European Diet

European Union (EU) policies have been evolving beyond the protection of consumers through food safety protocols to the promotion of healthy and sustainable diets. The European Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy—the most recent step in this evolution—addresses challenges facing European agriculture and proposes measures for creating a more resilient as well as sustainable food system, which includes a plan for product labelling. The effort to improve information conveyed to consumers through product labelling is a long-standing and ongoing phenomenon, and different front-of-pack voluntary labels presently co-exist across EU Member States. One objective of the Farm to Fork Strategy is to harmonize them; a second objective, no less important, is to add ‘sustainability’ as an additional quality to be certified through labels. Yet, adopting some of the current models of voluntary front-of-pack labels—in order to better promote both dietary health and sustainability—might conflict with already-established measures implemented by the Common Agricultural Policies, such as Geographical Indication protection for agri-food products. Furthermore, influencing consumers’ behaviour through labelling should not be regarded as equivalent to ‘empowering’ consumers in terms of nutrition and sustainable choices. Labelling needs to be complemented by higher levels of policy interventions—incentives/disincentives or even policies that limit or restrict choices—in order to rebalance power in the food supply chain and to induce a change in the complex social practices of food consumption. This paper examines the Farm to Fork Strategy through an analysis of EU policy documents, existing literature, and the discussion of a case study—with particular attention paid to the role of labels in promoting healthy and sustainable diets as well as the possibility of new sustainability criteria for products certified with Geographic Indications.