Larger Society Research Articles

A case study of three communities – Indigenous Women, jurisprudence and Climate Justice

abstract The women of the Ogoni Tribe in Nigeria, those of the Dongria Kondh tribe in India, and the Ogiek women from Kenya could perhaps not be more distant geographically. However, the underlying threads of courage, the determination to fight for social justice and the resistance to depredation and attacks on their ways of life weave them together. These economically vulnerable communities have been systematically discriminated against by the state and neglected by the larger society. Furthermore, their lands and livelihoods have been increasingly subject to unrelenting attacks from the ever pervasive “development”. Their resilience in the face of systematic oppression may hold relevance and important lessons for us too, as the world around becomes more complex and vulnerable, due largely to economic greed and social inequality; the effects of which are seen in and in turn hastened by climate change and environmental degradation. This article attempts to identify the common threads in the struggles of these communities and the lessons that their experiences of social and political mobilisation offer to us. Specifically, the article will focus on the role women have played and will also look to underpin these struggles and responses theoretically so their exemplary successes may be replicated to inspire similar movements across the world. In essence, the authors study commonalities intertwined between climate and social justice movements spearheaded by vulnerable women in the global South to understand and highlight their contribution to the jurisprudence of evolving movements across the world.

Elitist and Popular Ideological Forms in Selected Nigerian Campus Novels

ABSTRACT In Nigeria, the university system and its campuses are relatively new, having only been in existence for about 70 years. Within this university system, there has always been a tension about whether its role is to reproduce elites (initially considered its role), or to change society for the better, which later became the expectation of society. The tensions between these two trends in thinking about universities are transgenerational. As the nation that gave birth to these universities changed for the worse, its universities followed. This bifurcation in thinking about the role of Nigerian universities is evident in the novels that have been inspired by the Nigerian university as setting. This article argues that the Nigerian campus, in terms of ideological formation, as reflected in the novels selected for this study, is elitist in foundation and populist in progression. It argues that campus narratives, while acting as documents of elite behavioural activity, also highlight that the relationship between the evolution of Nigeria and its university system is instrumental to the formation of elite forms on campus, and reveals universities’ subsequent transformation into spaces for the creation of non-elite ideological forms in the larger society.

“Ready to Die”: The Notorious Cuff, a Resistant Enslaved (Akan) Male in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey

Abstract This essay explores the little-known yet fascinating 1767 murder of Daniel Hart at the hands of his enslaved male named Cuff, an alleged Akan person from Ghana, West Africa. The murder provides a crucial interpretive window into eighteenth-century New Jersey and the hostile relationship between bondmen and their male enslavers that could be described as warfare, that is, as a constant state of conflict that involved violent coercion. In its attempt to hear Cuff's muted oppositional voice, the essay engages a range of sources, including a popular rap song from the 1990s. In doing so, the essay refutes the portrayal of Cuff as evil, lazy, and hence, historically irrelevant. It frames the bondman as empowered by his Akan culture, which encouraged him to resent his existence under a white patriarchal system that degraded him in various ways, and in a larger white patriarchal society that policed his Black body, thereby making permanent escape an impossibility. Feeling boxed in by slavery and the larger society, Cuff took Hart's life and then his own, with the idea of making a spiritual journey to the ancestral realm. Armed with the weapon of cultural suicide, Cuff had reached the point in his war with Hart where he was, to borrow from rapper Notorious B.I.G., “ready to die.” Cuff's obscured story sheds important light on the destructive ramifications of New Jersey slavery, suggesting that Blacks fought whites for the preservation of their bodies and sense of self-worth with powerful (hidden) weapons.

BUSINESS USE: IS AI SURPASSING HUMAN CREATIVITY?

This study aims to assess people’s perceptions regarding AI-generated images compared to those made by humans. This study used quantitative research in the form of a survey to find out how much respondents prefer AI-generated images. The findings indicated that most respondents favoured artificial intelligence (AI)generated visuals. Age and time spent online were key determinants of this choice. These discoveries have important implications for organisations and people who produce and consume visual content in their jobs. It implies that as people become familiar to them and as technology advances, AI-generated images are likely to gain popularity in the future. It also emphasises how critical it is to be aware of audience preferences and adjust to the evolving state of technology and visual media. In conclusion, this study offers insightful information about the prospective effects of AI-generated images on the creative sectors and the larger society.

From Corrective to Predictive Maintenance-A Review of Maintenance Approaches for the Power Industry.

Appropriate maintenance of industrial equipment keeps production systems in good health and ensures the stability of production processes. In specific production sectors, such as the electrical power industry, equipment failures are rare but may lead to high costs and substantial economic losses not only for the power plant but for consumers and the larger society. Therefore, the power production industry relies on a variety of approaches to maintenance tasks, ranging from traditional solutions and engineering know-how to smart, AI-based analytics to avoid potential downtimes. This review shows the evolution of maintenance approaches to support maintenance planning, equipment monitoring and supervision. We present older techniques traditionally used in maintenance tasks and those that rely on IT analytics to automate tasks and perform the inference process for failure detection. We analyze prognostics and health-management techniques in detail, including their requirements, advantages and limitations. The review focuses on the power-generation sector. However, some of the issues addressed are common to other industries. The article also presents concepts and solutions that utilize emerging technologies related to Industry 4.0, touching on prescriptive analysis, Big Data and the Internet of Things. The primary motivation and purpose of the article are to present the existing practices and classic methods used by engineers, as well as modern approaches drawing from Artificial Intelligence and the concept of Industry 4.0. The summary of existing practices and the state of the art in the area of predictive maintenance provides two benefits. On the one hand, it leads to improving processes by matching existing tools and methods. On the other hand, it shows researchers potential directions for further analysis and new developments.

Who belongs to the swiss body politique—A diaspora perspective

In this paper, I try to better understand the intersection between “integration” in legal terms, and how long-term resident “non-citizens” and migrants from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) situate themselves in narratives of belonging vis a vis the normative power structure that constitutes the Swiss body politique. More specifically, how do labor and forced migrants from former Yugoslavia negotiate the shifting understanding of “integration” in Switzerland in legal and social terms? Former Yugoslavs constitute not only a comparatively large number of “non-citizens” in Switzerland, but individuals from-and-with-connections to this community also embody numerous labels and categories of migrant that statistical databases, the media, and legal practices attach to them since the 1970s. Key findings in this paper illustrate a two-tiered narrative: “non-citizens” seemed to have maintain(ed) their pursuit of not attracting attention to their persona—a strategy that allowed individuals to disappear within the larger society. Ensuing Europeanization processes, coupled with the Wars of Yugoslav Succession during the 1990s, however, brought to the fore “a politics of rupture” that called into question othering processes, and the seemingly tightening sociolegal basis of belonging to the Swiss body politique. Hitherto examined data suggests that interlocutors pursue a “positive essentialist frame” to counter exclusionary narratives “non-citizens” experience to postulate “rights claims”. Interviewees, in other words, activate diaspora connections and networks to support and aid each other when legal and socio-political questions arise, but also to actively influence the political and legal landscape in Switzerland.

The integration hypothesis and positive mental health outcomes for children and young asylum-seekers in Iceland

The current global situation affects millions of people forced to flee their homes in search of safety and protection. Child and youth forced migrants are often exposed to stressful life events before arrival in the country of resettlement and suffer more mental health problems than other migrants. For this population, finding the balance between maintaining their heritage culture while interacting with the larger new society is related to better mental health, a phenomenon referred to as the integration hypothesis. The present study sought to address gaps in the literature by examining the integration hypothesis among children and youth who sought asylum in Iceland. The study examined the acculturation strategy preferences of participants and their relationship to mental health outcomes. Participants were 75 individuals, ages 13–24, who arrived in Iceland between 2016 and 2020. Part of the data was collected via face-to-face interviews, while mental health measures were administered. Participants who preferred integration showed the best mental health outcomes, while those who chose marginalization had poorer mental health. Study results support the integration hypothesis in Iceland and underline the importance of helping immigrant children and youth recognize the value of maintaining their heritage culture while interacting with the larger society.

Functional Variation of German Also across Registers and Speaker Groups

Abstract This study investigates the variation of the polyfunctional linguistic item also across registers and language contact settings. I present findings from a corpus study using the corpus of the Research Unit Emerging Grammars, RUEG for short (Wiese et al., 2019), which provides comparable, register-differentiated data of bilingual and monolingual speakers of German in Germany and bilingual heritage speakers of German in the US. The data suggest that functional variation of a specific lexical item reflects the use of functional features in specific communicative situations. The data further indicate an impact of the societal status that a language occupies in the larger society (majority vs. heritage language) on the distribution of such functions.

Breaking Gender Stereotypes in the Gaming Community: Importance in Providing All-Round Support for Female Gamer Against Misogyny

The experience of female gamers in online gaming and gaming communities arecharacterized by a lack of social-emotional and organizational support, as well as prevalent general harassment and sexual harassment. Offline, negative stereotypes associated with female gamers and the lack of understanding from others towards women with video games as a hobbylead to the unwillingness of women to self-identify as gamers. Gender stereotypes, specifically, traits of male gamers being traditionally associated with gamer stereotypes cause the exclusion of female gamers and feminine traits from fair and normal treatment in the gaming community. In this contribution, the effects of existing gender stereotypes and misogynistic ideals present insociety on the gamer stereotype and gaming community, as well as the subsequent treatment of female gamers are examined. I conclude that only a multifaceted approach capable of addressing the aforementioned relationship between the larger society and the gaming world would beeffective in improving the overall condition and support for women in the gaming community. Additionally, I argue that the categorization and grouping of coping strategies used by female gamers in response to harassment online should be standardized into specific categories – taking into account previous methods of categorization grounded in both quantitative and qualitativeapproaches – to benefit future research.

How General is General Strain Theory? An Inquiry of Workplace Deviance in Iran

Occupational deviance is one of the most rampant and alarming phenomena in the workplace. It can have negative effects on the individual employee, the organization, the profession, and the larger society. Therefore, it is important to better understand the etiology of such behavior in the hopes of providing solutions to reduce it. One such theory that may provide a conceptual framework to help understand workplace deviance is Agnew's general strain theory. As such, the main goal of this research was to examine the predictive utility of general strain theory in explaining workplace deviance. Using a sample of 336 private bankers in Iran, the findings suggest that the important theoretical concepts of workplace strain, subjective strain, negative emotion, and deviant motivation all predicted workplace misconduct. Consistent with the theory, additional results demonstrated important mediated relationships, such that strain was indirectly related to workplace deviance through negative emotions and deviant motivation. Specific results, policy implications, and study limitations are discussed.

A Sustainable Philosophy for Teaching Ethics and Morals to Build Character, Pro-social Skills and Well-being in Children

This paper looks at frameworks for the practice of moral and ethical values for children, drawn from Yoga and Buddhist Philosophies. Verily the purpose is to inculcate a repository of thought and behaviour through which they align moral and ethical behaviours by becoming important cogs in establishing harmony in the world that we exist. Harmony between one child and another child, harmony between children and their families, harmony between the families and larger society and harmony between society and other sentient beings and life forms is what constitutes cosmic-harmony. In this sense, Confucius’ triadic cosmic-harmony and the timeless Vedic Ṛta are not merely a philosophical thought or idea envisaged in ivory towers but real-time experiencing or darsana. This is realized through disciplined individual behaviours in balancing of our purusharthas with our dharma; aligning these with a sense of universal responsibility out of care and concern for one another. This would ensure in connecting and building synergy with all that surrounds us since these practices fostering morals and ethics could also be befitting measures to counter the Anthropocene epoch’s negative geologic impact on our planet. This paper is being written from the perspective of human beings and their practice of humanism via moral and ethical behaviour. The point of departure being that humans are placed as a dominant species at the centre of our planet with unprecedented power to influence the fate of other species, the environment and the future of the quality of bio-diversity of life on earth.

America’s Continuing Struggle with Mental Illnesses: Economic Considerations

Mental illnesses affect roughly 20 percent of the US population. Like other health conditions, mental illnesses impose costs on individuals; they also generate costs that extend to family members and the larger society. Care for mental illnesses has evolved quite differently from the rest of health care sector. While medical care in general has seen major advances in the technology of treatment this has not been the case to the same extent for the treatment of mental illnesses. Relative to other illnesses, the cost of care for mental illnesses has grown more slowly and the social cost of illness has grown more rapidly. In this essay we offer evidence about the forces underpinning these patterns and emphasize the challenges stemming from the heterogeneity of mental illnesses. We examine institutions and rationing mechanisms that affect the ability to make appropriate matches between clinical problems and treatments. We conclude with a review of implications for policy and economic research.

Institutional Courage: An Antidote to Institutional Betrayal and Broken Trust

An emerging area of interest is how institutional betrayal among nurses might lead to issues of nurse well-being, such as burnout and turnover. In this phenomenon, the organization, whether by explicit actions or the abstract ethos of the work environment, can become a contributing factor to psychological well-being. Within health care, the systemization and corporatization of medical services has contributed to a more institutional identity. Institutional actions that defy the expectation for safety and violate relationships between individual and institution are termed institutional betrayal. In any case or among any population of nurses, the key element of institutional betrayal is a violation of trust. If trust is lacking and the relationship with the organization is broken, then the person would feel a psychological weight or some sort of strain on their ethos that wears on their resilience. For nurses, this fractured relationship then makes patient care feel more like work than caring, which then cascades to burnout. In a system depleted of institutional trust, nurses might feel useless and wasted in the churn of the “system,” so they become depersonalized and bitter. Building back institutional trust becomes a pivotal way to counteract the trauma of betrayal. Rebuilding trust takes acts of courage. It is not easy for an organization or institution to admit it harmed people, and likely even more difficult as public relations and brand image become critical factors in health care business practices. But to admit these faults and take bold action is an act of institutional courage, one that can help heal the wounds experienced by nurses and larger society.

Influence of Dipo Rite Performance on the Girl Child’s Education and the People of Yilo and Lower Manya Krobo

This paper investigates the impact of the Dipo rite performance on the education of Ghana's Yilo and Lower Manya Krobo girls and their communities. The Dipo rite is a Yilo and Lower Manya Krobo tradition that entails the initiation of girls into womanhood. It is deeply rooted in their culture. It has been discovered, however, that the practise has detrimental effects on the education, health, and economic well-being of females and their families, frequently leading to early marriage and school dropout. Using social learning theory as a theoretical framework, this paper investigates how cultural practises such as the Dipo rite performance are learned and transmitted across generations, as well as the potential for behaviour modification through modelling and reinforcement. The paper examines empirical studies that examined the attitudes of parents, community leaders, and the larger society towards the Dipo rite performance and its effect on girls' education. The findings suggest that interventions that promote positive attitudes towards girls' education and discourage detrimental traditional practises could result in behaviour modification among parents, community leaders, and the larger society. In its conclusion, the paper suggests a multifaceted approach to addressing the issue, including community sensitization, the involvement of local leaders, and government policies that support girls' education.

The Language Demands of Analytical Reading and Writing at School

Analytical writing poses particularly challenging, yet often overlooked, language demands that need attention in educational research and practice. In this article, I discuss the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and its relevance for school reading and writing. CALS refer to the set of learners’ school-relevant language resources that are of high utility to understanding analytical texts across content areas. After a brief review of the relations between mid-adolescents’ language and their school reading and writing proficiencies, I offer illustrative examples of individual differences in middle-schoolers’ analytical writing and CALS. I argue, on the basis of recent but extensive empirical evidence, that without understanding and addressing the immense variability in the language resources that students bring to school and the language demands of reading- and writing-to-learn tasks and texts, schools run the risk of maintaining and even exacerbating the inequalities that exist in the larger society.

Decentering the use of police: An abolitionist approach to safety planning in psychotherapy.

The dominant narrative in much of the world, but especially the West, is that public safety and security are provided by policing. Psychotherapy invests in this dominant narrative via its reliance on emergency services provided by the state, such as 911 and police, to pursue the safety of clients and the larger society. However, the long-documented history of oppressive systems of policing suggest that these dominant narratives operate to protect powerful groups while surveilling and policing marginalized people, but particularly Black and Brown communities. As such, critical and abolitionist movements have rejected the idea that policing provides safety and have sought out alternative methods for ensuring community wellness and safety. Although the field of psychology has broadly expressed interest in growing its critical lens and interrupting systems of power, very little has directly addressed how carceral logics influence psychotherapy practice, and how this influences the client's sense of safety in therapy. This manuscript argues for an abolitionist approach to informed consent and safety planning in psychotherapy to address the disparate ways that clients, and especially marginalized clients such as Black and Brown people, experience psychotherapy's traditional use of systems of policing and state authority. Clinical illustrations are provided and future directions are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Engaging whiteness within mixedness: multiracial Filipina/o American scholars’ journeys towards belonging

ABSTRACT This collaborative autoethnography shares the stories of two multiracial Filipina/o American scholars at various points in their academic careers as they engage in a purposeful journey towards unlearning the whiteness of their upbringing and larger society. The enduring legacy of American colonisation of the Philippines grounds the analysis with thematic findings outlining the saliency of (a) reflecting on whiteness, (b) distancing from whiteness, (c) seeking ethnic belonging, (d) claiming (multi)racialised space, and (e) remembering to resist. Taken together, the narratives and findings outline a potential journey towards engaging whiteness within mixedness while demonstrating how even the best intended educational theorising can fall victim to unrecognising the systemic nature of whiteness. Whiteness tends to be invisible in multiracial scholarship; thus our paper urges educators to critically engage whiteness as a construct in relation to multiraciality in order to disrupt white supremacy.

Sustainable entrepreneurship development in Oman: a multi-stakeholder qualitative study

PurposeEven though sustainable entrepreneurship has increasingly received researchers’ attention in recent years, the topic remains rather under-researched in natural resources’ rich Gulf countries such as Oman. Hence, this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature and, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is one of the first attempts to assess the state of sustainable entrepreneurship development in Oman from a multi-stakeholder perspective.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses a qualitative research approach where in-depth semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 12 respondents representing relevant stakeholders of sustainable entrepreneurship development in Oman. The interviewees included four sustainable entrepreneurs, four policymakers and four educationists representing entrepreneurial skills development institutes in Oman.FindingsThis papers’ findings highlight that despite some positive improvements, several critical challenges remain, which hinder sustainable entrepreneurship development. The authors further found the role of FinTech to be critical in this concern by all stakeholders, though its usage and acceptance remain low. Also, the costs associated with the post-carbon (sustainable) economy and different profitability evolution have resulted in a slow change in the policy development in this concern. From an educational (skills development) perspective, a lack of context-specific training programmes and culture-based hesitations appeared to be hindering achieving sustainable entrepreneurship possibilities in Oman. The nascent entrepreneurial ecosystem, bureaucracy and lack of human capital (attraction as well as retention) appeared to be significant challenges for entrepreneurs. Finally, the findings highlighted the need for cross-sector collaboration with clear benchmarks for effective policy development concerning sustainable entrepreneurship in Oman.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first academic study explicitly highlighting the state of sustainable entrepreneurship in Oman by incorporating the development initiatives as well as the major challenges in the analysis. Secondly, this study is also a pioneering work specifying the interlinkage between financing (FinTech), policy initiatives and skills development and the development of a sustainable entrepreneurship ecosystem in an under-researched context of Oman. Finally, the transition to a sustainable economy is challenging in natural resources’ dependent economies like Oman, as it needs to be supported by the mindset change in the larger society (legitimacy). In this concern, this paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is one of the first academic endeavours to also specify the role of legitimacy from the perspective of different stakeholders (and larger society) for sustainable entrepreneurship development in such contexts.

The Effects of Marriage and Divorce on Women's Nationality in the Iranian Law

As the first and foremost social institution, the family significantly impacts its immediate larger society. Also, the importance of family as a key figure in a healthy society and the necessity of strong relations between spouses make it imperative to devise the required legal devices. As women are prone to suffer and receive more damage in cases of family breakdown, the legislator should develop and establish more protective statutes concerning women's rights. This study uses legal research methods with a qualitative approach. To protect Iranian women's rights, the legislator distinguishes cases where an Iranian woman marries a foreign man and those where Iranian men marry foreign women. In the former case, the wife's change, or retention, of nationality is subject to the laws of the husband’s State. In contrast, in the latter case, the legislator enforces the unity of nationality principle. Marriage between Iranian women and foreign men causes women to experience many changes and limitations regarding their national and inheritance rights. Also, they may lose their Iranian nationality due to their marriage —in cases when the husband’s nationality, due to the law of the husband's State, is forced upon the wife. On the other hand, foreign women married to Iranian men, though forced to accept Iranian nationality, encounter fewer limitations resulting from marriage. Upon Divorce, they are neither forced to accept a nationality, unlike when marriage is celebrated, nor denied their Iranian nationality. They can choose whether to remain an Iranian national or recover their original nationality.

Risk factors and prognosis of postoperative delirium in nonagenarians with hip fracture

Hip fractures in nonagenarians is one of the great challenges for patients of this age, the family and the larger society. The purpose of this study was to investigate the risk factors and prognosis of postoperative delirium in nonagenarians with hip fracture. 199 Eligible patients were enrolled. Confusion Assessment Method (CAM) were used to identify the delirium. Logistic regressions were used to investigate the effect of 18 pre-existing conditions on postoperative delirium. Prognosis of postoperative delirium in nonagenarians with hip fracture were also be evaluated. The results indicated the following: (1) the prevalence of postoperative delirium among nonagenarians with hip fracture was 28.1% (56 of 199); (2) coexisting disease ≥ 4 (OR = 5.355, 95% CI = 1.394–9.074, P = 0.007), longer admission to operating time (OR = 1.514, 95% CI = 1.247–1.837, P = 0.000), and general anesthesia (OR = 2.086, 95% CI = 1.804–7.968, P = 0.032) were independent risk factors for postoperative delirium in nonagenarians with hip fracture; (3) nonagenarians with postoperative delirium had a predominantly high burden of perioperative complications, long length of stay, and postoperative mortality at 30 days follow-up and 1 year follow-up than the patients without postoperative delirium. The results could enable clinicians to improve outcome after operation in nonagenarians with hip fracture.