Everyday Experiences Of People Research Articles

Religion and the everyday citizenship of people with dementia in Nigeria: A qualitative study.

Research on the lived experience of dementia is burgeoning across the social and health sciences. Yet, very little is still known about the experience of dementia for many tribes and ethnoreligious groups, as most studies are conducted in Western countries. The aim is to advance the understanding of the role of faith and prayer in the lives of people with dementia in Nigeria through a lens of everyday citizenship. Interviews were conducted with 17 older people with dementia in a low-income, Yoruba-speaking community in Southwestern Nigeria. After transcription, the data were analysed thematically. The major theme identified in participants' accounts was that prayer served as a space for active and agentic participation. This theme was further elaborated upon through four subthemes: (1) agency in routine and daily prayer, (2) cognitive (re)framing through prayer, (3) prayer as a vehicle for active social interaction and support, and (4) prayer as work and transaction. Participants described religious practices as important to their acceptance of the situations, their feelings of hope in everyday lives, and their connection and contributions to the community. Analysis also shows the centrality of relationality in the everyday experiences of people with dementia. This article contributes to advancing the understanding of the socially orientated everyday experience of dementia. It contributes to a small body of literature on the social aspect and everyday experiences of living with dementia in Africa and stands out as the first of its kind study in Nigeria.

Labor of love: Re‐membering dismembered bodies in community research

AbstractEthnographic studies are practically invasive in nature in that they intrude into people's everyday experiences. It is therefore the duty of a researcher documenting experiences of women to pay attention to these forms of violence and undertake the labor of love that seeks to re‐member women's bodies and their stories in ways that restore their dignity and contribute to healing. African feminists have encouraged us to employ research methods that are able to engage stories of trauma and survival that are not triggering, invasive and limited. Intersectional feminism offers a qualitative analytical framework that aims at identifying the interlocked layered systems of oppression that affect the marginalized in society (Yuval‐Davis (2006). Similarly, in employing fragmented narrative as a methodology, there is a realization and acknowledgment of the superficiality of linear retelling as a mode of conveying psychological damage that exposes the relationship between silence, gesture and suffering in revisiting the site of trauma.

Exploring young trans people's everyday experiences of ‘out‐of‐placeness’ and socio‐bodily dysphoria

AbstractThis paper examines how young trans people come to be positioned as, and subsequently feel, ‘out‐of‐place’ in certain everyday spaces, particularly in the socio‐political context of the contemporary UK. Through the stories of young trans people aged 14–25 collected via participatory research, I question what it feels like to be young and trans and to experience and embody such dislocating feelings as ‘out‐of‐placeness’ and socio‐bodily dysphoria, and what toll repeatedly experiencing such embodied emotions exacts on young trans people, their bodies, and life trajectories. To do so, the experience of misgendering and deadnaming, others' hostile gazes, and what I refer to as socio‐bodily dysphoria, are introduced as examples of common modes of cisnormativity and ‘out‐of‐placeness’ experienced by participants. I build on Sara Ahmed's work on the socio‐spatial positioning and experience of non‐conforming or disruptive bodies to examine how trans youth and marginalised folk more generally become ‘out‐of‐place’ and experience ‘out‐of‐placeness’ in everyday space‐times that are not affectively, socially, or materially structured to expect their bodily presence, facilitate their participation, or enable their active agency, particularly on gendered terms. Importantly, a central contribution of the article involves articulating a spatial conceptualisation of socio‐bodily dysphoria. In sum, I develop geographical analyses of young trans people's everyday encounters and crucially build geographical understandings of the emergence and fixity of socio‐bodily dysphoria and everyday marginality through the voices and stories of trans youth.

The social organization of opioid policies and their implications for people with chronic pain and clinicians: An institutional ethnography.

Opioid use and related harms have been of growing concern in North America and elsewhere. In Canada, while policies and programs intended to mitigate opioid-related harms have been introduced by public health agencies, the medical profession, and different levels of government, there remains a paucity of evidence regarding the unintended consequences of these initiatives, including their impacts on people with chronic pain, a population often treated with opioids. This institutional ethnography investigated how opioid-related policies and programs are developed, deployed, and translated into practice in Ontario, Canada. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with people with chronic pain and practitioners to trace the institutional relations organizing opioid prescribing and use. Data analysis proceeded through an iterative process of identifying and mapping social relations, as well as textual analysis. Participants identified two policies that have been particularly impactful for people with chronic pain and clinicians: Ontario's Narcotics Monitoring System and the 2017 Guideline for Opioids for Chronic Non-Cancer Pain. Both interventions have contributed to fear among physicians that they will be investigated and disciplined by their licensing college for 'overprescribing' opioids. In the face of pressure to adhere to more conservative opioid prescribing practices, physicians have taken up strategies including rapidly tapering patients' doses and refusing to prescribe opioids. These changing work practices have had significant repercussions for people with chronic pain, such as increased pain, reduced quality of life, greater risks of harm, and the erosion of the physician-patient relationship. Policies intended to mitigate opioid-related harms by reducing the number of opioids prescribed have had repercussions for people with chronic pain and for practitioners. There is an urgent need to investigate the unintended and unanticipated impacts of drug policies, which may only be uncovered through explorations of people's everyday lives and experiences.

Radioactive Mosquito Bite and Its Surreal Life

Abstract The article explores the tensions between the state, science, and the lived experience among the residents in the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. The author proposes the analytics of the “surreal” to apprehend the incommensurable divide invisible radiation in society had produced between the state’s technoscientific focus on making the radiation visible and people’s diverse everyday experience of radiation in various aspects of life. Ethnographically retelling the struggles of a medical doctor who came to understand the manifold consequences of the accident in coastal Fukushima, the article shows how social science is a critical stakeholder in addressing the surreal to mediate between science and the lay public, the state and citizen, and risk and life to prevent the individuation of risk perceptions that follow with the emergence of invisible hazards in society.

Zmagania z niepewnością w biografiach członków rodzin emigrantów zarobkowych

The manner of functioning among family members who experience separation as a result of emigration shows that it is part of their biography, as a permanent element in the organisation of life. For the children of emigrants, the absence of a parent is an expression of the fact that the family’s functioning changed as a result of travelling abroad, depriving them of stability and predictability in family life. The remarks of emigrants’ family members remaining at home reflect the cyclical rhythm of everyday life, and indicate the day-to-day absence of the emigrant and their presence during holidays, which is a recipe for conflict. Emigration causes uncertainty. A fear of unexpected events, which occur without the presence of a parent who is simply unable to return on time, is characteristic of the children of emigrants. The feeling of insecurity and risk develops a kind of healing sense of temporariness, a sense that the state of separation will soon come to an end, which lowers the emotional tension of the family members remaining in Poland. The analysis presented in this article covers the findings of the author’s research, conducted using the biographical method on the everyday experiences of people whose reality was shaped by the hardships of migration separation. In many respects the research reveals that the beliefs of economic emigrants’ family members concerning the perception of separation is an experience that violates the imaginary image of a stable family.

Southern politics, southern power prices: Race, utility regulation, and the value of energy

AbstractFor many middle‐income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an ever‐increasing number of low‐income families, the electricity bill—filtered through the racialized materiality of poor‐quality housing stock and antidemocratic price regulation—represents something more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and a deep spin of vulnerabilities. This article explores the materiality of race in the US South through the prism of southern utilities and maps the political landscape on which contestations over the value of energy are taking place. I ask, how do different conceptualizations of value by utilities, regulators, and energy justice advocates figure into the price of energy and racialized dispossession in the Deep South? I draw attention to the highly elaborated narrative politics of the value of Georgia Power's energy. In conversation with recent anthropological debates about value and “the just price,” I argue that Georgia Power's monopoly on public power engages and reinforces the racialized political economy of the South to produce high home energy prices for low‐income families. But it also provokes a decryption of these energy prices by energy justice advocates that connects the silent violence of energy injustice to people's everyday experiences of extractive utility bills.

Exploring young people's experiences of race, gender and socioeconomic status in relation to everyday challenges: A focus group study

AbstractReports indicate a decrease in youth mental health in Sweden but at the same time research suggests that what is interpreted as mental ill‐health could be considered everyday challenges by young people themselves. The distribution of mental health and illness among young people is uneven based on inequities related to factors such as race, gender and socioeconomic status. Sweden in particular is a country with large socioeconomic inequities in youth mental health and in school results, compared to other European countries. The aim of this study was to explore young people's experiences of the role of race, gender and socioeconomic status in relation to everyday challenges. Sixty‐five young people aged 13–15 years old were recruited by student health services and participated in focus group discussions at schools in the southernmost part of Sweden. Data were analysed by secondary analysis with deductive qualitative content analysis using Ecosocial theory of disease distribution as theoretical framework. The analysis resulted in one main theme; Navigating inequities to gain and keep social status, with three underlying themes; Guided by social norms, Negative impact in everyday life and Importance of family influence. Participants were aware and critical of norms and expectations related to race, gender and socioeconomic status. Experiences of prejudice and unfairness was both own lived experiences by the participants as well as observed through friends and classmates. Young people spontaneously identify everyday challenges related to race, gender and socioeconomic status, even when not asked directly about these issues. Conforming to sexist, racist and classist, expectations is a way to lose and gain status in a school setting. Many of the inequities discussed related to socioeconomic status and the direct consequences of having or not having money. Young people's everyday experience of inequities is important to consider in youth mental health promotion aiming to tackle health inequities. Further research is needed on those experiences and how this affects mental health.

Incorporating new ways of doing by learning from everyday experiences and interactions using a multifactorial mHealth app.

Digital health innovations can support the prevention and management of risk factors for cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke. However, little is known about people's everyday experiences of digitally augmented stroke-prevention programmes combining onsite group sessions including peers and healthcare professionals with interaction and support from a multifactorial mHealth app. The aim of this study was to explore how people with stroke risk experienced interaction with a multifactorial mHealth app as support in the make my day stroke-prevention programme. Repeated interviews and observations with 12 adults with moderate to high stroke risk were analysed using a constant comparative method informed by constructive grounded theory. Incorporating new ways of doing into everyday life involves a process through which participants learn from both being and doing in different environments (e.g., digital, physical and social). Digital self-monitoring combined with seemingly trivial everyday experiences played central roles in the process of increasing awareness of health and stroke risks, and providing tools to support increased self-reflection on everyday behaviours. Adoption of positive health behaviours in everyday life was supported or hindered by how easy to use and personally relevant the mHealth app was perceived to be. An experience-based group programme together with a personally relevant multifactorial mHealth app can be supportive in stroke prevention to increase general health literacy and stroke risk literacy, and promote the incorporation of new ways of doing in everyday life. Routines of doing digital self-monitoring and health-promoting activities were however strongly influenced by different environments in which choices are presented. It is therefore important to explore how both self-monitoring and health-promoting activities can be incorporated into everyday routines for different individuals. Research should also explore how personally relevant mHealth can be developed and integrated into prevention practices in primary healthcare.

Moving through, interacting with, and caring for the city. Children's and young people's everyday experiences in smart cities

In recent years, smart city programmes have focused on innovation and technology to transform cities into resource-efficient, liveable, and inclusive places. Children's and young people's positions in smart cities are unstable and, depending on a project's agenda, ever-shifting – at the centre of a bottom-up movement, on the fringes of top-down planned programmes. This article revolves around the everyday experiences of children and young people and explores how they encounter life in a smart city district. It draws on observations from a qualitative case study with children and young people in a Viennese neighbourhood where an EU smart city lighthouse project was implemented from 2016 to 2019. Drawing on ethnographic research with children and young people in a school, an afterschool centre, and an open child and youth care programme in a city park, I develop three dimensions of encounters: how children and young people move through, interact with, and take care of the city. My findings show that many children and young people perceive crises with the same urgency as smart city programmes and are equally interested in technological innovation, environmental protection, and social inclusion. They demonstrate responsibility and care about socio-ecological challenges and approaches to solutions. However, young people's discourses and practices also show that urban life cannot be limited to certain issues, nor do young people's urban lives end at structural or administrative boundaries. Participants also emphasise that focusing on human beings alone does not lead to sustainable urban development, and they express frustration with measures that bypass the reality of their lives and divert much-needed attention away from pressing issues.

SnapPI: Understanding Everyday Use of Personal Informatics Data Stickers on Ephemeral Social Media

Sharing personal informatics data can support accountability, connectedness, and self-expression, but people often find their data too trivial to share on social media. Ephemeral social platforms like Snapchat and Story features have emerged as spaces for sharing more trivial life events, presenting an opportunity to incorporate self-tracked data into sharing. Past work suggests that including data-driven stickers on these platforms can help add additional context to what people share, but little is known about the benefits and challenges of people's everyday experiences with this concept. To understand people's everyday use of data-driven stickers, we designed and developed SnapPI, an app for flexibly incorporating data into stickers for Snapchat. We deployed SnapPI to 21 participants for two weeks, finding that participants value aligning data sharing with Snapchat's communication and stylistic norms. Perceiving Snapchat as a playful platform, participants connected data stickers with various visual components of their Snaps. Stickers were used to incorporate personal informatics data into their existing conversations, and were edited to align with different audience needs or to be expressive. We discuss recommendations for personal data sharing, suggesting supporting flexibility in presentation and aligning with the norms of existing platforms.

Afro-Cypriots: Prejudice, Colourism, Racism, and Rising Black Consciousness in Cyprus

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Afro-Cypriots, whose ancestors came to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus during the Ottoman period. The paper contributes to extant literature by exploring the impact of colonialism, racism, and slavery by questioning the ways Afro-Cypriots navigate their identities within the particular context of North Cyprus. By de-emphasizing the ethnic division of Turkish and Greek Cypriot identities, this paper focuses on the shifts from double consciousness to developing Afro-Cypriot consciousness. A rich methodology of oral history interview analyses from 20 Black Cypriots and a life-story narrative of a pioneering Black Cypriot expose the communal and familial microaggressions towards darker skin tones. We explore how colonial construction of ethnicity as a master status creates double consciousness for Black Cypriots. The paper concludes with a call against colour prejudice in Cyprus for a positive shift in Afro-Cypriot people's everyday experiences.

Философско-семиотический анализ истории музыкальной знаковости: от XVII до XХ века

The philosophical analysis of the problem of the musical language as a system of special symbolism from the period of the birth of individual composer creativity to the period of the New Time described in the article. This is the first part of the theoretical interpretation of the history of musical symbolism. The philosophical and aesthetic interpretation of the sign structures of the musical language considered to be presented in the context of the evolutionary and historical development on the basis of the methodology of semiosis analysis. Composer's creativity is based on certain techniques and innovative experiments, sometimes on mathematical calculations or on the improvement of existing techniques. Beginning approximately from the 11th-14th centuries, when individual composer creativity was born, and in the epoch of the 17th-20th centuries, reaching its apogee, European composer music produced the highest examples of opus music. This is an autonomous art that sets laws for itself and does not require meaningful injections from the outside - religion or philosophy, from a household or ritual situation, from the lifestyle or everyday experiences of people. The system of autonomous opus music of the twentieth century represents, on the one hand, the absolutization of the artistic specification of the art of sounds, and on the other, the fragility and vulnerability of creativity, isolation from life concreteness or from symbols included in traditional ceremonies, ceremonies, cult life, which often alienates professional opus music from the mass audience makes it incomprehensible and inaccessible. Since music and its language have a sign-symbolic nature, the process of semiosis is the mechanism by which decoding of musical symbolism is possible. Therefore, we are talking about the philosophy of musical semiosis as a process of understanding musical significance in the context of its evolution from its inception to the present day. Musical semiosis is the process of interpreting and structuring musical signs and symbols, as a result of which the open space of human emotions and sense-values is generated. A semi-musical form of musical thinking arises in terms of symbolic and symbolic meaning-making and is a mental construction, interpretation and understanding of musical signs.

COVİD-19 GEÇİREN BİREYLERİN DAMGALANMA DENEYİMLERİ

Bu çalışmanın konusu Covid-19 hastalığını geçirmiş on sekiz yaş üstü yetişkin bireylerin hastalık süreçleri ve bu süreçteki damgalanma/dışlanma deneyimleridir. Çalışmanın amacı, görüşülen katılımcıların hastalıktan kaynaklı damgalanma pratikleri ile yüz yüze kalıp kalmadıkları, eğer kaldılarsa da damgalanmanın hasta bireyler tarafından nasıl anlamlandırıldığı, damgalama pratikleri karşısında nasıl tutum geliştirdiklerine odaklanmaktır. Çalışma, özellikle Türkiye’de Covid-19 ve damgalanma ilişkisini sağlık çalışanları perspektifi ile sınırlandıran literatürdeki boşluğa cevap vermeyi hedeflemektedir. Nitekim hastalığı deneyimlemiş farklı demografik özelliklere sahip kişilerin öznel, gündelik deneyimlerine odaklanmaktadır. Çalışma nitel araştırma yöntemleri içinde sıklıkla kullanılan fenomenolojik araştırmayı içeren yaklaşımla, on sekiz yaş üstü yirmi beş yetişkin bireyle yüz yüze derinlemesine mülakatlar aracılığıyla tamamlanmıştır. Çalışmada nitel araştırmalarda sıklıkla kullanılan bir analiz yaklaşımı olarak, temalandırma ve kategorilendirmeye dayalı betimsel analiz tekniği kullanılmıştır. Çalışmanın sonunda katılımcıların damgalanma riskine rağmen hastalık durumlarını kolektif sorumluluk bilinciyle sosyal çevreleri ile paylaştıkları açığa çıkmıştır. Öngörülenin aksine katılımcıların tamamında damgalanmanın görülmediğini, dolayısıyla bu katılımcı profilinde damgalanma deneyiminin sınırlı kaldığını söylemek mümkündür. Beyan edilen damgalanma görünümleri ise karantina sonrası yakın fiziksel temas kurmaktan kaçınma, onur kırıcı dil kullanma, aynı ortamda bulunmaktan kaçınma, hastalıkla bağlantılı şakalar yapma biçiminde tanımlanmıştır.

Material Citizenship: An ethnographic study exploring object-person relations in the context of people with dementia in care homes.

Materiality has become an increasingly important topic in sociological studies of health care. How objects support the identity of people with dementia in care homes is an emerging area. While early research has tended to focus on sentimental or cherished items (such as photographs or keepsakes), the present study focused on functional objects (such as curling tongs or a hairdryer) as a mechanism to actualise citizenship. This article presents findings from an ethnographic study into the everyday experiences of people with dementia living in a residential care home in southern England. Drawing on a framework analysis of observations of daily life, object-elicitation interviews with residents, in-depth interviews with staff and relatives and documentary research, the findings demonstrate that object relations are a critical but overlooked site for citizenship. Residents are rarely involved in decision-making relating to their personal possessions, lack control over objects and are often discouraged from material interactions important to the maintenance and cultivation of identity. We introduce a new concept 'material citizenship' to advance thinking and practice in this area and argue that it is valuable for care practices to combine a material citizenship approach with existing care practices; thus, elevating the importance of object-person relations in dementia care.

For You, or For"You"?

Online communities provide spaces for people who are vulnerable and underserved to seek support and build community, such as LGBTQ+ people. Today, some online community spaces are mediated by algorithms. Scholarship has found that algorithms have become deeply embedded in the systems that mediate our routine engagements with the world. Yet, little is known about how these systems impact those who are most vulnerable in society. In this paper, we focus on people's everyday experiences with one algorithmic system, the short video sharing application TikTok. TikTok recently received press that it was suppressing and oppressing the identities of its growing LGBTQ+ user population through algorithmic and human moderation of LGBTQ+ creators and content related to LGBTQ+ identity. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore people's everyday engagements and encounters with the platform. We find that TikTok's For You Page algorithm constructs contradictory identity spaces that at once support LGBTQ+ identity work and reaffirm LGBTQ+ identity, while also transgressing and violating the identities of individual users. We also find that people are developing self-organized practices in response to these transgressions and violations. We discuss the implications of algorithmic systems on people's identity work, and introduce the concept of algorithmic exclusion, and explore how people are building resilience following moments of algorithmic exclusion.

A graph-based semi-supervised approach to classification learning in digital geographies

As the distinction between online and physical spaces rapidly degrades, social media have now become an integral component of how many people's everyday experiences are mediated. As such, increasing interest has emerged in exploring how the content shared through those online platforms comes to contribute to the collaborative creation of places in physical space at the urban scale. Exploring digital geographies of social media data using methods such as qualitative coding (i.e., content labelling) is a flexible but complex task, commonly limited to small samples due to its impracticality over large datasets. In this paper, we propose a new tool for studies in digital geographies, bridging qualitative and quantitative approaches, able to learn a set of arbitrary labels (qualitative codes) on a small, manually-created sample and apply the same labels on a larger set. We introduce a semi-supervised, deep neural network approach to classify geo-located social media posts based on their textual and image content, as well as geographical and temporal aspects. Our innovative approach is rooted in our understanding of social media posts as augmentations of the time-space configurations that places are, and it comprises a stacked multi-modal autoencoder neural network to create joint representations of text and images, and a spatio-temporal graph convolution neural network for semi-supervised classification. The results presented in this paper show that our approach performs the classification of social media content with higher accuracy than traditional machine learning models as well as two state-of-art deep learning frameworks.

Place, Displacement and Belonging: The Story of Abdi

ABSTRACT In traditional geopolitical discourses, an individual’s very being is routinely tied to and predicated upon the sanctity of the individual’s nation-state. The global refugee regime operates upon this assumption and regulates those who have been forcibly displaced from their homelands. Feminist geopolitics offers a way to see beyond the rigid boundaries of nation-states and attend to the embodied, lived, intimate and everyday experiences of people and their situated realities in any given time/space intersection. In this article, I explore questions of place and displacement through the story of one man’s journey from his village in Somalia to his eventual resettlement in Tucson, Arizona. Through Abdi’s story, this article seeks to contribute to geographic understanding of the immanence of place to self as it relates to displacement and forced mobility. Abdi’s story and his journey from Migwa to Tucson illustrate the nomad potential of his connection and disconnection to various places he has inhabited. His story and lived experience provide a nuanced example of the context of human relations with the places they inhabit and how these relations are much more fluid and porous than that assumed in the model of the ‘geographical self’- the self that is deeply rooted in and defined by places. This story-based approach reclaims human agency in the dyadic connection between place and self and centers individual experience in a geographic study of forced mobility and displacement.

Food Charity, Shame/ing and the Enactment of Worth

ABSTRACT Food insecurity is a significant problem in many countries, including Australia. Consequently, food hubs, through which food is distributed using a supermarket style layout, have become an important new source of charity food provision. However, little is known about users’ experiences. We draw on ethnographic research to understand the everyday experiences of people using South Australian food hubs. We suggest that attempts to produce a more dignified experience by creating a normalizing experience of shopping is not being achieved, because of the shame and stigma surrounding poverty, confusing operational processes, poor food quality, staff attitudes, and the disciplinary capacity of food hubs.

Lifelog Moment Retrieval With Interactive Watershed-Based Clustering and Hierarchical Similarity Search

Recently, the “lifelogging” and “lifelog” terminologies are frequently used to represent the activity of continuously recording people's everyday experiences, and the dataset contained these recorded experiences, respectively. Hence, providing an excellent tool to retrieve life moments from lifelogs to fast and accurately bring a memory back to a human when required, has become a challenging but exciting task for researchers. In this paper, a new method to meet this challenge by utilizing the hypothesis that “a sequence of images taken during a specific period can share the same context and content” is introduced. This manuscript per the authors introduces a new system to overcome the drawbacks. The experimental results confirm the high productivity of the proposed method in both stable and accuracy aspects as well as the advantage of having an interactive schema to push the accuracy when there is a conflict between a query and how to interpret such a query. Especially, this system requires only a few interactive steps to retrieve relevant images with high accuracy completely.