Literature plays a significant role in representing the body, and its literary interventions transform perspectives on and practices regarding disability, further reshaping society's stance. Literature and history have ample examples of the achievements of disabled persons, but they too had to undergo rejection, exclusion and defiance before positioning themselves into the mainstream. Christy Brown suffered from cerebral palsy and authored a memoir, My Left Foot, which is an example of the struggle to break society’s preconceived notions about disability. His medical condition segregated him from the immediate social environment. Despite facing constant challenges, Christy produced a text that showcases existing social patterns and further raises the voice for the beliefs to be re-examined or altered. Marginalisation and exclusion reduce the opportunities to contribute productively. The marginalisation of the disabled describes the way disability is understood in the international context and discourses. The lives of the disabled have been a history of silence, further relating to Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’. The present paper will discuss disability not as a feature of ‘dysfunctional’ bodies and minds, but as a creation of social structure. Secondly, it will examine how literature represents and constructs the concept of disability and can serve as a tool for inclusivity. Thirdly, the study will examine the silence, representation, and socio-cultural dimensions of My Left Foot to highlight the factors that bridge the gap between individual and societal beliefs.

Multi-modal fake news detection is a technique designed to identify and classify fake news by integrating information from multiple modalities. However, existing multi-modal fake news detection models have significant limitations in capturing structural information when processing social context. The core issue stems from the reliance on simple linear aggregation or static attention mechanisms in existing graph detection methods, which are inadequate for effectively capturing complex long-distance propagation relationships and multi-layered social network structures. Furthermore, existing multi-modal detection approaches are limited by the feature representations within the respective semantic spaces of each modality. The semantic gaps between modalities lead to misalignment during information fusion, making it difficult to fully achieve modality complementarity. To address these issues, we propose GINMCL, a graph isomorphism network-driven modality enhancement and cross-modal consistency learning method for multi-modal fake news detection. This method builds on the extraction of text and image features by incorporating graph isomorphism networks (GIN) based on the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) injective aggregation mechanism to effectively capture both local dependencies and global relationships within social graphs. Modality consistency learning aligns text, image, and social graph information into a shared latent semantic space, enhancing modality correlations. Additionally, to overcome the limitations of traditional methods in modality fusion strategies, we leverage a hard negative contrastive learning mechanism, which softens the penalty on negative samples and optimizes contrastive loss, further improving the accuracy and robustness of the model. We conducted systematic evaluations of GINMCL on the Pheme and Weibo datasets, and experimental results demonstrate that GINMCL outperforms existing methods across all metrics, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

This paper examines auspicious Chinese character motifs on Ming and Qing dynasty ceramics through an interdisciplinary approach integrating iconography, philology, and folklore studies. Focusing on representative ceramic examples, it analyzes the interaction between form, craftsmanship, and cultural meaning, revealing a clear evolutionary trajectory: from symmetrical and standardized designs in the Ming dynasty to more diverse and dynamic forms in the Qing, from monochrome blue-and-white ware to multicolored decorative techniques, and from imperial ritual symbolism to expressions of everyday aspirations. The study argues that these motifs visually reflect the social structure and collective psychology of Ming–Qing society and proposes “form translation, semantic adaptation, and cultural inheritance” as a viable framework for the contemporary revitalization of traditional decorative motifs.

Global population aging is reshaping social structures and health demands at an unprecedented pace. Existing research indicates that decision-making power is significantly associated with health outcomes in later life. However, the underlying pathways linking household financial decision-making power to mental health remain underexplored in population-based studies. Elucidating multi-pathway effects will provide pathway-based evidence for identifying vulnerable populations and developing clinical interventions. We analyzed five waves (2005-2014) of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey(CLHLS), comprising 23,994 observations from 9,055 adults aged 65 years or older. Financial decision-making power was self-reported on a four-point ordinal scale. Mental health was assessed via five indicators: psychological resilience, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, self-rated health, and loneliness. Fixed-effects models were applied to control for time-invariant confounders, and inverse probability weighting was used to address attrition bias. Mediation pathways were tested using a bootstrapping approach (500 repetitions). A graded dose-response relationship was observed: lower financial decision-making power was associated with poorer mental health across all outcomes. Compared to those with full autonomy, older adults without decision-making power showed significantly lower psychological resilience (β = - 0.31, p < 0.001) and subjective well-being (β = - 0.51, p < 0.001). Mediation analyses revealed that activities of daily living (ADL) accounted for 13.0% to 31.8% of the total effect and leisure activities for 10.0% to 34.2%, with the strongest mediation observed for loneliness. Among the participants who were functionally independent at baseline, functional capacity exhibited dual mediating roles: a positive pathway for self-rated health and a suppression effect for loneliness. Heterogeneity analyses revealed more pronounced benefits among economically disadvantaged, financially dependent, female, and younger-old adults, with protective effects partially offsetting vulnerabilities in these populations. Financial decision-making power is a significant and potentially modifiable factor associated with mental health among older adults, representing an underexplored pathway for promoting healthy aging, with effects partially mediated through ADL and leisure engagement. Mental health promotion strategies should seek to preserve older adults' household financial decision-making power while supporting functional independence and social engagement.

Abstract Promoted as transformative of personal lifestyles and broader socio-environmental strategies, smart homes often deliver material change without disrupting entrenched social norms. As such, they tend to reinforce existing social structures instead of challenging or reforming them. This article presents the first cross-disciplinary critical review of 92 smart home publications to evaluate the extent to which gender has been meaningfully addressed in this field. Using qualitative content analysis across disciplines, four dominant analytical strands were identified, and only 19% of studies adopt constructivist or intersectional approaches to gender, while the majority treat it as a binary demographic variable. Only 12% of studies engage in discourse analysis to interrogate how smart home narratives reproduce heteronormative assumptions and gendered divisions of labour. Technical and quantitatively oriented research largely ignores gendered dynamics, reinforcing assumptions of neutrality in smart technology design. Authors argue that this lack of engagement with gender—as well as with intersecting categories such as race, class, and disability—limits the field’s conceptual richness and social responsiveness. The findings underscore the urgent need for more inclusive and reflective methodological frameworks and offer practical guidance for integrating gender-sensitive approaches into future smart home research, design, and policy.

Studies of Muslim religious practice have largely relied on theological and normative perspectives, while analyses based on sociological approaches that treat religious practice as a social phenomenon remain relatively limited. This study aims to analyze the forms of religious practice among Muslims, identify the social factors that influence these practices, and explain the relevance of a sociological approach for understanding the dynamics of religiosity in society. A qualitative approach with a case study design was employed, involving 15 participants selected through purposive sampling, consisting of religious leaders and members of the Muslim community. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, observations, and documentation, and were analyzed using thematic analysis through the stages of data reduction, coding, categorization, and conclusion drawing. The findings show that Muslim religious practice manifests in two main dimensions: ritual practice (congregational prayer, recitation of the Qur’an, and study circles) and social practice (charitable giving, gotong royong, and community-based religious activities). Family, social environment, religious education, and the role of religious leaders were found to be key determinants shaping patterns of religious practice, while variations in the intensity of practice were influenced by personal conditions such as level of busyness and access to religious activities. These results affirm that religious practice is the outcome of dynamic interaction between individuals and surrounding social structures, and thus a sociological approach is relevant and necessary for understanding the forms of Muslim religiosity more comprehensively. Theoretically, this study enriches the body of knowledge in the sociology of religion, while practically it provides a basis for religious institutions to design more contextual guidance programs and opens avenues for further research on the impact of modernization and digital media on the transformation of religious practice.

This study examines how pedagogical strategies function as cultural processes in shaping students’ cultural awareness and social responsibility in higher education. Conceptualizing higher education as a cultural space, the study positions pedagogy as a site of meaning-making through which student development unfolds. A mixed-methods convergent design was employed to capture both the scope of developmental change and the meanings students attribute to their learning experiences. Quantitative data were collected through a survey measuring three interrelated dimensions of student development: values, worldview, and social consciousness. Qualitative data were obtained from in-depth interviews and students’ reflective journals, allowing analysis of lived learning experiences and student agency. Integrated analysis generated meta-inferences that illuminate the cultural dimensions of pedagogical practice. Quantitative findings indicate that pedagogical strategies supported development across all three dimensions, with more pronounced changes in worldview and social consciousness and more gradual shifts in values. Qualitative findings reveal that these changes emerged through critical reflection, questioning of prior assumptions, and connections between learning experiences and broader social structures. Overall, the findings demonstrate that pedagogical strategies contribute to cultural formation by shaping students’ interpretive frameworks and enhancing their potential for socially responsible and transformative action. The study underscores the role of pedagogical design in advancing cultural analysis and social change within higher education.

Climate change and human activities are intensifying the water cycle processes, exerting a certain degree of impact on the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of water resources, thereby increasing the uncertainty in water resource development and utilization. This has led to situations where in some regions, the degree of water resources development and utilization has approached or even exceeded the carrying capacity of water resources, creating a mismatch between the spatial layout of water resource carrying capacity and the economic and social structure. This study focuses on the Yishusi River Basin, constructing a system dynamics coupled orthogonal experimental optimization method for predicting and regulating water resources carrying capacity. By setting various scenarios combining climate change and human activities, and applying the constructed model for predicting and regulating water resources carrying capacity under climate change, the study conducted analysis on predicting and regulating water resources carrying capacity during different future development periods in the region. The results include predictions of water resources carrying capacity and regulatory measures for this basin. The results indicate that: (1) Under different scenarios, the natural runoff in the Yishusi River Basin is expected to increase in the future. (2) By 2030, 2035, and 2050, under current water supply conditions, the water quantity and quality in the Yishusi River Basin will be all in a state of overload for each climate scenario.(3) By selecting regulatory indicators and formulating control measures, the predicted results for different scenarios in the Yishusi River basin were regulated. After regulation, all scenarios are in a critically overloaded state.

This study analyzes the role of Minangkabau women in decision-making communication in both domestic and public spheres, in their homeland (ranah) as well as in the diaspora (rantau). Using a qualitative case study approach, data was collected through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and analysis of customary documents. The results show that women hold significant control over household economic management, inheritance distribution, and children’s education, making them key actors in domestic decision-making. However, in public customary forums, women’s voices are still often channeled indirectly through male intermediaries, such as ninik mamak or penghulu. A different phenomenon is observed in the diaspora, where women are more active as leaders of social, cultural, and economic organizations. Empirical data reveal that 95% of Minangkabau ancestral land is inherited by women, yet almost all Kerapatan Adat Nagari forums are still led by men. Conversely, more than 60% of Minangkabau SMEs in Jakarta are run by women. By combining Agenda Setting Theory and Cultural Policy Theory, this research highlights the paradox between symbolic authority and formal power. The contribution of this research lies in a new understanding of Minangkabau gender dynamics and supports the global agenda of UN Women (2022) regarding gender-inclusive cultural governance.

Down Syndrome Regression Disorder (DSRD) is an acute neurocognitive regression in individuals with Down syndrome (DS), causing a profound loss of acquired skills. DSRD increases demands on caregivers, to sleep disturbances, financial distress, and negative impacts on caregiver-reported social connections and perceived social support. The goal of this study was to characterize the caregiver-reported impacts of DSRD on social relationships by comparing their experiences to those of caregivers of individuals with DS and other neurological disorders (DSN). This is a narrative burden-of-care study, not a network study. Using cross-sectional study design, caregivers of individuals with DSRD (n = 228) and DSN (n = 137) were recruited from a neurology clinic and a DSRD Facebook support group. Participants completed the DSRD Caregiver Distress Survey (CDS), which included four qualitative, open-ended questions focused on self-perception of adult friendships, social relationship impact, spouse/partner impact, and perceived shrinkage of social world. Responses were analyzed using thematic coding; resulting theme frequencies summarize caregiver-reported perceptions and narratives and do not represent objectively measured social network structure. In the DSRD cohort, a high-level overview revealed that 65.66% of responses reported a negative impact on adult friendships, while 71.21% reported a negative impact on social relationships. A negative impact on spouse/partner relationships was reported in 51.53% of responses, and a perceived shrinkage of social world was found in 52.82%. Caregivers in the DSRD group were significantly more likely to report "Social Withdrawal and Isolation" (43.2% vs. 17.9%, p = 0.006), "Loss of Community Participation and/or Support" (16.7% vs 4.5%, p = 0.043) and a "Perceived Enduring Loss of Social Connections" (35.3% vs. 8.7%, p = 0.002) compared to the DSN group. This study's findings reveal a significant and complex process of perceived social disengagement among caregivers describing social withdrawal and loss of social connections that they experienced as enduring. The results emphasize the need for early interventions that address the individual's needs but also address the caregiver's social and mental health to prevent perceived long-term social isolation.

Farmland quality protection is an important measure to implement the strategy of “storing grain in the land” and a vital part of promoting ecological agriculture development. This study focuses on the main agents of farmland quality protection, farmers, with a sample of 1013 households from the rice-growing areas of Jiangxi Province, which is one of the major rice-growing provinces in southern China. We used an Ordered Probit model, a mediation effect model, and a moderation effect model to analyze the influence and mechanism of farmers’ social capital and structure on their farmland quality protection behavior. The result shows that: (1) Social capital significantly promotes the farmers’ farmland quality protection behaviors. The promoting effect of bonding social capital is greater than that of linking social capital. These conclusions remain robust after the endogeneity issue has been addressed and robustness tests have been conducted; (2) Ecological cognition plays a mediating role in this relation, while Internet use exerts a significant positive moderating effect; (3) The effect of social capital is greater for full-time farming households than for part-time farming households, and more significant for risk-neutral and risk-seeking farmers than for risk-averse farmers. Accordingly, this study proposes recommendations, including fostering farmers’ social capital, improving their ecological cognition, promoting the penetration and use of the Internet, vigorously cultivating new agricultural business entities, and expanding agricultural insurance coverage.

ABSTRACT In the early twentieth century, scholars studied the Nuer social organisation and described it as a system of interconnected patrilineal lineages, clans, tribal segments, and tribes. They viewed the Nuer society as lacking centralised political institutions and complex social structures. However, this observation was based on the Nuer of the nineteenth century, who had weak ties to their common origin and history, allowing for intermixing with neighbouring peoples, mainly Dinka and Anuak. Over the twentieth century, factors such as globalisation, colonialism, and civil wars caused the Nuer society to undergo significant changes. They transitioned from a genealogically segmented pastoralist society to an ethnic group. However, this ethnic identity is currently facing challenges and fragmentation due to displacement and increased mobility. This paper examines how the Nuer have defined boundaries between themselves and others throughout history, depending on the cultural and structural contexts that shape their identity, through an in-depth analysis of literature, oral history, historical research, and interviews.

The Deep Maniots, an isolated population at the southernmost tip of mainland Greece, have drawn scholarly interest for their unique dialect, culture, and patrilineal clan structure. Geographically shielded by the Mani Peninsula, they are thought to have been minimally affected by 6th-century CE migrations that transformed Balkan demography. To investigate their genetic origins, we analysed Y-DNA and mtDNA from 102 Deep Maniots using next-generation sequencing. Paternally, Deep Maniots exhibit an exceptional prevalence (~80%) of West Asian haplogroup J-M172 (J2a), with subclade J-L930 accounting for ~50% of lineages. We identify Bronze Age Greek ancestry in Y-haplogroups nearly absent elsewhere, highlighting their longstanding genetic isolation. The absence of northeast European-related paternal lineages, common in other mainlandGreeks, suggests preservation of southern Greece's pre-Medieval genetic landscape. Y-haplogroup phylogeny reveals strong founder effects dated to ~380-670 CE, while the emergence of clan-based social structure is estimated around 1350 CE, centuries earlier than previously thought. In contrast, maternal lineages display greater heterogeneity, primarily originating from ancient Balkan, Levantine, and West Eurasian sources. These results align with historical and anthropological accounts, showcasing Deep Maniots as a genetic snapshot of pre-Medieval southern Greece, offering new perspectives on population continuity and mobility in the Late Antique eastern Mediterranean.

Communication and sociality are intimately related, as many important social processes are mediated by communication between signal senders and receivers. Despite recent advances in social network analysis, animal communication networks remain difficult to characterize because the interactions that comprise the network structure depend on receiver sensory, perceptual, and cognitive processes. Collectively, these receiver psychological traits process social information and lead to decisions regarding whether and how to interact with signallers, generating variation in social interactions and the structure of communication networks. Here, we review the evidence that variation in receiver psychology affects both individuals' positions within the communication network and the structure of the communication network as a whole. These effects range from limits on signal active space imposed by receiver sensory acuity and sensitivity, to facilitation of social connections by learning and memory of signal characteristics. Although we identify numerous receiver psychological traits that likely affect connections between receivers and signallers, few studies have explicitly examined the role of receiver psychology on variation in communication network structure. We therefore review recent methodological advances that could facilitate such studies. We then show that the effects of receiver psychology on communication networks could have strong impacts on ecological and evolutionary processes. In particular, we discuss the reciprocal links between receiver psychology and social structure, and how these individual-group feedbacks are expected to generate coevolution between communication and sociality. Our review synthesizes diverse evidence that receiver psychology can affect communication interactions and provides a path forward for integrating sensory, perceptual, and cognitive mechanisms of signal processing with individual behavioural variation and ecological and evolutionary consequences of variation in animal social behaviour.

Comparing Patient-Centered Approaches to Social Care in the Emergency Department: A Mixed-Method Randomized Controlled Trial.

Purpose Focusing on the interplay between individual, organisational and relational dimensions, this study investigates the drivers of crisis-resilience in businesses owned by women. Design/methodology/approach Using a mixed-methods approach, a quantitative survey is combined with qualitative interviews, in order to expose the key factors shaping resilience, including transformational leadership skills, individual passion and perseverance, a familial organisational culture and social support networks. Findings Our analysis of the findings indicates perseverance and passion drive transformational leadership, which itself fosters organisational resilience through robustness, agility and integrity. Research limitations/implications Future research could consider the institutional dimensions of resilience, particularly across different cultural and economic contexts. Practical implications Practitioners, women entrepreneurs, can employ these insights to create targeted strategies that enhance resilience and sustainability in times of crisis. Originality/value This study augments the existing literature on the importance of resilience in leadership, illustrating the critical role of gendered experiences and social support structures play in women-owned businesses. Furthermore, it bridges the gap between theoretical models and real-world contexts by demonstrating how resilience is useful in practice.

Human hunter-gatherer groups were commonly thought to be broadly egalitarian, with increasingly formal hierarchical social structures hypothesized to spread following the introduction of agriculture. However, this view is being challenged by mounting evidence for social hierarchies in several foraging populations. Nonetheless, the processes by which such hierarchies emerge, and whether human hierarchies are homologous with non-human systems of dominance, remains unclear. Here we examine the role of prestige, the tendency to freely confer status and influence on skilled or esteemed individuals and a proposed component of human-unique cultural psychology, in generating unequal patterns of social influence. Through a combination of cultural evolutionary modelling, human experimentation, and evolutionary simulations, we find that human prestige psychology generates highly unequal influence hierarchies, and that the “prestige sensitivity” we measure empirically in human participants closely matches the predictions of our evolutionary simulations, suggesting it is an evolved psychological adaptation. Nonetheless, unlike non-human dominance hierarchies, the processes involved are non-coercive, being driven by individuals freely seeking high quality information. We thus conclude that social hierarchies plausibly have a deep evolutionary history in our lineage, with prestige enabling hierarchies to be mutually beneficial as opposed to coercive.

In the context of human displacement, it is essential to study how local knowledge is reshaped, eroded, or transformed. This study sheds light on how wild plant reports are articulated after migration, retained, and kept; the research explores specifically the ethnobotanical knowledge linked to wild food plants of five ethnic communities, namely the Bettani, Ormur, Mehsud, and Miani populations living in the Gomal area of NW Pakistan, of which three are displaced communities. The study aims to record the knowledge of wild food plants and their use among generations in these communities. To better determine the impact of displacement, we have analysed the data along two trajectories: (a) cross-geographically comparing the recorded wild food plant reports with the available published literature in NW Pakistan and (b) conducting a cross-cultural comparison of the local plant knowledge among the considered groups (displaced ones: Mehsud, Ormur, and Powanda; autochthonous: Bettani and Miani) residing in the Gomal area. Via semi-structured interviews with a hundred study participants (twenty for each ethic group), the study revealed the use of 69 wild food taxa, showing a remarkable diversity of food uses, with Ormur and Powanda exhibiting several idiosyncratic reports. The research highlights that displacement may have disrupted potential pathways of knowledge transmission among the Mehsud, Ormur, and Powanda; however, local plant knowledge about their past environment remains part of the collective memory of these communities. Moreover, post-migration exposure to a new ecological system has become a challenge for the newcomers, necessitating adaptation to rearticulate their relationship with nature and plants. The broken paths have a profound impact on plant knowledge transmission to youngsters, as social structures and gatherings have been significantly altered or disrupted; these were the primary means of interaction between youngsters and their elders. The exposure to urbanisation compounds the issue of displacement, and the erosion of knowledge systems has come at the expense of hands-on experiences among the selected groups. Notably, the local plant nomenclature of Ormur is also highly threatened. We advocate incorporating local plant knowledge into local educational curricula, which may be crucial for the sustainability of natural knowledge and have profound impacts on mitigating the effects of socioecological change.

ABSTRACT Digital monitoring represents a new dimension of external control. We focus on variation in the experiences and perceptions of digital monitoring among employees with differing access to resources due to their embeddedness in differentially resource‐rich organizations and jobs. Based on German linked employer–employee survey data, our results suggest that employees in resource‐rich organizations that are able and willing to pay relatively high wages to secure work performance are less likely to experience the use of automatically stored data on work steps for performance evaluation and to perceive digital monitoring as constant surveillance. The same is true of employees in resource‐rich jobs with high task complexity. These patterns did not emerge for the mere automatic storage of data about work steps, which suggests that—in contrast to more invasive levels of digital monitoring—employees' experiences of this basic level are less likely structured by their embeddedness in organizational inequality regimes.

To explore cross-sector collaboration in complex care transition planning by care coordinators through discussion of a hypothetical practice application and recent research application of social network analysis and relational coordination. With growing evidence showing the impact of health-related social needs on patient outcomes, funding and regulatory agencies demand care models that link health and social organizations. Programs like medical respite for people experiencing homelessness rely on cross-sector collaboration, the structured alliance of multiple agencies to manage a complex problem unable to be met by one entity, to ensure successful transitions after hospitalization. In cross-sector scenarios, nurse administrators oversee frontline care coordinators, facilitating transitional care plans that can be labor-intensive and require an interorganizational strategy to maneuver and optimize. A discussion of social network analysis and relational coordination was applied to a hypothetical hospital care coordinator practice scenario. A recent research application study of a medical respite program and its collaborating cross-sector network (N=15 health/social organizations) through 21 administrative interviews and 41 frontline care coordinator surveys was reviewed. Cross-sector collaboration in the research application study was measured by analysis of the frequency of collaboration between agencies (social network analysis) and the quality of relationships and communication (relational coordination). Elements and practical application of social network analysis and relational coordination were discussed. Research application results showed that administrative participants were more collaborative than the frontline. All rated relationship quality higher than communication quality. Homeless service and acute care agencies were central actors in the cross-sector network. The authors describe an innovative way to measure and optimize cross-sector collaboration in teams coordinating complex care transitions. This model could be used by nurse administrators designing or managing cross-sector collaborative programs with community partners receiving patients at high-risk for readmission after hospital discharge, like people experiencing homelessness with multimorbid clinical needs, and adds to the growing literature on an innovative care concept known as cross-sector care coordination.