Socio-cultural Relationships Research Articles

More-than-land: conserving the social fabrics of the Kat O coastal settlements in Hong Kong

This article examines the unique self-organised spatial and social structure of the Kat O coastal settlements in Hong Kong. By problematising the identity politics between built forms and landscapes, this paper analyses the village’s deep-rooted history within the land‒water dichotomies, which have been shaped by government survey methods and conservation-development policies. Specifically, it presents the peri-urban condition of Kat O’s coastal settlements as a departure from the traditional urban‒rural continuum perspectives. Empirically, the field documentation of the self-built additions presents critical perspectives into the static understanding of land ownership, addition and adaptation strategies and the building materialities embedded within the government survey methods and conservation-development policies. Theoretically, this study provides an understanding of these coastal settlements as cultural landscapes that are dynamically related to the environment, as well as the changing sociocultural relationships among different communities on the basis of their unique conceptions of habitation and living. By examining past and current conservation policies, this article advocates for a water-centric vision for countryside conservation in Hong Kong that transcends the commonly adopted terrecentric perspective.

A spatially explicit assessment of factors shaping attitudes toward African elephant conservation.

Conservation plans that explicitly account for the social landscape where people and wildlife co-occur can yield more effective and equitable conservation practices and outcomes. Yet, social data remain underutilized, often because social data are treated as aspatial or are analyzed with approaches that do not quantify uncertainty or address bias in self-reported data. We conducted a survey (questionnaires) of 177 households in a multiuse landscape in the Kenya-Tanzania borderlands. In a mixed-methods approach, we used Bayesian hierarchical models to quantify and map local attitudes toward African elephant (Loxodonta africana) conservation while accounting for response bias and then combined inference from attitude models with thematic analysis of open-ended responses and cointerpretation of results with local communities to gain deeper understanding of what explains attitudes of people living with wildlife. Model estimates showed that believing elephants have sociocultural value increased the probability of respondents holding positive attitudes toward elephant conservation in general (mean increase=0.31 [95% credible interval, CrI, 0.02-0.67]), but experiencing negative impacts from any wildlife species lowered the probability of respondents holding a positive attitude toward local elephant conservation (mean decrease=-0.20 [95% CrI -0.42 to 0.03]). Qualitative data revealed that safety and well-being concerns related to the perceived threats that elephants pose to human lives and livelihoods, and limited incentives to support conservation on community and private lands lowered positive local attitude probabilities and contributed to negative perceptions of human-elephant coexistence. Our spatially explicit modeling approach revealed fine-scale variation in drivers of conservation attitudes that can inform targeted conservation planning. Our results suggest that approaches focused on sustaining existing sociocultural values and relationships with wildlife, investing in well-being, and implementing species-agnostic approaches to wildlife impact mitigation could improve conservation outcomes in shared landscapes.

Truth Telling and Reconciliation in the Pacific: Solomon Islands' Experience

Truth-telling was necessary as part of Solomon Islands’ reconciliation and peace-building process following the violent conflict between 1998 and 2003. When Solomon Islands gained constitutional independence from Great Britain in 1978, the architects of independence did not anticipate that the country would be embroiled in a violent conflict 20 years later. This conflict left the national economy in ruins, the nation-state on the verge of disintegration with law and order in disarray and an Australian-led Pacific Islands Forum regional intervention force was deployed in 2003. The Solomon Islands government later established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to address the causes of the conflict and establish sustainable peace. From 2010 to 2012, the TRC facilitated a process of truth-telling that was seen as important to secure reconciliation and peace. The truth-telling process focused on the plight of the victims and perpetrators with limited focus on traumas that were generated due to factors such as governance, socio-economic issues, land alienation and displacement. This article will discuss transitional justice by paying attention to the role of the TRC and the effects that it produced. Given this context, the conversations around truth-telling should recognise the intersection between the colonially prescribed state and Indigenous expressions of sovereignty defined through socio-cultural relationships and protocols.

Significance of Socio-Cultural Relationships Between River Ghats and Local Communities in Conserving the River Ghats: The Case of Baghbazar Ghat, Kolkata

Kolkata in India has a promenade riverine system. In it, the river Ghats are promenade structures that create communications between a river and its people. The local vernacular communities living close to them have closely knitted socio-cultural relationships with the river Ghats, which help to build their identity. In fact, they act as the thresholds between the rivers and the cities. The Baghbazar Ghat, with its profound religious and cultural significance has been a hub for the traditional practices of the local communities. However, the changing dynamics of these practices, and the gradual abandonment of the Ghats pose a threat to their conservation and protection. This research examines the issue of the conservation of the river Ghats and their socio-cultural relationships with the local communities. It examines the history and different social practices associated with the river Ghats in the past and today. The study uses a mixed-method approach to reveal the socio-cultural interactions between the local communities and the river Ghats. It also employs observations and interviews with the local communities to unearth the significant role the river Ghat plays in the socio-cultural practices. Maps, drawings and charts have been created to analyze the data. The paper concludes that the river ghats play a significant role in the socio-cultural practices and identifies them as the backbone of the Kolkata city that fosters the traditional practices. They sustain the traditions, culture, social systems, history and heritage of the city. It therefore offers strategies for the conservation of the River Ghats.

How do BPoC design professionals pursue environmental justice considerations when planning and designing recreational spaces?

ABSTRACT Recreational spaces like parks and playgrounds play a vital role in community development. They serve as avenues for important experiences like physical activity, social interaction, and shared cultural expressions. However, BPoC (Black Person, and Person of Color) communities face disparate unjust environmental barriers to utilizing such spaces. Yet not much is known about how BPoC professionals in dedicated professional associations, could address such barriers through the pursuit of environmental justice when planning and designing recreational spaces. This study aims to address this lacuna in research. Findings from in-depth interviews demonstrate that in the design and planning of spaces for recreation, BPoC design professionals drew on their lived experiences from community history and personal encounters to: (1) foster opportunities for participation in design and planning processes (procedural justice), (2) address location-related concerns pertaining to systemic strains in resource allocation (distributive justice), and (3) integrate features that support socio-cultural relationships (interactional justice).

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CULTURE AND COGNITION

<p>Contemporary society is swarming with constantly altering paradigms and emerging trends, which are fluctuating within the array of punctilious socio-cultural relationships.<br />It goes without saying that the global shift of events, which entails such notions as national disruption, cultural discrepancies and numerous misinterpretations of implications, leads to local and global havoc within the scope of multilingual and multicultural interactions. Nevertheless, regardless of the swiftly changing pace of ideas and commonly perceived concepts, there is a notion, which remains unaltered, i.e., an individual's socio-cultural background. The latter entails the whole set of factors, ranging from the psychological state of a person, his or her implicit and explicit knowledge and lexical aptitudes. This particular article accumulated a solid set of international respondents, thus delineating the core idea of what exactly moulds us, as units of society, subsequently adapting our perception of utterances, interpretation of interlocutors and the grasp of transpiring events. The author truly believes that the overall accumulation of international responses might serve as a great launching ground and the premise for further multilingual and inter socio-cultural research.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/lit/0707/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Labor‐capital relations on digital platforms: Organization, algorithmic discipline and the social factory again

AbstractDigital platform labor and its complex relationship with capital have stirred scholarly inquiry, calling for a systemic review that bridges foundational theories and various currents of development. In this review, we revisit Marxist and autonomist Marxist theses on the changing nature of work in the platform economy. Following that, we review two major strands of studies on the organization of production at the macro level and labour control at the micro level, which have revealed variegated types of workplace fissuring and different techniques of algorithmic control over bodies. However, we argue that the path forward must transcend these boundaries. We call for a revival of the ‘social factory’ thesis to rekindle ‘networking’ as a way of understanding labor‐capital relations on digital platforms. Our premise is that capital and labor mutually constitute the platform economy through their agency of networking the internet and ‘outernet’. We outline four key directions for future research based on this premise: networking with public elements, networking with market‐driven elements, networking for financialization in the digital landscape, and networking for resistance. By reinvigorating the social factory approach, we aim to enrich scholarly understandings of labor‐capital relations in the platform economy by articulating digital labor in a wider web of sociocultural, technical, political and economic relationships extending beyond and transcending the internet.

Mechanisms of Formation of Professional Qualities in the Conditions of Transformation of Russian Society

Abstract. Introduction to the problem. Modern Russian society is undergoing a significant development of its condition, which is expressed in structural changes in the political, economic and social structures that determine the transformation of the entire socio-economic system of the state. This implies the need to comprehend, test and introduce new mechanisms for the formation of professional qualities of specialists of the widest range. The purpose of the article. To reveal new mechanisms for the formation of professional qualities of a military specialist in the conditions of transformation of Russian society and to propose ways of testing these mechanisms.The methodology of the study consisted of methods of a system-activity approach to pedagogical research, presented in conceptual unity with pedagogical modeling. The article reveals a complex of issues of modeling the professional qualities of a military specialist in the conditions of transformation of Russian society. This complex complements the conceptual apparatus of the theory of pedagogy with new categories relevant to the conditions of transformation of socio-cultural ties, relationships and principles arising in the formation of professional qualities of specialists of the widest profile. The results of the study. The article identifies new mechanisms for the formation of professional qualities of a military specialist in the conditions of transformation of Russian society and suggests ways to test these mechanisms.The result of the application of the proposed mechanisms was the readiness of the Russian officer corps to self-organize their professional activities, assuming “authorship in the Culture” of a modern military specialist, which was confirmed experimentally on such grounds as confidence in the use of mechanisms for the formation of professional qualities. Conclusion. The conclusion is made that for the successful functioning of a modern serviceman in the conditions of transformation of public relations, continuous modernization of already proven mechanisms for the formation of professional qualities is necessary, as well as the design of new ones adequate to existing and emerging military-professional tasks.

Post-Migration Changes in Dietary Patterns and Physical Activity among Adult Foreign Residents in Niigata Prefecture, Japan: A Mixed-Methods Study.

The migrant population of Japan is gradually increasing, but it is not well known how and why diet and physical activity (PA) change post-migration. Therefore, this study used a mixed-method approach to investigate the changes in dietary patterns and PA through a web- and paper-based survey (n = 128) and understand the contextual factors for those changes through semi-structured interviews (n = 21). Descriptive and thematic analyses of quantitative and qualitative data were conducted, respectively. The majority of survey (57.8%) and interview (66.7%) participants were female, and the mean duration of stay in Japan was 5 and 3.6 years, respectively. The survey revealed an increased consumption of foods attached to Japanese culture, frozen and microwavable food, and a reduced consumption of fruits. We identified environmental (availability, accessibility, and affordability of foods; food safety and diet-related information; and climate), individual (living status; post-migration lifestyle; and food preferences and limitations), or socio-cultural (relationships with Japanese people; cultural differences; and religious influences) factors that impact diet changes. Language proficiency and the duration of stay shape dietary behaviors. Determinants of PA changes were climate, lifestyle, and the influence of Japanese culture. In conclusion, immigrants in Japan experience post-migration diet and PA changes, and this study adds knowledge about how and why such changes occur.

Nationality Discursive of Hamzanwadi: A Socio-Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) Perspective of Teun A. Van Dijk

This study explores the discursive ideological aspects of Hamzanwadi's nationality in the national movement's texts, languages, and institutions. Language texts as names or designations and institutions of national movements have cognitive content, ideologies, norms, and values, all of which give birth to awareness as a nation that must be independent and have a better life. The study is based on Van Dijk's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework through micro-macro, namely the existence of power as control. This context of mastery gives birth to Hamzanwadi's discursive nationality with the ideology of cognition, attitudes, norms, and productive values for Indonesian nationality. The study uses historiographic methods, with techniques for documenting historical texts of national struggles through historical sources and interviews. The study data were analyzed as a discursive discourse with the Van Dijk CDA micro-macro framework. Each text data is explained in finding socio-cultural relationships with the ideological substance that gives birth to nationality through cognitive awareness, attitudes, ideologies, and norms. The study found that Hamzanwadi's discursive nationality began with thinking as a form of cognition awareness of the fate of his people due to colonized conditions. Cognitive awareness gives birth to establishing educational institutions as a forum and instrument to build the same mental understanding of the context happening. The naming of educational institutions and mass organizations reflects the affirmation of national attitudes through the attitude of wanting to be free and live equal to the civilization of other nations. Discursive nationality does not stop at the cognitive awareness, attitudes, and values of the importance of independence but continues with the agenda of filling freedom with continuous development.

Multimodal Listening as Technologically-Mediated Embodied Musicking

This paper discusses an approach to multimodal listening that draws upon three disparate but related areas of research: the creative music practice of the first author, quantitative evaluation of vibrotactile technology within speech and hearing science aimed at improving music perception and enjoyment for cochlear implant users, and a qualitative study involving the musical experiences of people who routinely wear a variety of assistive hearing technologies. It proposes that listening is an active, embodied process, taking place within the diverse sensorimotor, sociocultural, and aesthetic relationships between listeners and their worlds. These ideas are explored through observations of musical listening experiences that are technologically-mediated in various ways: they are ones which incorporate both the sonic and the tactile, but which do not aim to simply substitute one sensory modality for another. This project is intentionally interdisciplinary in its methodologies with the goal of illuminating how research approaches that work in tension can be productively inventive.

A genetic and linguistic analysis of the admixture histories of the islands of Cabo Verde.

From the 15th to the 19th century, the Trans-Atlantic Slave-Trade (TAST) influenced the genetic and cultural diversity of numerous populations. We explore genomic and linguistic data from the nine islands of Cabo Verde, the earliest European colony of the era in Africa, a major Slave-Trade platform between the 16th and 19th centuries, and a previously uninhabited location ideal for investigating early admixture events between Europeans and Africans. Using local-ancestry inference approaches, we find that genetic admixture in Cabo Verde occurred primarily between Iberian and certain Senegambian populations, although forced and voluntary migrations to the archipelago involved numerous other populations. Inter-individual genetic and linguistic variation recapitulates the geographic distribution of individuals' birth-places across Cabo Verdean islands, following an isolation-by-distance model with reduced genetic and linguistic effective dispersals within the archipelago, and suggesting that Kriolu language variants have developed together with genetic divergences at very reduced geographical scales. Furthermore, based on approximate bayesian computation inferences of highly complex admixture histories, we find that admixture occurred early on each island, long before the 18th-century massive TAST deportations triggered by the expansion of the plantation economy in Africa and the Americas, and after this era mostly during the abolition of the TAST and of slavery in European colonial empires. Our results illustrate how shifting socio-cultural relationships between enslaved and non-enslaved communities during and after the TAST, shaped enslaved-African descendants' genomic diversity and structure on both sides of the Atlantic.

A Matter of Taste: Tea, Opium, and Trade Monopolies in Tibet

Abstract This article chronicles the British Indian state’s attempt, and eventual failure, to break the Chinese monopoly on trading tea in Tibet at the very time Britain replaced Qing China as the largest exporter of tea on the global stage. I explore this short history by analysing the trade marts established in Tibet and the eastern Himalayas between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not simply as centres of imperial trade between two powerful empires, but as occupied territories meant to form key nodes on land networks throughout the Tibetan plateau and highlands. Following its failure to push Indian tea into Tibetan markets, the British government in India experimented with the sale of opium in British-controlled marts in Tibet, thus marking important continuities in commodity trade competition with China across market spheres. The competition between Chinese and Indian tea has been richly documented as a narrative of ascendancy and industrial modernisation that rapidly reshaped global imperial hierarchies as well as local socio-cultural relationships (including those of labour accumulation). By contrast, the British failure in Tibet highlights how militarised frontier-making alone advanced market capitalism throughout the trans-Himalayan theatre. This article demonstrates how the exigencies of war propaganda and imperial frontier-making shaped not only the spatial and cultural frames of tea consumption in Tibet, but the territorial entities of the Himalayan “borderlands”, and indeed, “Tibet” itself.

Visualising the invisible: meanings of architectural drawings produced in the early modern Korean context

ABSTRACT This paper examines the architectural significance of the first architectural drawings on Korean housing conditions produced between 1904 and 1932. Based on the political context of the time and place under investigation, most of the drawings produced at the time reflect Japan’s orientalist perspectives on its Asian neighbours. Nevertheless, due to the close socio-cultural relationships that existed between Japan and Korea in the early 1900s, shared contemporary architectural knowledge, such as positivism and human geography, played an important role in the creation of Korean architectural drawings. In this context, by closely communicating with the Japanese active in the Korean peninsula, Kil-Ryong Park developed his unique architectural approaches to analyse and create Korean housing conditions by producing poetic perspectival drawings without real-life qualities and devising architectural borders and thresholds, while meticulously examining the sites’ microscopic physical and environmental conditions. This research employs the hermeneutic research approach to address the gaps within existing scholarship which has so far focused only on the scientific and utilitarian characteristics of Park’s architectural work.

Women and plant entanglements: pulses commercialization and care relations in Punjab, Pakistan

ABSTRACT Commercialization of agriculture in patriarchal rural Pakistan has transformed women’s critical roles in pulses production and has re-organised the gendered division of labour in what used to be widely known as a ‘women’s crop’. Pulses are grown in the marginal and arid lands by small-holder farming families where women care for the crops as an extension of their other caring roles for the households. Based on an ethnographic study of women pulse farmers in Pakistan, this paper examines the complex relations of women with the crop and the challenges they face. It argues that the restoration of a caring relationship between women and the pulses crop through a re-animation of multispecies contact zones may be a way to ensure everyday food provisioning in rural Punjab, maintain traditional socio-cultural and ecological relationships, understand the masculinity that has pushed women to the margins, and value women’s contribution, experience, and knowledge in agriculture.

Consolao pueblo afrodescendiente de venezuela: actualmente macuquita

This article focuses on explaining the construction of contemporary cultural and ancestral identities of the inhabitants of the village of Macuquita, an Afro-Venezuelan descendant community of a free black people, located in the Guzmán Guillermo parish up to the Falconian capital, Falcón state, Venezuela. The objective is to understand the possible existing relationships between the current religious meanings and the social memory of the foundational past of this community, recalled by its inhabitants in the different ceremonies they practice. From an ethnographic perspective, we explore the sociocultural relationships that the Macuquita people trace in their ancestral culture, their songs that identify their customs, among others. Finally, it is concluded that the identity processes of the Macuquita are associated with mechanisms of resistance, negotiation and cultural autonomy, developed in the past and reactivated in the present.

Inclusive culture in the aspect of realizing the rehabilitation potential of subjects accompanying children with autism spectrum disorders

Introduction. Socialization of children with autism spectrum disorders is carried out through their immersion in the sociocultural space. The most important component of sociocultural integration is reliance on the rehabilitation potential of both individuals with autism spectrum disorders and their immediate environment. An analysis of understanding inclusive culture was embedded in the ideological concept of the research initiative. The study aims to determine the conceptual positions of inclusive culture as a specific system of attitudes, knowledge and skills that contribute to solving problems of including children with autism spectrum disorders and their immediate environment in various sociocultural spaces and relationships. Materials and methods. The study involved 307 people representing four subject groups of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast of the Russian Federation: teachers/specialists of preschool educational institutions, teachers/specialists of general education organizations, parents of children with autism spectrum disorders and students receiving defectology education. The main research method was the author's questionnaire survey of respondents followed by expert assessment. Results. The obtained results reflect the variable subjective positions of respondents in relation to various aspects of inclusive culture as the basis for the inclusive potential of persons with autism spectrum disorders and their immediate environment. The differences in understanding the essence and mechanisms of inclusive culture and of its place in personal and social context among different subjects of educational space are updated. This aspect allows objectifying the problem of effective interaction between family and educational organization in disclosure and implementation of the rehabilitation potential of persons with autism spectrum disorders. More than 50% of teachers/specialists of educational organizations, as well as 70% of surveyed students and parents of children with autism spectrum disorders, differentiate the concepts of ‘culture of inclusion’ and ‘inclusive culture’, giving them different content contexts. 57% of surveyed teachers and 65% of parents consider persons with disabilities to be objects of inclusive culture, i.e. they are assigned a more passive role as a consumer of this very culture specially formed for them. Conclusion. The results obtained allow determining the main directions of educational, advisory and psychocorrectional work aimed at increasing psychological and pedagogical competence of specialists and parents who accompany children with autism spectrum disorders. Subjective expectations and ideas of respondents about the indicators and criteria of psychological culture, inclusion and features of interaction between society and people with disabilities act as a guideline for strategic planning of comprehensive support for families raising children with autism spectrum disorders

Righteous, Reveler, Achiever, Bored: A Latent Class Analysis of First-Year Student Involvement.

Using the Wabash National Study on Liberal Arts Education and a latent class analysis of 28 outside-the-classroom activities and behaviors, we developed a typology of outside-the-classroom student engagement during the first year of college. We find ten classes of student involvement: academic artist, party athlete, serious athlete, conventional non-worker, disengaged, maximizer, moderate worker, detached partier, involved partier, and religious. Next, we examine the relationship between latent classes and students' characteristics through a multinomial logistic regression analysis. Students reporting as first-generation or racially minoritized are overrepresented in the disengaged and involved partier classes. We found an overrepresentation of White students across all party classes. Students reporting as female were likelier to be members of the religious, moderate worker, and disengaged classes and not to be members of the party classes. Federal grant recipients were likelier to be in the academic artist and moderate worker classes. We discuss other sociocultural, economic, and academic relationships in the paper. Next, we explore the relationship of latent class to academic and developmental outcomes. We find academic artists as the only class with a significant positive relationship across the seven dependent measures. Involved partier, moderate worker, and religious classeshave positive relationships with at least five dependent measures. The detached partier and party athlete classes have the lowest first-year GPAs of all latent classes. Finally, we discuss the relationships of latent classes, related institutional policy implications, and directions for future research.

Sociocultural Contexts and Relationships as the Cornerstones of Students' Motivation: Commentary on the Special Issue on the "Other Half of the Story".

This special issue on the development of academic motivation covers many issues that are groundbreaking in the field of motivation and interpersonal relationships. In this commentary, I discuss the following elements: (a) the challenges of integrating central motivational constructs; (b) interpersonal relationships as supports for motivation at school; (c) school or cultural contexts that sustain motivation; (d) new avenues for research. I hope that the articles in this special issue will stimulate new research that would have the potential to advance the field but that would also be useful to research professionals working day to day with children and adolescents.

Re-Imagining Wild Rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand

If wilderness is dead, do wild rivers exist and if so, in what form and in whose construction? This reflective article reviews perspectives on rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand as wild or tamed entities. A historical overview of the socio-cultural and institutional relationships with rivers examines the meanings of rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand through multiple lenses. This includes indigenous Māori knowledge, command-and-control mentalities of a settler society that assert human authority over rivers, the emergence of the environmental movement and associated legislation with a sustainability focus (the Resource Management Act), and recent movement towards co-governance arrangements that incorporate the original intent of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (1840). It is contended that management practices have disconnected society from rivers, and vice versa, creating a sense of environmental loss (solastalgia), especially for Māori. Using rivers in the Greater Wellington Region as examples, prospects to accommodate wild river behaviour in Aotearoa New Zealand are explored. Recognising that re-wilding is no longer a feasible option in most instances, further attempts to tame rivers are also considered to be unrealistic, especially in light of climate change and accentuated flood risk. Reconnecting with indigenous knowledge offers prospects to re-imagine wild rivers in Aotearoa, living generatively with rivers as dynamic and emergent entities.