Social Space Research Articles

Psychographic segmentation of alcohol quitters in behaviour change maintenance mode: utilsisation of the activity interest opinion (AIO) framework

Purpose This study aims to cluster psychographic activities, interests and opinions of alcohol quitters in behaviour change maintenance mode to form segmentation bases for social policy and alcohol policy formulation that sustain the behaviour change. Design/methodology/approach A two-step cluster analysis was used to segment a cross-sectional sample of n = 501 former alcohol consumers based on their activity interest and opinion (AIO) framework through a multiple-response survey design. Findings Five clusters were found across five AIO themes of “people socialised with”, “relationship interest”, “ingredients of a good relationship”, “party activities” and “outing dressing”. The clusters were honesty-based relationship seekers, spiritual- and intellectual-based relationship seekers, attention seekers in a healthy relationship, self-conscious seeking a healthy relationship, and sincere, spiritual and intellectual-based relationship seekers. Practical implications The findings present an opportunity for social policy design that encourages alcohol-free social space creation, strong family ties, community and spiritual growth and incentives for long-term relationships as means of sustaining alcohol quitters’ behaviour. Equally, alcohol policies that match the themes of the clusters can be designed to aid sobriety sustenance. Originality/value This study advances knowledge of behaviour change maintenance and provides lifestyle segments of alcohol quitters as bases for further social and alcohol policy design to sustain gains in behaviour change.

The Zimbabwe political space

Zimbabwe's post-independence election processes have been predominantly male-dominated, with women relegated to the periphery as electorates or party ‘cheerleaders’. Since the Beijing conference in 1995, Zimbabwe enacted several laws to overcome bottlenecks that have impeded women's participation in political processes, with the 2013 Constitution serving as the ultimate template for promoting women's engagement in mainstream electoral systems. Nonetheless, women’s participation as candidates or leaders in electoral processes has declined significantly since the 2013 Constitution. The study brings to the fore, findings to respond to 3 fundamental research questions which are: 1) what is the interlinkage between economic, cultural, social, and physical spaces with the electoral processes, 2) what are the complex social inclusion factors in political spaces, and 3) what recommendations can be proffered to enhance inclusion of women in electoral processes. In answering the questions, the research draws on content analysis of reports from the Project on Preventing Violence Against Women in Politics Project (VAWP/E), face-to-face interviews, and focus group discussions to offer insights and investigate the opportunities provided by various legal frameworks to increase women's engagement in electoral and political processes in Zimbabwe. The article further systematically explores other important factors and elements that impede and contribute to women's full participation in electoral processes as candidates. This study contends that the availability of excellent legal provisions does not result in increased women's participation in electoral politics as candidates unless there is political will. The study further asserts that participation in social, cultural, economic, and physical spaces interacts in a complex manner and influences women's participation in Zimbabwe's electoral political processes as candidates. Because of the country's political polarisation and the impunity of perpetrators of political violence, the political arena is believed to be intimidating and discouraging, thus not ripe, for women to participate as candidates. The study recommends a wholesome approach to dismantling the complex interlinkages between cultural, social, economic, and physical spaces as obstacles affecting the inclusion of women in electoral processes as candidates. Thus, the study further recommends that existing legal instruments should be complemented by progressively dismantling the social, cultural, and physical forces prohibiting women's participation as leaders in electoral processes. Specific provisions in the Electoral Act may further be used to penalise failure by political parties to field a reasonable number of women as candidates in elections.

The social significance of slang

It is well‐established within linguistics that slang serves a group‐identifying function. In this paper, a new understanding of the notion of lexical metadata is developed to provide a philosophical treatment of said function. The proposed account explains the group‐identifying function of slang in terms of certain inferences about a speaker's group affiliations that people competent with a slang word will be disposed to make given the lexical metadata related to the word in question. The resulting view is theoretically simple and may extend to a whole range of linguistic phenomena that speakers utilize to position themselves in social space.

Celebritizing Dr. Fauci: Risk, Public Affection, and the “Total Package” of Scientific Expertise

ABSTRACT In the earliest days of COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci earned a reputation that transcended the typical boundaries of public trust. Among progressive science advocates—particularly in social media spaces—Fauci developed an admiring fandom who saw him as a symbol and distillation of official scientific knowledge. In this essay, I combine insights from scholarship on ethos, public feeling, and risk to unpack the implications of Fauci’s “celebritization” on rhetorical understandings of expert-public relationships and the construction of risk and expertise. Specifically, I examine tweets from one viral X (formerly Twitter) account, the Anthony Fauci Fan Club (@FauciFan), to show how fans augment Fauci’s expertise through affection and moral praise, while carefully reiterating his (and science’s) reluctant, apolitical orientation and empirical commitments. These emotional engagements, I argue, constitute a potent form of tactical risk communication whereby publics claim a voice in larger discourses, and which acknowledges the entangled relationship between facts and feelings.

How a buddy scheme created social and intercultural space for international and home students

Buddy schemes are a form of learning intervention that create a space for students to support each other by ‘sharing knowledge, ideas and experience between [...] participants’ (Boud, 2001, p.3). The author set up and conducted research to evaluate a buddy scheme to support international Nursing students on a one-year programme by matching them with a home-student buddy studying at the same level. This small-scale, qualitative study sought to investigate international and home students’ experiences of participating in the buddy scheme. An online survey asked students to evaluate their access to social and academic support before and during the scheme through textual and numerical questions. A self-selecting subgroup of participants subsequently took part in semi-structured interviews to reveal their experiences and insights. These were recorded and transcribed before the data were analysed using inductive textual analysis to identify key themes. In line with wider literature, this study found peer support has a positive influence on international students’ socio-cultural transition (McPherson, Punch and Graham, 2017; Shu et al., 2020; WONKHE, 2022), yet it is also ‘mutually beneficial’ (Boud, 2001, p.3), having a positive impact on both groups of students. Home students valued the opportunity to build relationships with peers they would not have otherwise met (Bethel, Ward and Fetvadjiev, 2020). This opportunity for intercultural exchange enriched their experience too. As such, this study adds weight to existing evidence that buddy schemes are a useful means by which UK universities can support international and home students.

The Politics of Memory: NLP Models as Liberating Artifacts

The main argument of this article is that natural language processing (NLP) projects of Indigenous African languages can be understood as an effort to restore and preserve Africa’s memory in the digital. Language has always occupied a particular place in the African decolonial imaginary. Several African states embarked on processes of Africanisation of postcolonial institutions in their respective national contexts. One of the main features of this project in many African countries was the restoration of African languages in education and public service. Taking a social constructivist approach rooted in science and technology studies and looking through the analytical lens of decoloniality in Africa, I conceptualise NLP models of Indigenous African languages as liberating artifacts. I mobilise decolonial theory to look at language as a technology that can be used to dis-member and re-member the African subjects of their memory of being as people. The coloniser erased the memory of the African subjugated by cutting off their linguistic connections and instead planted the European memory. From this perspective, decolonisation can be understood as a process of re-memberment that can be achieved through the return of the languages of those whose humanity has been denied or questioned. In this sense, NLP projects offer instances of the digital that represent spaces of restoration and negotiated digital futurities. I contend that these digital spaces in Africa are social spaces of contestation about what common investments should be made, what collective futures are desirable and what are the perceived material consequences of such shared imaginations.

A Study of the Liberation of Physical Space in Edgar Allan Poe’s Novels

In Edgar Allan Poe’s novels, deaths often occur at night, in narrow stairwells, and in dark, confined basements, hidden within the thickness of walls or beneath the ruins of collapsed buildings. By integrating Henry Lefebvre’s theories of social space and physical space with the plot of Poe’s stories, this paper conducts a textual analysis to interpret the author’s intentions in choosing specific social spaces. In Poe’s novels, the murderer’s use of space to commit murder and conceal the truth of death is a manifestation of the individual’s struggle for power within the society they inhabit and the deprivation of others’ power, reflecting the alienation of human nature. To counter such alienation, Poe regards the individual body as the subject of social space production in his novels. By focusing on the depiction of “resurrection from the dead” and other magical and romantic elements, and by emphasizing the liberation of bodily sensations—particularly the medium of sound—to reveal the truth of death, it is argued that Poe’s novels demonstrate the purpose of bodily resistance to the alienation of human nature through the liberation of physical space.

A “Promise to Preserve Proper Decorum”: Organized Dancers, Filipino Patrons, and the Politics of Night Work in 1920s Seattle

Abstract In 1920s Seattle, dance halls charging ten cents per dance became the focus of debate. Tracing the dance workers’ self-representations and labor organizing in a city increasingly hostile to interracial social spaces, this paper evaluates how gender, race, labor organizing, and politics intersected in unprecedented ways in Seattle’s nightlife. In a decade of tepid labor organizing and in a sexual labor sector where unions were extremely rare, female dancers in Seattle unionized. Moreover, they did so in what became under Mayor Betha Knight Landes (1926–1928) the first major American city to have a female mayor. The Women Dancing Entertainers’ Union’s (WDEU) tactics of emphasizing the respectability of their profession enjoyed initial successes, yet faltered when dance hall critics increasingly constructed the presence of interracial couples as a sign of immorality. The closure in 1929 of numerous ten-cent halls south of Yesler Way reflects how Anti-Asian prejudice entered into regulation of the city’s nightlife, adversely impacting dance hall workers, women in politics, and minoritized men. The WDEU’s insistence that they were upstanding workers and economic providers nonetheless provides a powerful corrective to contemporaries’ and, until recently, historians’ tendency to overlook sexual sector night labor.

“They don’t mean to hurt”: Female gamers’ reluctance in recognizing and confronting sexism in gaming as an online-offline juxtaposition

Female gamers have long suffered from gender-based online abuse in the gaming community. Apart from commonly observed quitting and gender-masking behaviors from female gamers, this study explores what female gamers understand as sexism, how female gamers react to it, and why they choose certain reactions instead of others. Findings show that female gamers are keenly conscious of normalized sexism in gaming culture, and thus often prioritize preventing personal interaction with strangers online, resulting in their shared preference for gaming with trusted acquaintances, which makes gaming an online-offline juxtaposition. Shouldering gender norms in doubled dimensions of gaming and specific real-life relationships, female gamers thus become reluctant to recognize and confront less violent sexism from male acquaintances. Female gamers’ strategic self-protection, although gaining them relatively safer gaming spaces, also consolidates sexism in gaming, and further suggests gaming as a critical social space for reproducing broader gender inequalities.

Overcoming barriers in implementing healthy school nutrition policies: insights from Ukraine

Abstract The general mortality rate from NCDs in Ukraine exceeds that in European Union countries, (Yurochko et al., 2023) exacerbated by the ongoing war. Healthy nutrition plays a pivotal role in enhancing the overall quality of life and curbing the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Despite its significance, ensuring healthy eating habits, particularly during the early stages of life at the period of setting lifelong habits (Jackson et al., 2020; Riley et al., 2018), remains a challenge. Besides, school-based settings represent an ideal environment for effective intervention because they offer a shared common physical, academic, and social space (Tapia-Fonllem et al., 2020). Through a series of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, this study identifies barriers and facilitators to policy implementation, with a focus on educational institutions. Qualitative analysis reveals barriers such as inadequate human resources, funding constraints, resistance from the food industry, and ineffective communication strategies at the family level. Moreover, there exists a disjointed understanding of nutrition standards. However, collaborative efforts with civil society, empowerment of nursing roles, strategic utilization of grants and fundraising, engagement with the food industry, and the adoption of a family-oriented approach emerge as crucial enablers for successful policy implementation. These findings offer theoretical foundations for fostering healthier nutrition environments within schools. This research serves as a roadmap for policymakers and educators striving to create sustainable and effective strategies for promoting healthy eating among early school-age children in Ukraine and beyond. Study finds human resource shortages, funding constraints, and food industry resistance as major barriers to school nutrition policy. Recommendations include collaborative approaches, nurse involvement, and aligned standards for effective school nutrition policy. Key messages • Healthy nutrition plays a pivotal role in enhancing the overall quality of life and curbing the prevalence of non-communicable diseases. • Through a series of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, this study identifies barriers and facilitators to policy implementation, with a focus on educational institutions.

НАСТОЛНА КНИГА ПО СЪВРЕМЕННИ ПРОАКТИВНИ ПУБЛИЧНИ ПОЛИТИКИ ЗА НАМАЛЯВАНЕ НА БЕДНОСТТА В БЪЛГАРИЯ

Recently, the Publishing Complex - UNWE made available the interesting study of Dr. Ralitsa Veleva "Proactive Public Policies for Poverty Reduction". This monograph deserves attention mainly due to the still existing deficit in Bulgaria of complex analyses on the development and implementation of proactive public policies for poverty reduction. The work of the young author breaks the tradition in the Bulgarian social space to discuss extensively and in priority "welfare", and its antipode "poverty" - only as incidental touches and by the way. And it is brazenly "present on the table" of a significant part of the population, which lives this ingrained scarcity as its own social drama. What is clearly needed is, first, a professional identification of the level and trends of poverty in the country, and second, the development and implementation of credible radical instruments for its definite mitigation and containment.

Компетенция построения социального пространства отношений дошкольников в системе обеспечения качества профессиональной подготовки будущих педагогов в вузе

The study aims to determine the content and structure of the competence of constructing a social space of preschoolers’ relationships and, based on this, to identify the features of its formation in the quality assurance system of professional training for future educators in higher education institutions. The article analyzes the problem of the quality of professional training for future educators of preschool educational organizations. The scientific novelty of the study lies in describing and characterizing the competence of constructing a social space of preschoolers’ relationships of future educators, determining its structure and content, identifying the components of the competence, and presenting the features of its formation in the educational process of the university, taking into account the requirements of state educational standards. The formation of this competence is carried out through innovative forms, means, methods, and technologies. As a result of the study, it was found that the competence of constructing a social space of preschoolers’ relationships includes professional and personal qualities of future educators that determine their readiness for future professional activities. The structure of the said readiness is comprised of motivational, cognitive, active, and communicative components. The content of these components is substantiated. Features of competence formation in the quality assurance system of professional training for future educators in higher education institutions have been identified.

Saving the Wild or Saving the Cowboy? Cultural Conflict between the Old and Nouveau West*

AbstractIn North Central Montana, a land‐based conflict centered on the environmental organization American Prairie sparked the formation of the “Save the Cowboy, Stop the American Prairie Reserve” Facebook page, attracting posts and comments from ranchers and members of the area's agriculture‐dependent communities. Despite Montana's rapid amenity migration and rural gentrification, this region has largely maintained its Old West culture. Consequently, Save the Cowboy members often express frustration about how American Prairie's large‐scale rewilding initiative and land acquisitions affect the region's rural communities. In this qualitative content analysis, concerns about preserving the Old West culture and avoiding the New West transformation dominated Save the Cowboy's Facebook posts and comments (N = 1,002), even compared to the ostensibly more concerning economic and ecological issues. By describing a social space marked by cultural antagonisms between Old West insiders and New West outsiders, this study points to the dangers of essentializing Old West‐New West conflicts. Illustrating how Old West insiders deploy their cultural capital to contest rural change, it also expands the Old West‐New West typology by proposing the term “Nouveau West” to capture how Old West insiders assert dominance by disparaging newcomers who lack the requisite knowledge of how things are done locally.

Without Risk Reduction: How Black Men’s Well-being and Humanity Are Compromised in Mobile Public Spaces

Much of the urban research on the daily experiences of Black men in American society has focused on Black men as perpetrators, as victims of street and gang violence, or with some carceral connection. These earlier studies highlight how racist tropes of Black men as dangerous and thus to be feared situate Black men for continuous, targeted, and aggressive actions by the state and other social actors. This places a social tax on Black men who are then bound to exercises of embodied negotiations in public social spaces where they navigate both being shunned and “disappeared” while also hyper-visible. Drawing on ethnographic data collected across several years, this article examines how Black men are targeted for aggression in mobile public spaces in Chicago, Illinois. We use public transportation as a space of interrogation because of the uniqueness of mobile places where riders and transit personnel are temporarily confined while mobile and with limited options to escape the dangers of racism and racial aggression. In these spaces, we find that (1) Black men are threatened with harm, (2) their bodies are treated as sites of fear, and (3) their well-being is risked through an institutional breach of duty to provide safety for them as passengers and transit personnel.

Social and spatial determinants of energy ageism: Calibrating social policy towards older people under the conditions of energy transition in Polish society

The article aims to identify the problems and challenges faced by senior citizens in the context of energy transition and also to develop a framework of social policy that would respond to senior citizens' concerns and is necessary for the effective implementation of the goals of the European Union's (EU) climate and energy policy. The authors focus on the analysis of the challenges of energy transition faced by older people who live in Poland in various types of buildings and use different sources of home heating. The article shows how various types of buildings constructed using different technologies and in different historical periods and located in various social and geographical spaces divide people in terms of class and also create challenges for older people related to home heating. The type of building and its place in the urban space may be a determinant of the energy poverty of its inhabitants, and the area where specific types of buildings are clustered together may affect the air quality in this part of a city. The authors suggest taking specific local and national actions as part of social policy towards older people during energy transition. The material was collected in the winter of 2024 using focus group interviews for eight groups of senior citizens differing in place of residence, type of building inhabited and source of home heating.

Standing between the elite and street fields: Young people from affluent communities dealing with drugs

Sociology has a rich tradition studying ‘elite’ and ‘street’ social spaces, but rarely considers spaces between these fields and the social actors within them. This article fills that gap by examining the life stories of affluent Oslo youth engaged in illegal drug dealing. Participants had access to economic, social, and cultural capital in both elite and street social space. Making money in legitimate and illegitimate ways kept participants relatively marginal in both spaces. Having social networks among street-oriented peers and among elites facilitated drug dealing but also allowed them an exit from drug crimes when needed. They were educated and often employed, but also had high levels of drug and street cultural competence. This left them relatively estranged from their affluent background milieu leading to persistence in drug dealing. I argue that illegal drug markets among the affluent can be viewed as an in-between social space, that ‘elite’ or ‘street’ youth are likely best conceptualized as existing on a sociocultural spectrum between fields and provide a Bourdieusian framework to study social actors who stand between fields and the impact this may have on their lives.

A Model for Collaborative Immersive Classroom Management Development Using Multi-user Virtual Reality

Classroom management has been ­­identified as a key challenge in becoming a teacher, as newly qualified teachers are overwhelmed by the complexity of professional teaching practice. This paper explores the transformative potential of immersive technologies in fostering a collaborative reflection and problem-solving space for the continued development of newly qualified teachers’ classroom management competencies – allowing newly qualified teachers to become better prepared for facing the unexpected, local, and situated challenges of becoming a teaching professional. Through iterative cycles of design-based research, we have developed a model of immersive collaborative classroom management training using multi-user Virtual Reality. The model consists of four phases: (1) 360-degree video recording, creating an immersive version of the classroom and the complex interactions that occur within it. (2) clip selection, giving teachers the ability to select clips that are relevant for them and their practice. (3) Multi-user Virtual Reality training, allowing teachers to get feedback on their selected clips and construct actionable knowledge together with local teaching supervisors (4) Debriefing, for ensuring the joint understanding and transfer of knowledge to practice. Through analysing teacher’s and supervisors’ meaning making processes of 18 selected video clips across five multi-user Virtual Reality training sessions, we uncover three main phases: Analysis, Abstraction, and Actionability. By being able to collaboratively watch, re-watch, and discuss selected video clips and moving between these three main phases, teachers and supervisors co-create actionable knowledge, creating an improved understanding of current practices, and supporting the ability to transform future practices. These findings contribute both theoretical insights and practical implications for educators and learning designers, emphasising the importance of creating social immersive reflective spaces in which real situations may be revisited in order to examine the intricacies of classroom practices, allowing newly qualified teachers to better engage with their profession.

The loss of rural vital places: A case study using the social determinants of health framework

Healthy food sources, recreational facilities, and social spaces serve as vital places for supporting health. Less is known about what happens when vital places are lost, especially in rural contexts that have experienced disinvestment and population decline. In this paper we use a case study of a small rural community in Pennsylvania that lost a substantial share of its vital places over a short period of time to explore the experiences of local residents. Using qualitative interviews with 26 local residents we show that the loss of vital places, which are part of the neighborhood and built environment, intersected with other social determinants of health with potential consequences for health and well-being. This was often because vital places were essential (i.e., few or no alternatives existed) and multifunctional (i.e., supporting health through multiple behavioral and social mechanisms). Examining experiences of local residents following the loss of vital places through a social determinants of health lens helps to identify consequences and inform adaptation strategies. We also use the findings to refine the vital places framework for rural contexts.

From ‘dankgevingsdag' to 'turkey party’: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives on loan strategies in Flemish-American heritage newspapers

Within the domain of historical sociolinguistics, attention for heritage languages has been on the rise in the last decade (see e.g., Brown 2019; Litty 2019). The goal of this paper is to contribute to that growing body of research studying the role of sociolinguistic factors in heritage language use in the past, by looking at the lexical output of Belgian emigrants in the United States using heritage newspapers. We will investigate the borrowing patterns in three Flemish-American newspapers that were published in the 19th and 20th centuries and circulated widely within the Flemish-American communities. We focus on (1) borrowing rate (how many English-origin lexemes are transferred?), and (2) borrowing type (which loan processes are involved?). The findings are interpreted in terms of the social variables time and space to chart diachronic as well as regional differences, besides looking at differences between the newspapers more generally.

Las Polémicas de la Relación Espacio Social y su Influencia en la Forma Urbana en Ciudades Contemporáneas

This essay explores the polemics of the concept “social spatial.” Four main axes of thought can be distinguished: social space as the material environment of social groups; social space as a relational establishment of positions; social space as a dialectical approach to the society-space relationship; and, finally, the threads of constructivism that question the opposition of society and space from a post-structural perspective. This essay attempts to situate these four perspectives within the literature that pays attention to social theory, social geography, urban studies and their implications for the spatial professions of urban planning, urban design, architecture and civil engineering. These four perspectives of social space are complementary from a theoretical point of view. Its application in social research often occurs simultaneously within and among different disciplines, depending largely on the object of analysis, and how geography is defined. I argue that these four theoretical perspectives define geography differently as either functional space, central places, territoriality, or lived places. Moreover, these perspectives and their respective definitions of geography influence practice and professional policy that affect urban form. This essay pays attention to the link between knowledge and practice that have created contemporary socio-spatial environments.