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This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.

Young people in rural areas often face barriers when accessing participation opportunities in their municipalities. This affects their voices being heard and their ability to create change. Even though almost half the world’s population lives in rural areas, rural young people’s activism is often overlooked in the literature. In addition, when young people’s activism is explored in empirical research, conceptualisations of activism and methods are often not tailored to rural areas. This chapter, thus, adds to our understanding of young people’s activism in rural municipalities by drawing on a mixed methods case study including thirteen focus groups (FGs; n = 35) and a questionnaire (n = 106) with young people aged 13–17, and semi-structured interviews (n = 11) with teachers from one secondary school in a rural municipality in Germany. Five of the FGs were conducted and analysed by Year 10 students, adding unique insights into participants’ experience of activism. In this chapter, activism is conceptualised as one of the multiple dimensions of citizenship. Activism includes demanding systemic change, individually or collectively, which may include refusing to do things, aiming to prevent laws, raising awareness, and making consumer choices. Rather than being full-time activists, the young people in this study were engaged in only a few forms of activism, often carried out ad-hoc, part-time and in connection with other citizenship activities such as volunteering. Spaces for activism included online, the local municipality, everyday spaces such as the supermarket, and school. Participants experienced multiple barriers when engaging in activism including narratives of non-activist young people, age restrictions, power imbalances and few opportunities for creating change, particularly at participants’ school and in their municipalities.

Social media (SM) platforms tempt individuals to communicate their perspectives in real-time, rousing engaging discussions on countless topics. People, besides using these platforms to put up their problems and solutions, also share activist content (AC). This study aims to understand why people participate in activist AC sharing on SM by investigating factors related to planned and unplanned human behaviour.

The study adopted a quantitative approach and administered a close-ended structured questionnaire to gather data from 431 respondents who shared AC on Facebook. The data was analysed using hierarchical regression in SPSS.

The study found a significant influence of both planned (perceived social gains (PSGs) , altruism and perceived knowledge (PK)) and unplanned (extraversion and impulsiveness) human behaviour on activist content-sharing behaviour on SM. The moderating effect of enculturation and general public opinion (GPO) was also examined.

Sharing AC on SM is not like sharing other forms of content such as holiday recommendations – the former can provoke consequences (sometimes undesirable) in some regions. Such content can easily leverage the firehose of deception, maximising the vulnerability of those involved. This work, by relating human behaviour to AC sharing on SM, offers significant insights to enable individuals to manage their shared content and waning probable consequences.

This work combined two opposite constructs of human behaviour: planned and unplanned to explain individual behaviour in a specific context of AC sharing on SM.

School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is possible. This inquiry contributes to understanding school climate strikes as important forms of climate justice activism by exploring how they work as public pedagogy.

The inquiry process involved poetic inquiry to produce an affective poetic witness statement to an event of school climate strikes, and then a performative enactment of diffractive reading using the poem created. The diffractive reading is used to conceptualise school climate strikes as public pedagogy and move towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy. Diffused throughout is the question of where the more-than-human fits in public pedagogy and youth climate justice activism.

School climate strikes are dynamic and differently acting (diffracting) public pedagogies that work by open spaces of appearance that enable capacities for collective action in heterogeneous political spaces. Consideration of entanglements and intra-actions between learner, place, knowledge and climate change are productive in understanding how phenomena work as public pedagogy.

This inquiry extends on important considerations in both climate change education and public pedagogy scholarship. It diffuses consideration of the more-than-human throughout the inquiry and enacts a move beyond the humanist limits of existing public pedagogy scholarship by introducing climate intra-action, heterogeneous political spaces and non-conforming learning to an understanding of activist public pedagogies and the educative agent.

This paper aims to explore the opinions of business owners in an industrial area of Abu Dhabi that could be potentially turned into an art tourism destination.

By mobilizing the concept of “gentrification aesthetics,” the authors use a recall technique to explore support toward art from business owners, regression analyses to understand how the type and content of art predicts gentrification support and chi-square to research the differences between respondents who support the area to become a creative place and those who do not.

A model that explains the connection between gentrification aesthetics and art tourism is presented.

The authors’ proposed model results from testing the possibilities for expanding art tourism specifically and may not apply to other types of tourism. Future research is needed to understand whether and how the model can be applied to other forms of tourist consumption.

The current research presents a case study on how tourism can be strategically expanded into more rural places in a city.

The authors found significant differences between respondents who would like to see Mussafah becoming a creative place in five years and those who believe Mussafah needs to be(come) something else.

While work on tourism gentrification has been conducted, the nexus between gentrification aesthetics and art tourism cannot be found. Their relation can help to expend (art) tourism from busy cultural attractions to industrial areas. The present research fills this gap.