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The purpose of this paper is to examine health issues among Liberian refugees living in Staten Island and access potential barriers to accessing healthcare.

Qualitative methods including interviews (n=68) with West African immigrants, predominantly Liberian refugees, and long-term ethnography were employed to elicit West Africans’ views on health, acculturation, and access to service providers. Framework analysis was employed to analyze the data thematically.

Chronic health diseases, depression, isolation, and inadequate access to healthcare were the main concerns of the population studied. The findings are in contrast to the public health experts’ concentration on infectious diseases.

The barriers to access proper healthcare have implications for healthcare providers and government institutions and information about these barriers can help them to refocus their health efforts to better address the needs of West African refugees.

Africans are among the newest immigrants in the USA and are considerably understudied compared to other groups such as Latin Americans and Asians. Additionally, there is an abundance research about refugees’ health status when they first arrive in the USA, but there is little data on their health after their resettlement.

The purpose of this study is to apply spatial theory to a review of the literature on activity-based working in higher education. Globally, the office concept of activity-based working (ABW) is increasingly implemented in higher education, and scholars contributed to developing empirical explanations of the effects of implementing ABW in higher education. However, the focus on theory building is limited, decreasing the predictability and the understanding of implementing ABW.

The authors developed a theoretical framework by categorizing the empirical findings of earlier accounts by integrating them with Lefebvre’s spatial theory. They conducted a systematic literature review of 21 studies published between 2008 and 2022 that reported on the phenomenon of ABW among higher-education employees.

It remains to be seen whether the implementation of the ABW in higher education is successful in terms of pre-defined goals. The studies investigating academic workplace concepts have led to inconsistent findings that lack an underlying framework. As the ABW concept fails to adequately support academics’ work processes, it is recommended that managers and architects consider their subjective perspectives about the use of space and take the time to understand the users’ fundamental values.

The authors integrated the selected studies with Lefebvre’s spatial theory, and this model includes three perspectives that can explain workers' experiences with ABW. This theoretical framework can assist researchers in gaining a deeper understanding of ABW and support practitioners in implementing it in higher education.

Social policy tries to foster (re)integration into the labour market and social inclusion via specific programmes. The purpose of this article is to expand knowledge about the common experiences of people in such schemes.

A total of four group discussions were conducted in four different Austrian cities. The added collective dimension is at least as important to the understanding of the felt experience of labour activation recipients as their individualised views.

Collectively, activation is not something that is experienced as promoting lasting inclusion; rather, participants express a common line of argument towards a situation of “permanent entry”. Activation programmes allow for a certain form of support but do that in a specific and restricted way.

The authors could only obtain an explorative analysis by contrasting four discussions which rely only on the opinion of participants and not of caseworkers.

One has to define how to implement activation policies in reality so that they do not foster “permanent entry” which becomes a societal norm for specific groups.

Social policy needs to be discussed including the perspective of participants in reforms.

The paper contributes to the debate on inclusion and exclusion. Instead of the dominant logic of achieving social inclusion via activation, it treats the issue of “permanent entry” to programmes.