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The ways communities have regarded disasters and natural hazards in the cultural sphere can provide a lens to inform the understanding of their ability to withstand shocks and the factors that led to such conditions. Only by tracing the complexities of creating, transmitting and preserving a culture of preparedness among disaster-vulnerable communities can researchers and practitioners claim to be working toward policy that is informed by the communities’ own experience and design policy or programming on their behalf.

In efforts to prevent, respond to and recover from disasters, what alternatives are available to top-down strategies for imposing expert knowledge on lay publics? How is the context of communities’ socioecological context understood in the development of programs and policy on their behalf? What can be learned from community narratives and cultural practices to inform disaster risk reduction?

I collected examples of how different communities perceive, prevent and respond to disaster through art, music and literature and analyzed how these were embedded into local narratives and how historical context influenced such approaches. My findings show that communities use cultural practices to contextualize experiences of hazards into their collective narrative; that is, storytelling and commemoration make disasters comprehensible. By incorporating such findings into existing policies and programs, institutions may be able to more effectively apply them to affected communities or build new ones around their actual needs and experiences.

By framing disasters as an anthropological inquiry, practitioners can better recognize the influence of a place’s nuance in the disaster management canon–guided by these details, not despite them.

This study assessed the heterogeneous impact of the Anchor Borrower Program (ABP) on the welfare distribution of rice farming households in Nigeria.

Self-selection bias and treatment endogeneity were accounted for by employing the Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression (IVQR) model. The estimates obtained from the IVQR model were further compared with those from the conventional quantile regression, and quantile regression using Propensity Score Matching. This was to highlight the extent to which endogeneity bias has been purged from the treatment, in order to establish a consistent causal link between participation in the ABP and the welfare of a cross-section of rice farming households.

ABP farmers had significantly higher rice yields across all quantiles of the yield distribution under treatment exogeneity assumption, and in only two quantiles upon controlling for observable confounders. However, this yield gain did not translate to higher Per capita Consumption Expenditure (PCE). The estimates of the more robust IVQR model provided further evidence that the rice yield and PCE of ABP farmers are not statistically different from that of non-ABP farmers across all quantiles of the welfare distribution.

The negligible impact of ABP was relatively higher for lower-yielding households. Thus, implying that, although the ABP is a pro-poor development intervention, the program has not been sufficiently implemented to significantly improve the welfare of the dominant resource-poor farming households in Nigeria.

This study assessed the impact of ABP beyond the conventional potential mean outcome framework by accounting for heterogeneity in treatment effect.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2023-0083

Current evidence indicates that humans and animals are at increased risk of multiple health challenges due to microplastic (MP) profusion. However, mitigation is constrained by inadequate scientific data, further aggravated by the lack of evidence in many African countries. This review therefore synthesized evidence on the current extent of MP pollution in Africa and the analytical techniques for reporting.

A literature search was undertaken in research databases. Medical subject headings (MeSH) terms and keywords were used in the literature search. The authors found 38 studies from 10 countries that met the inclusion criteria.

Marine organisms had MPs prevalence ranging from 19% to 100%, whereas sediments and water samples had between 77 and 100%. The most common and dominant polymers included polypropylene and polyethylene.

This review shows that most studies still use methods that are prone to human errors. Therefore, the concentration of MPs is likely underestimated, even though the authors’ prevalence evaluations show MPs are still largely pervasive across multiple environmental matrices. Also, the study reveals significant spatial disparity in MP research across the African continent, showing the need for further research in other African countries.

Even though some reviews have assessed MPs pollution in Africa, they have not evaluated sample prevalence, which is necessary to understand not only concentration but pervasiveness across the continent. Secondly, this study delves deeper into various methods of sampling, extraction and analysis of MPs, as well as limitations and relevant recommendations.

Social media platforms are a pervasive technology that continues to define the modern world. While social media has brought many benefits to society in terms of connection and content sharing, numerous concerns remain for the governance of social media platforms going forward, including (but not limited to) the spread of misinformation, hate speech and online surveillance. However, the voice of citizens and other non-experts is often missing from such conversations in information systems literature, which has led to an alleged gap between research and the everyday life of citizens.

The authors address this gap by presenting findings from 16 h of online dialog with 25 citizens on social media platform governance. The online dialog was undertaken as part of a worldwide consultation project called “We, the internet”, which sought to provide citizens with a voice on a range of topics such as “Digitalization and Me,” “My Data, Your Data, Our Data” and “A Strong Digital Public Sphere.” Five phases of thematic analysis were undertaken by the authors to code the corpus of qualitative data.

Drawing on the Theory of Communicative Action, the authors discuss three dialogical processes critical to citizen discourse: lifeworld reasoning, rationalization and moral action. The findings point toward citizens’ perspectives of current and future issues associated with social media platform governance, including concerns around the multiplicity of digital identities, consent for vulnerable groups and transparency in content moderation. The findings also reveal citizens’ rationalization of the dilemmas faced in addressing these issues going forward, including tensions such as digital accountability vs data privacy, protection vs inclusion and algorithmic censorship vs free speech.

Based on outcomes from this dialogical process, moral actions in the form of policy recommendations are proposed by citizens and for citizens. The authors find that tackling these dark sides of digitalization is something too important to be left to “Big Tech” and equally requires an understanding of citizens’ perspectives to ensure an informed and positive imprint for change.

The purpose of this study is to examine how young people imagine civic futures through speculative fiction writing about artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The authors argue that young people’s speculative fiction writing about AI not only helps make visible the ways they imagine the impacts of emerging technologies and the modes of collective action available for leveraging, resisting or countering them but also the frictions and fissures between the two.

This practitioner research study used data from student artifacts (speculative fiction stories, prewriting and relevant unit work) as well as classroom fieldnotes. The authors used inductive coding to identify emergent patterns in the ways young people wrote about AI and civics, as well as deductive coding using digital civic ecologies framework.

The findings of this study spotlight both the breadth of intractable civic concerns that young people associate with AI, as well as the limitations of the civic frameworks for imagining political interventions to these challenges. Importantly, they also indicate that the process of speculative writing itself can help reconcile this disjuncture by opening space to dwell in, rather than resolve, the tensions between “the speculative” and the “civic.”

Teachers might use speculative fiction writing and the digital civic ecologies framework to support students in critically examining possible AI futures and effective civic actions within them.

Speculative fiction writing offers an avenue for students to analyze the growing civic concerns posed by emerging platform technologies like AI.

This study aims to examine the effects of cyberbullying on the academic lives of Ghanaian university students. It also establishes whether cyberbullying victims, perpetrators, victim-perpetrators and bystanders differed in their thoughts on the effects of cyberbullying on students’ academic lives.

This study is anchored on Bandura’s theory of triadic reciprocal determinism and Abraham Maslow’s theory of needs. This study uses a cross-sectional survey design and quantitative approach to collect the data from 1,374 students from three public universities. The authors use descriptive statistics and ANOVA techniques to analyse the data.

The results show that the effects of cyberbullying on academic life are difficulty concentrating on studies, difficulty studying in groups and difficulty assessing important academic information online. There is also a statistically significant difference among cyberbullying victims, perpetrators, victim-perpetrators and bystanders in their thoughts on the effects of cyberbullying on students’ academic lives.

This research contributes to the literature on cyberbullying in the Ghanaian tertiary education environment. Even though the impact of cyberbullying on academics in Ghanaian universities may seem minimal, it is still imperative that it be checked, as it is significant enough to disrupt effective academic work. Thus, this study adds to the existing literature on cyberbullying from a developing country perspective.

The purpose of this study is to find what kind of leadership is suitable for developing a business in an Islamic boarding school.

This study used a qualitative research method by conducting in-depth interviews with 16 informants.

This study resulted in three critical factors leadership qualities, entrepreneurial qualities and Muslim qualities. The unique combination of these essential elements must be in the soul of a business leader in a boarding school in carrying out its business activities to meet school operational costs while developing it into a sustainable business.

This research is limited to being conducted in Indonesia’s most densely populated areas, namely, West Java Province, which also has the highest number of Islamic boarding schools. Not all Islamic boarding schools have business units because their operational needs have been met either by tuition fees or outside assistance.

These findings are expected to be a guideline for other Islamic boarding schools to find out how business leadership in Islamic boarding schools should be in carrying out their activities so that their business not only survives but also develops and competes with other companies.

This study presents a combination of theories of entrepreneurship, leadership and Muslim qualities obtained from the literature review and empirical data from the results of in-depth interviews.

The development of financial technology (fintech), especially digital payments (e-payments), aims to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of economic transactions. This study aims to see the extent to which microentrepreneurs in Indonesia and Malaysia take advantage of the existence of e-payments in developing their business and the factors that influence the adoption of e-payments.

This study uses qualitative and quantitative approach. For quantitative approach, partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM 4.0) was used to analyze the data. Using the nonprobability convenient sampling technique, this study collected 400 respondents from microenterprises in Indonesia and Malaysia in various regions.

Most of the microentrepreneurs in Indonesia and Malaysia have used fintech platforms, especially e-wallet and ATM debit. However, for quick response code-based fintech for business transactions, most microentrepreneurs have not taken advantage of the platform. Then the results of the digital payment adoption factor also differ for each country.

This study is valuable for decision-makers and regulators. These results can be used to find a roadmap for regulators to build a digital economy, especially digital payments for microenterprises in both countries. In addition, these results can be used as a basis for making policies regarding digital payments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to compare e-payment adoption by microentrepreneurs in Indonesia and Malaysia. Indonesia and Malaysia are two countries in the Southeast Asia region that have great attention in fintech development. This study provides new insights about fintech, especially digital payments as a strategic approach in the digitalization era.