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This paper aims to illustrate how first-generation immigrant youth who are English language learners respond to graphic novels and what literacies they acquire from reading and discussing graphic texts.

This paper is based on qualitative discourse data collected from an afterschool program with five high-school-aged English-language learners and their teacher. The afterschool program is centered on reading and discussing graphic novels.

Transcript analysis showed that the girls, even while working to “break” the written code, were engaged in critical analysis. In other words, English learners’ struggles to decode the words did not hinder them in assuming the role of a text analyst, and in questioning the creator’s message, purposes and worldviews.

This paper, which draws on an approach wherein the researcher pays close attention to immigrant youth as language users and meaning makers, can inform the methodologies of literacy and language researchers.

The paper can also inform the work of educators who are interested in pedagogical supports – texts and practices – that promote powerful language and literacy.

This paper is timely, given not only the challenges and possibilities associated with educating recent-arrival immigrant youth and English-language learners, but also the growing interest by language and literacy educators in the role of multimodal texts for developing multiple and critical literacies of all students.

Extant literature exploring service user (SU) involvement in clinical psychology training has been limited by its sampling from singular training programmes and its restricted application of psychological theory. This research seeks to counter limitations by exploring SUs’ experiences across multiple clinical psychology training programmes in the UK and by deductively applying psychological theory relating to power, recovery, identity and group development.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 participants. A deductive thematic analysis was used to analyse qualitative data.

Five main themes were identified: environment determines sense of safety; meeting challenges; sense of purpose, worth and value; the person you see now is not the person I was; and wanting to break the glass ceiling.

Carers are underrepresented and the sample does not contain SUs who were no longer involved in training.

It is important that the environment fosters psychological safety for SUs, via positive and supportive relationships with trainees and staff, with SUs being treated as equals and financially reimbursed as such. SUs and professionals need to explore managing and sharing power to enable SUs to feel valued and to reap benefits from involvement, including developing a positive sense of identity.

The research is part of the early literature exploring SUs’ experiences of involvement in clinical psychology training and is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first to explore the personal effects of involvement across multiple programmes.

This paper aims to examine critical, college-going identities and literacies of first-generation immigrant youth within a dual enrollment, youth participatory action research seminar.

This study is a qualitative case study drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study.

Findings illustrate that youth’s multiple literacies, forged in a deliberately intergenerational and relational space, served as a powerful site of analysis as well as a means to disrupt restrictive definitions of success, supporting youth’s worldmaking amidst the construction and negotiation of new and critical “academic” identities grounded in the familial, cultural and historical knowledges that their inquiries surfaced.

This research attends to the transformative power afforded by humanizing collectives that center youth voices and perspectives, specifically those of first-generation immigrant students.

Purpose: We critically examine the idea of neurodiversity, or the uniqueness of all brains, as the foundation for the neurodiversity movement, which began as an autism rights movement. We explore the neurodiversity movement's potential to support cross-disability alliances that can transform cultures.

Methods/Approach: A neurodiverse team reviewed literature about the history of the neurodiversity movement and associated participatory research methodologies and drew from our experiences guiding programs led, to varying degrees, by neurodivergent people. We highlight two programs for autistic university students, one started by and for autistics and one developed in collaboration with autistic and nonautistic students. These programs are contrasted with a national self-help group started by and for stutterers that is inclusive of “neurotypicals.”

Findings: Neurodiversity-aligned practices have emerged in diverse communities. Similar benefits and challenges of alliance building within versus across neurotypes were apparent in communities that had not been in close contact. Neurodiversity provides a framework that people with diverse conditions can use to identify and work together to challenge shared forms of oppression. However, people interpret the neurodiversity movement in diverse ways. By honing in on core aspects of the neurodiversity paradigm, we can foster alliances across diverse perspectives.

Implications/ Values: Becoming aware of power imbalances and working to rectify them is essential for building effective alliances across neurotypes. Sufficient space and time are needed to create healthy alliances. Participatory approaches, and approaches solely led by neurodivergent people, can begin to address concerns about power and representation within the neurodiversity movement while shifting public understanding.

An alliance of schools and researchers formed a collaborative community of practice in order to understand and improve the sensory school environment for pupils on the autistic spectrum, and incorporate the findings into school improvement planning. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Representatives of special and mainstream schools in South London and a team of researchers formed the project team, including an autistic researcher. The researchers and a named staff member from each of the schools met regularly over the course of 18 months in order to work on an iterative process to improve the sensory experience pupils had of the school environment. Each school completed sensory audits and observations, and was visited by members of the research team. Parents were involved via meetings with the research team and two conferences were organised to share findings.

Useful outcomes included: developing and sharing of good practice between schools; opportunities for parents of autistic pupils to discuss their concerns, particularly with someone with insider perspective; and exploration of creative ways to achieve pupil involvement and the idea that good autism practice has the potential to benefit all pupils. A resource pack was produced for the schools to access. Plans are in place to revisit the initiative in 12 months’ time in order to ascertain whether there have been long-term benefits.

Projects building communities of practice involving autistic people as core team members are rare, yet feedback from those involved in the project showed this to be a key aspect of shared learning.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the perceived influence of early gaming habits toward media production from seven students enrolled at a university in the Southeastern US. Participants identified as heavily involved in creating media such as anime, videos, fanfiction, webcomics, games, and digital music.

This exploratory study used qualitative research, thus data collection and analysis included questionnaires, interviews, and artifacts identifying and categorizing six main themes: game play preferences, persistence, early connections between game play and media, support and feedback, creations inspired by games, and significance of games in current lives.

The study found that most participants believed game play in childhood influenced increasingly complex media production habits. Six of the seven believed game play influenced their career path. The paper concludes with implications for education including games as conduits to personalized learning and career paths.

Results from this study extend prior research on the value of games to promote media production and meet personal and professional goals. This is significant as prior research linking early game play to media production influencing career goals is sparse.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on data from 16 interviews (two each with eight women) to explore some of the ways in which everyday shopping may change as women become mothers. The meanings, practices and implications of the transition to motherhood have long been a topic for sociological inquiry. Recently, interest has turned to the opportunities offered by this transition for the adoption of more sustainable lifestyles. Becoming a mother is likely to lead to changes in a variety of aspects of everyday life such as travel, leisure, cooking and purchase of consumer goods, all of which have environmental implications. The environmental impacts associated with such changes are complex, and positive moves toward more sustainable activities in one sphere may be offset by less environmentally positive changes elsewhere.

This paper draws on data from 16 interviews (two each with eight women) to explore some of the ways in which everyday shopping may change as women become mothers.

This paper focuses on the ways in which modes and meanings of everyday shopping may shift through the transition to mother, and on indicating any potential sustainability implications. The paper explores the adoption of more structured shopping and of shifting the mode of grocery shopping online or offline. The paper draws attention to the way in which practices are embedded and interrelated and argue that more consideration needs to be given to the influence of all household members.

The question here is not whether women purchase different products or consume more once they have a child, but rather how does the everyday activity of shopping for groceries and the meanings it has change with new motherhood and what sustainability implications might this have? In this context, this paper provides a novel addition to research on new mothers and consumption.

This research paper aims to examine how open innovation (OI) intermediaries facilitate knowledge collaboration between organizations and online user communities. Drawing on a Community of Practice (CoP) perspective on knowledge, the study lays out a framework of the knowledge boundary management mechanisms (and associated practices) that intermediaries deploy in enabling client organizations to engage in online community-based OI.

This research is based on an exploratory case study of an OI intermediary and 18 client organizations that engage with online user communities on the intermediary’s platform. Results incorporate both the intermediary and clients’ perspective, based on analysis of intermediary and client interviews, clients’ online community projects and other archival data.

Results reveal that OI intermediaries deploy three knowledge boundary management mechanisms – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – each underpinned by a set of practices. Together, these mechanisms enable knowledge transfer, translation and transformation, respectively, and thus lead to cumulatively richer knowledge collaboration outcomes at the organization–community boundary. The findings show that the pragmatic mechanism reinforces both semantic and syntactic mechanisms, and is hence the most critical to achieving effective knowledge collaboration in community-based OI settings.

The findings suggest that OI intermediaries have to implement all three boundary management mechanisms to successfully enable knowledge collaboration for community-based OI. More specifically, intermediaries need to expand their focus beyond the development of digital platforms, to include nuanced efforts at building organizational commitment to community engagement.

Drawing on the CoP view, this study integrates the knowledge management literature into the OI literature to conceptualize the role of OI intermediaries in shaping knowledge collaboration between organizations and communities. In engaging with the interactive nature of knowledge exchange in such multi-actor settings, this research extends the firm-centric theorization of knowledge that currently dominates the existing OI research.

The purpose of this study was to explore drivers of consumer engagement with sustainable fashion brands on Instagram to specifically answer the research question: what drives popularity of sustainable fashion among digital consumers?

Twenty-five global fashion retailers were identified and categorized as either (a) sustainable fashion brands (SFB), (b) sustainably aware mainstream brands (SAB) or (c) traditional fashion brands (TFB). Content analysis of the 25 retailer's Instagram posts over a three-week period was analyzed and categorized according to content theme. Data were analyzed for quantity of Likes and Comments (engagement) to identify engagement strategies with each of the brand groups.

It was found that different strategies may be taken regarding social media strategy for SFB, SAB or TFB. Consumers were engaged with unfamiliar content, for instance, sustainability to a consumer unfamiliar with the topic or how it applies to a specific brand. Digital consumers were looking for exciting and aesthetically pleasing posts. Specifically, all consumers were engaged with posts about Fashion and Lifestyle.

As the result of this study, sustainable fashion best practices and social media strategies were presented for the three brand categories of fashion retailers.

This study analyzed a cross-section of global fashion brands and identified “best practices” for digital consumer engagement with sustainable messages through Instagram. The findings provide original value, specifically in the area of fashion marketing via social media to communicate brand identify to digital consumers for brand growth.

Popular self-help pregnancy literature suggests a “generational disconnect” between pregnant women and their mothers, emphasizing the incommensurate experiences of the two generations. Based on longitudinal, in-depth interviews with a diverse group of 64 pregnant women and 23 grandmothers-to-be, this chapter explores how different generations of women negotiate the idea of a disconnect and its implications for the medicalization of pregnancy. My findings showed limited support for the generational disconnect. Nearly all of the pregnant women I interviewed who were in contact with their mothers consulted them to assess issues related to pregnancy embodiment. Black and Latina women and white women with less than a college degree disregarded or even rejected the disconnect; they tended to frame their mothers’ advice as relevant. Their mothers attended prenatal care appointments and frequently expressed skepticism about medical directives. By contrast, I found that highly educated white women tended to endorse the generational disconnect when it came to matters related to pregnancy health behaviors – what to eat, how much to exercise – and their obstetric care. The mothers of these women not only largely supported the generational disconnect, but also bonded with their daughter over a shared appreciation for scientific understandings of pregnancy. Foregrounding women’s perspectives provides insights into meaning-making in pregnancy and the ways that mothers of pregnant women can both stymie and deepen medicalization of childbearing.