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The world is changing rapidly and unexpectedly. COVID-19 is a warning sign that future generations need to be prepared for the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world where more complex situations remain to be seen. Students from all walks of life should have equal access to quality education that can equip them with skills to cope with new challenges. Although the inclusion of students with special needs in Thailand has allowed them to have academic and social interaction with non-special needs students in higher education institutions, little is known regarding how COVID-19 has impacted them and how they have navigated online learning. What are the learning challenges that college students with special needs face? Digital learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be an even more significant challenge for students with special needs. However, some of them may feel online learning is a lifeline and a nice learning accommodation. Is it possible that they may want to continue to stay in remote accommodations, even if face-to-face classes resume? Would any of the practices return to normal and be fruitful for the VUCA world? Using data collected through in-depth interviews, this chapter identifies learning challenges confronting special-needs college students through the lens of a right-based approach and how inclusive digital learning can turn these challenges into opportunities and help these students flourish in a VUCA future. This chapter begins with a brief historical background of inclusive education policy in Thailand's higher education institutions. The chapter then, using a case study of KU, Thailand, identifies and discusses existing challenges and problems currently facing special needs learners and analyses how universities can help them to deal with and overcome such challenges. Finally, the chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges of how inclusive digital learning can play a pivotal role in elevating the learning experience and outcomes of Thai college students with special needs in the VUCA World.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and social distancing mandates forced many young Australians to radically alter everyday interactions. Physical co-presence and embodied experience, a previously taken-for-granted dynamic of territorially embedded everyday lives, and interactions with urban surroundings, were reconfigured. Digital technology, while bringing people together for work, study, or socialising, is seen to dissolve material space, and mitigate geographic isolation. But what role does co-presence and embodied, spatially embedded experience play for young people living in the city? This chapter draws on the voices and experiences of young Australians aged 18–24 during the pandemic to clarify and understand the role of the digital in their everyday lives, how they negotiated disruptions to education, work, and managing relationships during the pandemic to articulate the relationships between digital lives and embodied experiences in the city.

This chapter features our innovative endeavors to inquire into an African-American student's potentially sensitive stories in a methodologically fluid and ethically delicate manner through two generative methods: digital narrative inquiry and musical narrative inquiry. Through a meta-level “inquiry into inquiry” approach, this work explores how we engaged in the digital and musical restorying of the participant's “Wounded Healer” narrative and uncovered its dynamism, cultural richness, and nuances. We subsequently represented the findings in humanizing ways using multimedia and music. Drawing on the insights from exploring these novel methods of digital and musical inquiry, our work illuminates noteworthy elements of narrative research: generativity, transformativity, interpersonal ethics, aesthetic ethics, and communal ethics. Additionally, the potential issue of trustworthiness in fluid narrative inquiries is addressed.

This chapter seeks to understand the intersection between eGovernment, social media, and digital inequalities by examining the disparate flow of information during the COVID-19 pandemic. Developed economies are increasingly transitioning to digital interfaces for information dissemination and provision of services. The authors explore the potential of, and challenges facing eGovernment by looking at the use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This chapter employs a case study approach to probe the dynamics of government-initiated efforts at information dissemination through the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website and social media account on Twitter. The analysis in this chapter uses NodeXL to examine communication roles played by government and non-governmental actors within this slice of the Twittersphere centered around CDC@gov. As the findings demonstrate, non-governmental actors played key roles in the dissemination of public health messaging. The authors analyze these data with an eye to the potential of social media for public health communication and extrapolate that understanding to the use of digital access and social media for the provision of accurate, official information in other circumstances. While the COVID-19 pandemic was a global health crisis, individuals and households face individual or local crises every day. This angle of vision allows the chapter to conclude with recommendations pertaining to government-led information dissemination for the public good during crisis and non-crisis situations alike. In the concluding section, the authors probe the degree to which eGovernment can also address digital inequalities including connectivity, device, and literacy gaps. The authors offer solutions needed for eGovernment initiatives in light of challenges posed by digital inequalities to ensure that digital information sharing and services are accessible to all.

This chapter examines the shifting significance of data ownership and athlete rights as they pertain to the growth and expansion of the global sports gambling industry. It provides a nuanced overview of the ‘datafication’ of society, tracing how the omnipresent embrace of digital technologies has expediated new forms of organisational, political and corporate surveillance from which concerns over privacy, rights to ownership and the misuse of personal data arise. The chapter moves on to discuss how the extraction and trade of data has revolutionised how elite sport is performed, manufactured, broadcast and consumed, shedding critical light on the role of the gambling industry in the exchange of human data as a market commodity. These insights inform a series of socio-legal and ethical questions about the relationships between athlete data and the sports gambling industry for the purpose of signposting emerging issues and opportunities for critical sociological research and intervention.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many educational institutions to move face-to-face education to entirely online education. This digital transformation has, in turn, reinforced the digital divide between learners who have easy access to digital devices and the Internet and other learners who do not have those. In addition to the digital divide, the differences in their genders and educational levels potentially impact leveling up learning. Therefore, the study in the present chapter has aimed to examine university-level sophomore and junior students’ differences in learning online during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of gender, educational level, and the digital divide. Data from a survey indicate that both females and males, and sophomores and juniors had different attitudes toward using digital devices, attending virtual classes and accessing online courses through the mobile phone or the home Internet. Based on the findings on their differences, the chapter makes some implications and recommendations for policymakers, course designers and teachers in the course design, especially in the emergence.

Blogs are websites that contain posts about a wide range of topics, often written by fashion enthusiasts referred to as bloggers. With the increasing prevalence and popularity of digital media and social media, fashion bloggers help to attract business and influence and engage various stakeholders, especially customers. The present exploratory study provided valuable insights regarding fashion consumption, preference, and buying behavior of young women consumers of metropolitan cities of India like Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, and Mumbai. The study was conducted under the domain of exploratory study. Snowball and Purposive random sampling techniques were employed to identify and reach respondents of both categories – women consumers and bloggers. A conscious attempt was made to include women from different demographics such as age, marital status, income, area of residence, employment status, etc. Primary data were collected with the help of questionnaires. The findings of the research revealed bloggers through their blogs are the new trendsetters and influence fashion adoption, especially by the young social media savvy consumers. Their blogs impact public perceptions of fashion and sometimes are precursors of new fashion trends. The findings of the study interestingly brought forth the fact that millennial women buying decision is significantly influenced by fashion blogs for the purchase of clothing and accessories. The findings also clearly indicated that blogs significantly influenced respondents’ attitude toward the purchase of branded merchandise. Fashion bloggers besides providing information and inspiration to the blog readers, also at times assist and/or give consultation to their followers.