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Social media have become a key part of placemaking. Placemaking revolves around collaboration between multiple stakeholders, which requires ongoing two-way communication between local government and citizens. Although social media offer promising tools for local governments and public professionals in placemaking, they have not lived up to their potential. This paper aims to uncover the tensions and challenges that social media bring for public professionals at the street level in placemaking processes.

This study aims to fill this gap with a case study of area brokers engaged in online placemaking in Amsterdam. In total, 14 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted, focusing on area brokers’ social media practices, perceptions and challenges. The authors used an open coding strategy in the first phase of coding. In the second phase, the authors regrouped codes in thematic categories with the use of sensitizing concepts derived from the theoretical review.

The use of social media for placemaking imposes demands on area brokers from three sides: the bureaucracy, the affordances of social media and affective publics. The paper unpacks pressures area brokers are under and the (emotional) labour they carry out to align policy and bureaucratic requirements with adequate communication needed in neighbourhood affairs on social media. The tensions and the multidimensionality of what is required explain the reluctance of area brokers to exploit the potential of social media in their work.

Several studies have addressed the use of social media in placemaking, but all neglected the perspective of street-level bureaucrats who shape the placemaking process in direct contact with citizens.

This chapter focuses on how the idea of ‘an ordinary day in the life’ can serve as an entry point for understanding media use. I discuss how everyday media use can be conceptualized as mundane and meaningful, and as most easily noticed when changing. Building on day-in-the-life interview segments from qualitative studies, I discuss methodological merits and challenges of this approach. The analysis follows media users an ordinary day from morning to night, as they wake up with the smartphone, navigate across social domains, and seek connection and companionship. I argue that seemingly mundane media use practices are made meaningful through the connection they entail, and particularly discuss the conflicted position of smartphone checking in everyday life. The chapter empirically substantiates the arguments made in Chapter 1 about the centrality of smartphones in digital everyday lives.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how we ought to distinguish between reference and readers' advisory (RA) service, given the latter’s turn toward a whole collection approach. In other words, the paper answers this question: If both reference and RA librarians aim to meet patrons’ information needs and may theoretically do so using the same materials, then how are we to differentiate the two services conceptually?

In this conceptual paper, we posit that we can distinguish between RA and reference using Louise Rosenblatt’s theory of the aesthetic transaction. With this theory in hand, we can redefine the service distinction in terms of the stance – aesthetic or efferent – that the patron expects to take toward the material they seek.

On our account, the reader’s desired stance becomes a kind of hermeneutical lens through which a library worker may productively evaluate plausible pathways and materials. An aesthetic lens is characteristic of RA; it makes features of potential aesthetic transactions between a particular reader and a particular text (or genre or author’s oeuvre) salient.

The proposed account constitutes a novel application of Rosenblattian response theory, one that grounds and refines the going view that RA’s proper focus is on supporting a particular sort of experience rather than providing particular sorts of texts. This theoretical emendation also better aligns the service distinction with contemporary conceptualizations of RA as a “whole collection” service. Important practical and philosophical implications follow from the new account.

We believe that management and strategy scholars should engage in research around the role of informal economic activity in the perpetuation of poverty on the African continent.

We argue that the study of informal economic activity, because of its explicit and often purposefully created hidden nature, requires a new method of inquiry and we propose that the practice of hermeneutics provides such a method. Our chapter describes the foundations of hermeneutic research and outlines key principles to guide inquiry.

We move from a rigorous introduction to the general method (a form of hermeneutic investigation) and its implementation in the narrative interview. The chapter concludes with a set of practical guidelines to help researchers employ narrative interviews to uncover collective memory structures and gain deeper insight and real understanding of the workings of informal economies.

We believe this chapter will motivate management and strategy scholars to examine the role of informal economic activity in the perpetuation of poverty in Africa and provide a starting point for developing the tools necessary to engage in research that creates a real and deep understanding of the contexts of poverty on the African continent.

This article examines the impact of the 1919 influenza pandemic on the life and culture of Australian universities, and the curious absence of sustained discussion about the crisis in university magazines. It considers two contexts, from the perspective of the general university population, and from the particular focus of medical students.

The primary source for this analysis is based on detailed reading of university magazines across three universities, as well as other primary and secondary literature. The article was written during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which has limited access to some other magazines held in library collections, but the corpus of material is more than sufficient.

This article shows that the pandemic further deferred the resumption of university life after a hiatus during the First World War. The failure to identify the causal agent limited technical discussion in medical school magazines.

This is one of the first dedicated studies of the effect of the 1919 influenza pandemic on Australian universities. It joins a growing body of work considering the effect of the influenza on different community groups.

Online Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter have become increasingly popular in the last decade. Each SNS varies somewhat, with different forms of expression, communication and customization. Different sites may have different priorities, methods of interacting, social features and definitions of what it means to be ‘social’ on their sites.

This paper reports on 2 months of exploratory observations and interviews with participants using two of the most popular SNSs; Facebook.com and Twitter.com. Paying attention to the modal nuances of the sites and their effect on social interaction and identity portrayal, the focus of analysis is upon how these two sites are interacted with as ‘stages’ for identity performances, and how the varying aspects of design and modality on these interactive sites can result in different multimodal identity performances and social interactions.

Data revealed that youth are adeptly able to negotiate the different modal options presented to them online, yet the temporal aspects presented by the design of the site, the differing definitions and priorities in the framing of identity presented by the SNSs, and the modal choices present across the two sites resulted in markedly differing presentations of identity to markedly differing audiences.

This research demonstrates the impact of modality and design on how we act and interact, and highlights that as Digital Sociologists and Researchers, we should be careful not to treat all Online SNSs the same, but pay attention to the plethora of nuances these sites offer as stages for identity performances.

The modern fairy tale hero identity falls into a general spectrum of tropes that spans from the charming prince who seals the fate of the beautiful princess with a kiss to borderline villains with little break in this spectrum. The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia brings to light an often overlooked hero's identity by representing neither ends of this heroic spectrum but rather a different breed of hero entirely. We argue that Geralt of Rivia differs from the typical representation of the fairy tale hero by embodying the spirit of the Huntsman archetype as depicted in stories such as Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood.

This creates a new means of exploring fairy tales as genres by giving perspective to the bloodier, messier sides of these tales which have since deviated from their darker origins. Geralt exists as neither hero nor antihero, but rather a sword-for-hire who cleans up messes that ‘heroes’ otherwise cannot or will not handle themselves. Across his depictions in the books, games, and show, Geralt involves himself as a witcher; hunter of monsters. Geralt's method in overcoming this style of quest is unlike the usual hero. Standing in for the Huntsman, Geralt understands the nature and balance of man and beast and carries this responsibility while looking to accomplish his goals. In this chapter, we seek to document and bring to light this underrepresented style of hero that the witcher has to offer to show that such a hero needs not be black nor white.