Search results

By 2030, one in six people in the world will be aged 60 years or over. As the average age of population increases, governments are increasingly called upon to implement policies to address the needs and interests of older people, including those related to housing, employment, health care, social protection, and other forms of intergenerational solidarity. Public libraries, as trusted community hubs, have the opportunity to serve as an environment for reflection and dialogue on age and aging. In this chapter, the authors reflect on the broader contexts and social trends that are shaping older adults’ engagement with public libraries and identify those older adults-focused public library practices that align with specific UN Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being, Goal 4: Quality Education, Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, Goal 10: Reduce Inequalities, and Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. While public libraries are already meeting many facets of UN Sustainable Development Goals, to ensure that libraries can responsively meet older adults’ changing needs and expectations, the authors conclude with suggestions to enhance public libraries’ cross-sector coordination for maximum reach and impact on older patrons’ everyday lives.

January 2016 saw the final release of Numinous Games’ crowdfunded linear adventure game That Dragon, Cancer. An impactful independent title which subverts many of gaming’s traditional and valued norms. In less than two hours of abstracted adventure, players are transported through a series of vignettes documenting one family’s struggle with cancer, and the battle faced by their terminally ill child, Joel. Digital memorialisation has been documented by scholars since the late 1990s. This has come in the form of sites specifically created for memorialisation, social networking sites repurposed by their users for memorialisation (MySpace and more recently Facebook), and online virtual worlds (Second Life and World of Warcraft). However, within That Dragon, Cancer the productive nature of grief has created and envisioned a gaming experience purpose-built for memorialisation. This chapter begins by documenting memorialisation within virtual environments. From here, the author turns to consider the way in which That Dragon, Cancer provides a purpose-built space for grief, memorialisation and understanding, focussing on key stylistic and mechanic-based decisions undertaken in the games design. Finally, the author considers the way in which That Dragon, Cancer, through the use of crowdfunding in late 2014, transformed from a project memorialising one child to the memorialisation of many across the globe.

The chapter traces the genealogy of the Education for All (EFA) Movement understood as a global regime of educational governance between 1990 and 2005. The chapter sets out the achievements of EFA including some success in uniting diverse interests around a common set of goals. It will also discuss the key tensions related to the Northern and Western-led nature of EFA; tensions between the multilateral agencies over the leadership of EFA and the issues associated with the hegemonic status assumed by the World Bank; the tension between a wider EFA agenda and a narrower focus on a few quantifiable targets; and the associated tensions between more economistic and rights-based views of EFA. It will be argued that the development of these tensions can be understood in relation to different kinds of power linked to the international political economy and to the impact of other global regimes.

This chapter explains how the Social Change Model of Leadership served as the process for uniting the campus on Cabrini Day around one shared vision of Leadership for Social Change. It also uses Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning to examine the resulting transformation that occurred among students engaged in this process.

In an effort to showcase students’ transformation into leaders for social change, the chapter focuses expressly on students enrolled in one particular course. These students worked together to develop a live simulation for Cabrini Day that brought campus community members through the real-world experiences of unaccompanied immigrant minors fleeing to the United States to escape violence in their home countries. The chapter employs an action research methodology to describe how, when, and why these students became transformed. Students’ planning steps, actions within the live simulation event, and reflections on their actions were analyzed using the individual, group, and community values of the Social Change Model, as well as the tenets of transformative learning theory.

Findings reveal that the Social Change Model is a viable process for integrating curricular and cocurricular endeavors on campus. Findings also show that this process can lead to transformative student learning outcomes.

Integrating curricular and cocurricular experiences on college campuses can lead to significant student learning outcomes and experiences.

This chapter explores processes of stratification in reproductive healthcare and considers the ways in which mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion shape reproductive opportunities and experiences. First, I consider the process of “selective inclusion” among sexual minority women. This examination questions the schisms that exist within the sexual minority population in regard to their visibility and legibility in medical, scientific, and public health discourses and constructions of reproductive health. The second process I examine is that of “exclusionary inclusion” among substance using pregnant women who have been collectively deemed “bad breeders” by medical and state authorities and whose reproduction is explicitly monitored, regulated, and criminalized. The final process I discuss is “side-stepping inclusion” which describes the healthcare and consumer decisions of women who circumvent medicalized childbirth experiences by employing the services of a midwife for their pregnancy and birth care. This chapter examines how medicalization, biomedicalization, and de-medicalization dynamically work together to expand and delimit inclusionary processes, emphasizing the spectral and interconnected quality of these processes. By exploring various processes of inclusion that shape reproductive experiences of these disparate and differentially marginalized populations, this chapter provides a conceptual and critical meditation on the ways in which “respectable reproduction” is deployed in reproductive care. In considering these processes of inclusion and the ways in which they are co-produced by medical discourses and practices, scholars may more clearly grasp some fundamental mechanisms of stratification in reproductive healthcare and knowledge production.

Intersectionality research is normative; rooted in a desire to improve society as inspired by Sojourner Truth’s 19th century writings and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ongoing contemporary legal crusade. Overlapping social identity dimensions which constitute every human individual must be recognized and multidimensionality of lived experiences among people embraced. These dimensions intersect such that no one is just a gender or an ethnicity or a (dis)ability or a sexual orientation or a social class or a religion, and so on. Furthermore, intersectionalities are not some collection of layers that are piled or added on. Humans possess many distinctive social identity qualities simultaneously and they interplay in unique ways.

Those who embrace multiplicity of social identity dimensions and explore how they intersect also posit that uneven power distribution in a society complicates situated identities by more firmly entrenching some people at the center and others in the margins. Researchers dedicated to dismantling infrastructures supporting inequality and desirous of elevating multi-textured voices of the disenfranchised are drawn to intersectional analyses. Overall, intersectionality scholars question perceived group homogeneity, essentialist categories, and argue that there are substantial intra-group differences.

Intersectionalities of social identity dimensions play a significant role in organizational work environments. Critiqued in this chapter are ways that organizations use the business case to gain advantages when thinking of social identity intersectionality in terms of “double dipping” and recruiting the “two-fer” in order to satisfy government-imposed policies. In particular, occupying a liminal space due to social identity intersectionality, stereotypes, and othering effects are explored. Chapter 3 examines these issues and more according to themes of: defining intersectionality, “unbending” social identity intersectionalities, applying intersectionality in organizations, and advancing intersectionalities scholarship.

This chapter aims to discuss the issues associated with social indexing as a solution to the challenges of current information organization systems by investigating the quality and efficacy of social indexing.

The chapter focuses on the study which compared indexing similarity between two professional groups and also compared social tagging and professional indexing. The study employed the method of the modified vector-based Indexing Consistency Density (ICD) with three different similarity measures: cosine similarity, dot product similarity, and Euclidean distance metric.

The investigation of social indexing in comparison of professional indexing demonstrates that social tags are more accurate descriptions of resources and reflection of more current terminology than controlled vocabulary. Through the characteristics of social tagging discussed in this chapter, we have a clearer understanding of the extent to which social indexing can be used to replace and improve upon professional indexing.

As investment in professionally developed web directories diminishes, it becomes even more critical to understand the characteristics of social tagging and to obtain benefit from it. In future research, the examination of subjective tags needs to be conducted. A survey or user study on tagging behavior also would help to extend understanding of social indexing practices.

This paper explores how racial neoliberalism is the latest evolution of race and global capitalism and is analyzed in the example of global tourism in Costa Rica. Racial neoliberalism represents two important features: colorblind ideology and new racial practices.

Two beach tourism localities in Costa Rica are investigated to identify the racial neoliberal practices that racialize tourism spaces and bodies and the ideological discourses deployed to justify racial hierarchical placement that perpetuates new forms of global and national inequality.

Three neoliberal racial practices in tourism globalization were found. First, “neoliberal networks” supported white transnational actors’ linkage to national and global tourism providers. Second, “neoliberal conservation” in beach land protection policies secured private tourism business development and impacted current and future racial community displacement. Third, “neoliberal activism” exposed how community fights to change local tourism development was demarcated along racial lines.

An inquiry into the mechanisms and logics of how racism contemporarily operates in the global economy exposes the importance of acknowledging that race has an impact on different actor’s global economic participation by organizing the distribution of material economic rewards unevenly.

As scholarship exposes how gender, ethnicity, and class are constituted through global economic arrangements it is imperative that research uncovers how race is a salient category also shaping current global inequality but experienced differently in diverse geographies and histories.