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This research explores the educational participation, cultural identification, and linguistic practices of Middle Eastern refugee youth in Vancouver, Canada. Twenty refugee youth aged 15 to 30 participated in this critical ethnography that provided new information about the impacts of pre- and post-migration experiences on their educational attainment, language, and identity construction. Evidence reported here indicates that refugee youth are subject to institutional challenges in both their home and host countries. The youth experienced educational assimilation, biased curriculum, and language discrimination with devastating impacts on their educational participation and overall well-being. In response, this study indicates that young people resist assimilation and racism in educational and wider social settings. This study further suggests that refugee youths’ educational experiences, linguistic practices, self-identification, and well-being should be examined in relation to their pre- and post-migration experiences, and the dominant meta-narratives of their home and host countries (e.g., nationalism).

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to gain insight into fans' perceptions, attitudes and behavioural responses toward their favourite college football team in the context of a new beer sponsorship agreement. Specifically, the chapter examines differences in fans' attitudes and behaviours based on their gender, team identification and drinking habits.

Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was employed. The sample was comprised of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers who self-identified as college football fans. A hypothetical scenario was used as a manipulation, whereby participants were asked to imagine their favourite college football team had entered into a new alcohol sponsorship agreement while completing a questionnaire.

Findings: Highly identified fans exhibited more positive attitudes and behaviours after being presented with the hypothetical scenario than less identified fans. In terms of gender, female fans had increased attitudes toward sponsorship compared to males, and highly identified females had the most positive attitudes and behavioural intentions toward their favourite teams of any of the four subgroups in the study.

Research limitations/implications: The small sample sizes of some fan subgroups affected statistical power, which may have led to falsely insignificant findings. The range of favourite teams among the participants (50 universities) meant there was likely a high degree of variation between fans' previous experiences with beer/alcohol at college sport venues.

Originality/value: The study offers valuable insight into the intersection of sport fandom and gender in the context of alcohol sponsorship in US college sport, and is also among the first investigations of the effects of team identification on perceptions toward alcohol sponsorship.

A long-standing question is how group perception, which is the perception of a whole group, becomes an exaggerated perception of the individuals who comprise the group. The question receives scant attention within computer-mediated communication (CMC), which is increasingly a communication mode for groups and a research tool to study groups. I address this gap by examining bias in group perception when rating copresence, which is the sense of being together, with the group.

I model bias as occurring when perceivers differentially weigh ratings of individual group members on a variable while rating the whole group on the same variable. I analyzed how the degree of bias in participants’ ratings of copresence with a status-differentiated group varied by the availability of visual cues during CMC in an experiment. I also examined how the group’s status hierarchy impacted bias.

Bias increase as the availability of visual cues decreased and ratings of middle status members were weighed more in group perception than ratings of other members.

Middle status was based on possessing inconsistent statuses. Inconsistency, and not status position, may have rendered these members more salient than others.

Interventions that target group perception may benefit from targeting the group’s middle status members. Researchers and practitioners can minimize bias in group perception through increasing the availability of visual cues in CMC.

The findings illustrate the underpinnings of copresence with an entire group. This is important because copresence shapes several group processes during CMC.

Since 2016, the authors have been teaching an interdisciplinary module on the global clothing industry to students enrolled in an introductory psychology course and a second year chemistry course at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In 2016, the module also involved third year chemistry students, and in 2017, second year sociology students and graduate students in English literature from the University of Stuttgart in Germany took part. The module has the following features: (1) it focuses on a complex industry with ramifications for social and environmental sustainability, (2) it involves an issue of direct relevance to the students, (3) students teach those from another discipline as “subject experts,” and (4) students are assessed on their learning within their home course. An evaluation of the 2018 iteration with psychology and chemistry students (N = 185) showed post-test decreases in participants’ materialistic values, increases in knowledge and concern about the social and environmental impacts of the clothing industry and reported changes to clothes buying practices. The authors discuss the institutional barriers faced and provide five recommendations for other university teachers considering integrating an interdisciplinary sustainability module into existing courses.

When it comes to the analysis of markets, difference has been described as a tool for competition and for carving out specific target groups. Once it is taken as factual, the significance of difference for market processes is undoubted. Taking a practice theoretical perspective at the market for Islamic fashion in Berlin, this paper explores what comes before. It intends to investigate not only the effects of difference but also its performance. Investigating how difference is accomplished by entrepreneurs as active agents of the market will also shed light on the societal surroundings of the market and the ways in which it is embedded in its sociocultural and discursive environment, hence highlighting the significance of its context for economic action, and vice versa.

The practice of public relations (PR) is shaped by the ‘life world’ of the professionals; moreover, both the experiences of the professionals and societal changes shape the profession in a particular area (Hodges, 2006). Women have always played an important part in the development of PR as a profession and academic field in Turkey. Since PR Association of Turkey was established in 1972, five out of eight presidents have been women, and most of the members are also female. Female PR practitioners represent 70% of the total workforce of PR sector in Turkey, and most of the communication agencies are led by female entrepreneurs.

However, research on women' positions and their multiple roles in PR in Turkey are limited.

This chapter uses a qualitative study with 27 in-depth one-on-one interviews conducted in order to analyse female PR practitioners' experiences related to (1) the start of their careers, (2) their career experiences, (3) their evaluation of the profession, and lastly (4) their career goals. The interviewees included agency owners, managers, deputy general managers and group directors.

The research aimed to discover the female PR professional experience in respect of the difficulties they face in their practice and everyday life, advantages and/or disadvantages of being a female PR professional in Turkey and the ways women balanced their career and family duties.

The purpose of this chapter is to situate how the digitalized research environment is changing the roles of researchers and participants, and how these changes lead to more complex and less discrete ethics challenges. Incorporating contemporary examples from the social sciences, we outline the core challenges of the changing research landscape that embrace both research actors (researcher, participant, and research users) and data issues. The ethical implications related to research actors’ roles are discussed by considering how data is accessed, how people can now participate in research, and issues related to accessing participants. Digital data and associated ethical issues are explored through examining authorship and ownership, how digital data is produced, and how research transparency can be achieved. Following on from this consideration of research actors and data issues, we suggest which challenges have been re-contextualized by the digital environment, and which are novel to the digital research context, outlining six practical yet reflective questions for researchers to ask as a way to navigate ethics in the digital research territory.

Come, Madam But I don't have my shoes on. Come, Madam.