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This paper investigates the relationship between home spaces and social practice to explore how social practice informs the spatial typologies of the Korean home in the realm of everyday life. It identifies everyday activities socially embedded within the culture that contribute to a phenomenological understanding of the Korean home.

This paper incorporates a literature review of the conceptualisation of the traditional Korean home, as well as theoretical research concerning the spatial usage of the Korean home. This paper investigates (1) architectural and social aspects of traditional Korean homes, (2) social practice in the ondol, maru and madang as living spaces, and (3) the meaning of Korean home through analysis of spatial usages.

The analysis of the relationship between everyday activity and the home suggests that the Korean home is marked by (1) flexibility (changing the role and characteristics of individual components), (2) spatial extension (combining different areas), and (3) a blurred boundary between indoors and outdoors.

This paper considers the social and cultural aspects of the Korean home rather than its physical and architectural components; it demonstrates that the home as an everyday space holds both social and sacredness in a manner that is responsive to Korean cultural and social identity. Therefore, this paper will contribute to an understanding and provide knowledge of particular cultural types of the Korean home.

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.

The manoeuvring of everyday spaces to nudge the population towards a physically active lifestyle or active living has been the hallmark of the policy modes of instrumental thinking for combating physical inactivity, particularly in urban spaces across the world. Thus, the active promotion of fitness activities by the postcolonial state signifies the centrality of the body in disciplining docile and inactive individuals to produce fit and active citizens. Such a population-based approach has often raised concerns about social and spatial justice and expressions of identity, liberty, and surveillance, even as everyday spaces in cities continue to exhibit elements of colonial governmentality. In the midst of this, the body continues to be central to the ways in which such a population makes sense of being physically active and ‘being healthy’ in their everyday lives. By employing a multi-sited ethnography conducted over a period of 10 months in different public parks in Delhi, the present chapter aims to understand the ways in which fitness activities are performed, produced, and practised in the city. While public parks themselves are a product of colonial urban governmentalities in Delhi, this chapter argues that active bodies engaged in everyday sports in the parks also emerge as the critical site for the bodily inscription of global standards of physical activity. Driven by Western fitness regimes, individuals tend to understand themselves as entrepreneurial selves that can bring to life this imagination of the body ideal even while being engaged in various fitness and leisure activities aimed at being ‘healthy’.

This paper aims to explore the adaptive experiences of first-year international graduate students at a US university. It aims to understand the challenges they encounter, strategies they adopt with social media to navigate these challenges and tensions that emerge in their social media interactions.

This study uses a qualitative multiple-case research design to collect data from 22 semistructured interviews with 11 participants. Additionally, 110 social media artifacts were collected, focusing on international students’ use of social media in everyday and academic contexts.

This paper offers empirical insights into social media’s role in helping international students address practical challenges and fulfill learning needs in academic studies, assistantships, cultural understanding and the constructions of ethnic and peer groups for emotional and social support. Additionally, it identifies tensions such as addiction, distractions, emotional distress and the creation of filter bubbles.

Given the qualitative approach of this paper, the generalizability of study findings is limited. Future studies can focus on different sites to explore context-related issues, students across different years or use a longitudinal research design to further explore international students’ experiences in relation to social media use and its role in their adaptation over time.

This paper proposes implementing social media curricula in universities to educate students on media literacy and digital competence and create peer groups to support international students beyond classrooms.

This paper adds value to informal learning literature focusing on international students.

The aim of this study is to explore the characteristics of what is experienced in mental health recovery-oriented places and how these characteristics can facilitate social connections and participation.

This qualitative study has an explorative, interpretive and collaborative design. Dyadic interviews and participatory fieldwork observations were used as methods for data generation. Data were analyzed using a collaborative hermeneutic approach.

Characteristics of recovery-nurturing places involved how concrete and tangible features of place may nurture and enable actions and ways of being with oneself and others. Three broad themes explore the characteristics and how they can enable recovery: nurturing senses, nurturing practical skills and nurturing communication.

This study demonstrates how materiality and recovery are interconnected and expands the understanding of recovery as “in-the-mind processes.” It explores how places and material objects have a recovery-nurturing potential through enabling actions and participation and thereby supporting people in living, storying and restorying their lives.

The aim of this paper is to outline how public managers' reflective thinking capacity is developed through integration of education and practice using a real-life organizational problem as the educational starting point. Managers' reflective thinking capacity becomes important due to an increasing organizational complexity and the growing trend of introducing post-new public management paradigms.

Inspired by Brinkmann's (2012) approach to the inquiry on everyday life materials, semi-structured interviews were conducted with public managers taking a public management program. A phenomenologically inspired content analysis was applied in the process of scrutinizing the findings, subsequently informing the discussion on the development of problem solving through public management education.

The analysis indicates that the managers' pre-understanding of continuing education at the university level, managers' personal objectives, along with a growing experience with and insights into problem-based learning (PBL), appear to facilitate managers' integration of theory and practice. As revealed in this paper, an inquiry that integrates daily organizational practice and theoretical models and terms, as the origin of the personal development module, seems to facilitate managers' reflective thinking and self-reflexivity.

This paper illustrates that learning processes facilitated by seminars like the personal development module (PDM) not only facilitates the development of reflective thinking, but managers also seem to develop competencies in self-reflexivity – the latter being an underdeveloped element of Dewey's (1933) notion of reflective thinking. Thus, further theoretical and empirical research is needed to explore the potentials of developing a pragmatically inspired notion that offers an understanding of managers' self-reflexivity. By inquiring about managerial puzzlements through a personal development lens, a self-reflective focus adds to the Dewey-inspired approach to reflective thinking.

Informal conversational encounters are explored using free indirect discourse (FID) as a novel storytelling method to gain a multi-generational understanding of the experiences of women working in public relations (PR) in 1960s/1970s Britain.

Echoing a literary tradition, anonymised transcripts of recordings provide impressionist accounts that immerse the reader in the thoughts and feelings of novelistic characters. An informal network of women narrate their stories with a much younger listener enabling exploration of intergenerational relationships and the intersection of gender and age.

This unstructured approach develops a complex yet natural flow to create unique withness-understandings. The author/narrator introduces a conception of informal conversational encounters, supporting an organic approach of interweaving storying, everyday performance, situated accountings, narrative unfoldings and inside/outside points of view.

An interplay of multiple female voices reveals a degree of symmetry in fractal patterns of women's early career experiences over the duration of a generation. Facilitation of sense-making through intergenerational conversations connects with Mannheim's theory of generational unity.

Women's beginnings of PR careers in 1960s/1970s Britain demonstrate a liberal feminist perspective in taking responsibility for their careers and enjoyment beyond the workplace in a man's world.

Since public and private spaces are generally considered to be the fundamental building blocks for residential settings, this study draws attention to the need to consider and detail threshold spaces as one of the key aspects for accomplishing sociocultural needs, restoration and well-being in the residential environment. Understanding the function and uses of these spaces allows us to appreciate their benefits which are often neglected. This research particularly focuses on the social dimension of one fundamental threshold pattern; the Cairene balcony.

A qualitative anthropological approach was adopted in this research where in-depth interviews with female residents (n = 46) were conducted in three local contexts in Cairo, Egypt in parallel with non-participatory observation. The present piece focuses on the results elicited from the female residents’ interviews.

Irrespective of the income group, sociocultural background and context, dominating factors influencing women’s perception of the role of the Cairene balcony were commonly present. These included issues of; well-being and restoration, the phenomenon of personalization and identity, functional and communicative purposes, safety and security and privacy and control. Overall, the majority of interviewees stressed the significance of the balcony as a prominent source of prospect and an impermissible part of the residential environment.

The fact that little research has been conducted to examine the everyday use of the balcony and the role it plays in Cairene homes makes this “dedicated” research piece a valuable addition.