Documents found
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4141.More information
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted various public health measures, including the closure of social venues, physical distancing requirements, and general curfews. These social restrictions posed specific challenges for young gay and bisexual men, a group historically vulnerable to mental health problems and social isolation. This article is based on a study designed to understand the impact of pandemicrelated public health measures on the social and sexual relationships of young gay and bisexual men aged 18 to 26. Employing a qualitative descriptive interpretive design, the underlying study involved semi-structured interviews with 14 individuals living in Montreal. Thematic analysis revealed three themes regarding the impact of COVID-19 measures on the social and sexual lives of research participants: (1) social erosion as a marker of increasing loneliness, (2) a collective sense of injustice in a population that feltit was disproportionately burdened by often infantilizing public health measures, and (3) continued social activities despite pandemic-related fears. The results highlight the suffering and feelings of injustice experienced by young gay and bisexual men due to severe constraints on social interaction and, by extension, the loss of a spontaneoussexual life. The article includesrecommendations for improvement and further research on how Quebec-based community organizations can better support young gay and bisexual men.
Keywords: COVID-19, COVID-19, gai, gay, mental health, santé mentale, social life, vie sociale, Montréal, Montreal
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4142.More information
This article examines cryptocurrency trading in Turkey, focusing on the ‘gamblification’ of this emerging market. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research (2021-2022) conducted during an economic crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the research reveals how Turks engaged with cryptocurrencies are considering the structural parallels between trading and gambling. The article also incorporates the perspective of Turkey's Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet), which has declared cryptocurrency trading impermissible, highlighting the tension between contemporary financial practices and traditional Islamic frameworks. The article links the perception of cryptocurrency trading as a modern game of chance, as articulated by research participants, to Turkey's economic instability and their technological shift from traditional state-regulated games of chance (lotteries, betting on sports, and horse racing) to cryptocurrency trading. My ethnographic method brings new empirical data and qualitative analysis to understand the cultural and religious dynamics shaping this emergent financial phenomenon in the under-studied context of Turkey. I argue that cryptocurrency adoption in Turkey is driven by more than economic necessity; it reflects a cultural transformation valuing modernity and innovation. Many Turks view cryptocurrency as a viable alternative to traditional financial systems and a representation of the future of money. This shift signifies a departure from conventional monetary practices and reflects a collective idealisation of the future of finance. The article thus illuminates how Turkish individuals navigate risk and speculation during economic crises, demonstrating their adaptability in engaging with non-monetary financial markets.
Keywords: cryptocurrency, gambling, Turkey, trading, Islam
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4143.More information
This study explores the experiences of racially minoritized youth activists involved in the climate justice movement. From July to October of 2023, I conducted semi-structured narrative interviews with 15 Black, Indigenous, and youth of colour in Ontario, aged 18 to 29, who had been affiliated with a climate justice organization for at least six months. Through timeline mapping and semi-structured interviews, participants highlighted pivotal life events that shaped their justice-oriented values. Three overarching themes emerged: nurturing identity, shaping communities and schools, and forging new pathways for racially minoritized youth leaders. The findings underscore the empowerment youth experience through local action and community engagement. With a grounding in relational solidarity and ethical relationality, this study emphasizes the imperative for Canadian education systems to integrate robust climate justice pedagogies as well as interdisciplinary, action-oriented climate justice learning that fosters student efficacy and leadership. The study also aims to highlight the ways educators, policy makers, and stakeholders can engage with climate justice, informed by racially minoritized activists.
Keywords: climate justice education, mouvement pour la justice climatique, jeunes militant[e]s racialisé[e]s, climate justice movement, éducation à la justice climatique, intersectional environmentalism, environnementalisme intersectionnel, youth empowerment, résilience des jeunes, relational solidarity, ethical relationality, solidarité relationnelle, éthique relationnelle, racially minoritized youth activists
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4144.More information
Canada has a significant problem with Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism (AMR), holding the alarming distinction of having the highest rate of targeted killings of Muslims among G7 countries. Beyond personal fear and hatred of Muslims and Islam, Islamophobia and AMR are deeply ingrained in institutional and structural systems, perpetuating violence and discrimination. This paper challenges the conventional view of Islamophobia and AMR as simply an individual moral issue, arguing instead that it is a form of racial and colonial violence occurring across multiple levels of Canadian society. AMR intersects with other forms of oppression, including sexism, anti-Arab, anti-Black, and anti-Brown racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia. Despite social work’s stated commitment to social justice, the profession has failed to effectively address AMR due to its own ongoing legacy of racism, white supremacy, and coloniality. To truly uphold its stated commitments to equity and human rights, social work must confront AMR at all levels. Grounded in critical race and anti-colonial theory, this paper illustrates how AMR is a multifaceted issue. While advancing a framework for addressing AMR within social work, this paper emphasizes the need for a comprehensive approach that encompasses direct practice, policy and community work, research, and education. Recommendations include adopting an antiMuslim racism approach that includes strategies that can be used to confront AMR and identify key challenges and opportunities for transformative change within social work.
Keywords: Anti-Muslim Racism, Intersectionality, Islamophobia, Muslims, Social Work
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4145.More information
This study reports a systematic review and meta-analyses of the construct social presence in online higher education settings. The research objectives are to: 1) determine the overall impact of scale-based measures of social presence on student learning outcomes, and 2) determine the overall impact of scale-based measures of social presence on student satisfaction outcomes. A thorough examination of the research literature from 1995 to 2022 was conducted, employing a three-stage screening process to identify 53 studies suitable for inclusion in the meta-analyses. Utilizing a random effects model for analysis, the study investigated the two outcome measures with subgroup analysis. The results affirm that social presence has a moderate effect on both student satisfaction and learning outcomes, with no evidence of publication bias identified. In conducting a subgroup analysis to help explain some of the heterogeneity, significant effects were found for mode of delivery and for the scale-based instrument used. The paper concludes by advocating for enhanced rigour in research design to facilitate empirically validated investigations into improving social presence in online learning environments.
Keywords: evidence synthesis, synthèse de données, enseignement supérieur, higher education, online learning, apprentissage en ligne, revue systématique, systematic review, meta-analysis, méta-analyse, conception de cours, course design, enseignement, teaching, technologie, technology, présence sociale, social presence
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4146.More information
Algorithms pervade our reality and promise to universally enhance our lives, but what happens when this promise is reserved for cisgender people while subjecting trans people to legacies of anti-trans violence that implicate trans liveability? Despite this key question, existing critiques engage only sparingly with the violent legacies perpetuated by algorithms that trans people encounter, rarely go beyond notions of bias, and therefore fail to centre trans experiences. In this article, I extend scholarship on critical algorithm studies, trans studies, and necropolitics through three accounts of lived trans experiences to show the vicious algorithmic operations on trans lives. Centrally, this article argues that algorithms are not neutral, distinct, or progressive. Rather, as a vicious “cis-tem” (playing on the word system), algorithms enact forms of violence towards the possibility of transness, violence that is rooted in legacies of capitalist, colonial, and cisheteronormative power that violate trans lives and radicalise transphobia. Contrasting trans voices against the algorithmic machines, this article offers a novel perspective on the entanglement between algorithms and trans liveability through the lens of algorithmic violence. I demonstrate how algorithms embody racialised and gendered ideals of the human that target trans people through engineered transphobic feedback-loops, cisnormative default, and capitalist profit based on fear. I conclude by reimagining liberatory digital futures.
Keywords: algorithmic violence, violence algorithmique, qualité de vie des personnes trans, cisheteronormativity, colonialism, études numériques sur les personnes trans, nécropolitique, digital trans studies, cishétéronormativité, necropolitics, colonialisme, trans liveability
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4147.More information
The objective of this introduction is to present the contributions to this issue on happiness. Beforehand, we tackle a few themes that seem to have great interest : the « rewards » of happiness, its contagion, the reticence toward it, the connection with nature and fine arts that form good constituents of happiness and, lastly, genetic and epigenetic aspects of happiness.
Keywords: bonheur, émotions positives, émotions négatives, happiness, positive emotions, negative emotions
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4148.More information
Collaborating with the Canadian Council on Aboriginal Business (CCAB), the authors investigate how Aboriginal Economic Development Corporations (AEDCs) responded to and, in most cases, weathered the commercial disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Working from survey interviews, supplemented by business data from previous CCAB national surveys and other governmental information, the authors explore the challenges that CEOs faced and how they managed their companies through the COVID crisis. For many of the AEDCs respondents, the problems they were facing were not necessarily brought on by the pandemic but were outgrowths of pre-existing socioeconomic disparities that had been exacerbated by COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, these CEOs battled to maintain operations, manage and support staff in trying circumstances, and keep their assets operating or safely managed. They frequently assisted their home communities with services not normally within their purview, including producing PPE products and delivering groceries and medicine to remote communities. This report focuses on crisis management and can be a useful reference point for policymakers and decision-makers looking to create coherent responses to whatever the next crisis faced by EDCs might be.
Keywords: Indigenous economic development, business response to COVID, resiliency, digital divide, social inequality
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4149.More information
In an era of ubiquitous computing and generative AI, our experience of place is increasingly mediated by digital technologies, creating hybrid environments where physical and virtual interactions converge. While fields like media and urban studies have explored this through the concept of ‘digital placemaking’—the use of digital media to create a sense of place—this phenomenon has received limited attention within information studies. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a new conceptual framework, termed the ‘placial-technical,’ which refines the traditional socio-technical perspective to specifically analyze the mutual shaping of place, information, and technology. Using this lens, we argue that digital placemaking should be understood as a form of information practice, encompassing the socially situated ways individuals seek, use, and share information to construct meaning about their surroundings. Drawing on literature from human geography, media studies, and Human Computer Interaction, we trace the evolution of placemaking concepts and technologies. We then analyze digital placemaking through the dual processes of perception (how information inputs shape our understanding of place) and representation (how we create informational outputs to depict place), focusing on the growing influence of algorithms and generative AI. This synthesis reveals research gaps and offers implications for information studies. By conceptualizing digital placemaking as an information practice, the field can extend its theoretical and methodological tools while informing the ethical design of technologies that foster authentic community engagement and place attachment in a digitally mediated world.
Keywords: digital placemaking, Création de lieux numériques, sense of place, Sentiment d'appartenance au lieu, Pratiques informationelles, information practice, Systèmes sociotechniques, socio-technical systems
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4150.More information
This paper analyzes the relationship between surveillance, violence, and dissent on university campuses in the United States. With a focus on administrative and police responses to pro-Palestinian protesters in particular, I show how surveillance facilitates selective, targeted discipline of students and faculty members expressing pro-Palestinian positions. I explore these dynamics with Colombia University’s police crackdown on protesters; University of California, Los Angeles’s tolerance for terror inflicted by vigilante counterprotesters; and the broader punishment and dismissal of professors voicing criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Considered as a whole, these examples reveal a larger cultural landscape that constructs pro-Palestinian groups as fundamentally dangerous, terrorist, and intolerant. Anti-Palestinian violence should be an expected outcome from such an ideological position. The examples also show how campus surveillance practices have shifted to emphasize anticipatory and reactive modalities. In the anticipatory register, surveillance is mobilized as a counterinsurgency tool for the preemptive interruption of pro-Palestinian speech; in the reactive register, surveillance is deployed to punish and terrorize individuals for their expressions of dissent. The reactive modality effectively folds into the anticipatory one by serving as a warning to others and exerting a chilling effect on future campus protests. I argue that universities extend racialized state violence through their surveillance practices and that they remain key players in the maintenance of the racial order.
Keywords: police brutality, violence, dissent, racialized surveillance, culture wars, chilling effect, Islamophobia, pro-Palestinian protest, universities