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This essay examines the ubiquity of cultural forms such as gossip, rumours, urban legends, and hoaxes. This study addresses each cultural form as genre, pointing to their overlapping features and characteristics. In what follows, the authors explore each genre’s key practices, practitioners, motivations, and social settings in the interests of unravelling of the oft misunderstood relationships among these and other related forms. The essay situates these forms and practices as vibrant, compelling, and complex forms of discourse that initiate dialogue and deliberation in numerous settings to a broad (if amorphous) public.

Keywords: Gossip, Rumours, Urban Legends, Media Hoaxing, Genre

If the definition of public policies and the role of legislating belong to the executive and to the legislatures, judges have been precursors of important societal changes, particularly since the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Some of these issues can be divisive and have significant and lasting impacts in social, environmental, economic or political terms. What is the role of the judiciary in shaping these societal changes ? Do judicial institutions risk losing their legitimacy as a consequence of actions that are seen as significantly infringing on the spheres of action of other branches of government ? The author explores the designs and the limits of judicial intervention on these matters and discusses the need to find a balance that is operationalized by a dialogue between the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

Music has always been a powerful mean of leisure, but it represents also a tool for sensitization and raising awareness. Since its accession to independence in 1960, Ivory Coast has adopted a national anthem called ‘‘Abidjanaise’’, wich, from of its orchestration, is sung by seven voices. The text itself deals with citizen values essential to the development of this young nation. Therefore, music is a vehicle for promoting values useful for the construction of a country. In the Ivorian context, music has evolved with the history of the country. Over time, however, we realize that the majority of urban musical productions are devoid of ethics and civic values. This work attempts to shed light on the issue through a mixed approach that takes into account the main actors in the musical field. The study shows that the marginalization of civic values in the contemporary Ivorian musical field is mainly due to the quest for easy living, fear of political reprisals and the race for money.

Keywords: valores cívicos, citizen values, valeurs citoyennes, musical creativity, créativité musicale, creatividad musical, citoyenneté, citizenship, ciudadanía, Côte d’Ivoire, Costa de Marfil, Ivory Coast

Every city possesses zones devoid of human traffic during the day or at night. By the reclusion which they contain, these places make vulnerable whoever ventures and particularly women. To remedy this situation, the group Conscience Urbaine makes the bet that by modifying an urban place by the art, it will change the perceptions, will increase the attendance and consequently the safety of the place. More than a simple project of art in the public place, we speak about a concerted action which rests on the cooperation of the various actors who can act on the zone. We followed the projects of Conscience Urbaine during the summer and the autumn, 2015 to understand how these could be linked to an approach of social innovation. We also observed the approach from the point of view of the models of deep changes to succeed in understanding what braked or fed the innovation and the creativity in the process of action of the group.

Keywords: innovación social, Social Innovation, Innovation sociale, creatividad, creativity, créativité, ordenación urbana, urban planning, aménagement urbain, citizen dialogue, concertation citoyenne, concertación ciudadana, processus de changement, proceso de cambio, process of change

AbstractThe relationship between international migration and globalization is generally understood in very simple and incomplete terms in the current research literature. Many studies address globalization only partially or focus on one-sided views, such as how economic globalization (expanding trade, travel and communications) promotes increased international migration. Such formulations are a good starting point but extremely inadequate for a broader understanding because they ignore the impact of other important dimensions and impacts of globalization. They ignore, for example, how globalization generates anxiety in migrant receiving countries about job loss and changes to national culture and how these fears promote new state policies that seek to restrict, control and select international migrants. And they ignore the ways in which globalization increases the desire for people in less developed countries to move to the more economically developed countries. The purpose of this paper is to develop a more complex view in which different aspects of globalization and their often contradictory outcomes are taken into account.