Understanding Post-COVID-19 Social and Cultural Realities: Global Context

This book concentrates on the changing patterns of work and global social order as a result of COVID-19. It scrutinizes these changes in order to point out the possible reasons for these changes following COVID-19. It sheds light on the differences between the condition of underdeveloped and developed countries, focusing on how they struggle to find ways of coping. The pandemic has changed the global social order. It has an impact on every aspect of life around the globe, from individual relationships to institutional operations and international collaborations. Societies are endeavoring to protect themselves despite severe restrictions, while the pandemic continues to upset family relations and overturn governance. COVID-19 has made it clearer than ever before that where many strains on the social sector occur, the current global system, with its interconnectedness and vulnerabilities, is under threat. Due to the changing patterns of economic and societal elements caused by COVID-19, further research is urgently needed to analyze these changing trends. The book portrays what work and the global social order will look like in the future. It is essential reading for anyone interested in these changes and the pst-COVID-19 reality. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022, corrected publication 2022.

Helping Language Teachers in Lithuania take their First Action Research Steps During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Online Strategy

This paper reports on the experiences of the authors teaching action research workshops as professional development for language teachers in Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. It describes work carried out for Action Research Communities for Language Teachers, which is funded under the Training and Consultancies programme of the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe as part of its aim to promote quality language education in Europe. The paper focuses on the necessary pivot from face-to-face to online action research workshops and project development in a difficult global context for a group of teachers in Lithuania. It outlines the challenges experienced by the authors and teacher participants, the lessons learned in online teaching of action research, and the positive outcomes for language teachers in setting out on their action research journeys. The paper contributes to the literature on action research in language education and professional development during Covid-19.

Ethics and Marketing of Social Integration in Cultural, Heritage and Educational Contexts

In the current situation, Covid-19 has highlighted inequalities in all parts of the planet, demarcating a gap between the pandemic framework and social relationships, which require ethics and care in the distance scenario. In this sense, there is an urgent need to proceed with the ethics of care, both in terms of knowledge and action, and it is opportune to reflect on the link between health and education, in a systematic way. Therefore, in this article, the objective is to analyze the systems of acquisition of peace, education and health, aiming to highlight a culture based on the stimulation of conscience, in favour of integration and peaceful transposition of life in society. It is believed that the ethics of care is an element of social integration, based on moral feelings and the human ability to responsibly care for others. From this perspective, it appears that adequate support guarantees the continuity of learning and helps to reduce socio-educational gaps. In this way, it is necessary to defend a social experience in which differences can be recognized, valued and used, in line with the fulfillment of human rights, and the equality of conditions for all, especially those that allude to the containment of the recent pandemic. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Improving Participation among Youth with Disabilities within Their Unique Socio-Cultural Context during COVID-19 Pandemic: Initial Evaluation.

BACKGROUND: Participation in meaningful activities is important for quality of life among youth with disabilities; yet participation is often restricted during adverse times. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of the Pathways and Resources for Engagement and Participation (PREP) intervention among ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israeli youth with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: A 20-week single-subject research design with multiple baselines measuring participation goals/activities was employed with two youths (15 and 19 years old) combining quantitative and qualitative descriptive data. Changes in participation levels were measured biweekly using the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure; COPM; participation patterns were measured using the Participation and Environment Measure-Children and Youth; PEM-CY pre- and post-intervention; parents' satisfaction was measured using the Client Satisfaction Questionnaire, CSQ-8. Semi-structured interviews were conducted post-intervention. RESULTS: Both participants significantly improved participation in all selected goals and participation patterns, and were highly satisfied with the intervention. The interviews revealed additional information on personal and environmental barriers, factors supporting intervention, and intervention effects. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicated that an environment-centered and family-centered approach can potentially improve the participation of youths with disabilities within their unique socio-cultural context, during adverse times. Flexibility, creativity, and collaboration with others also contributed to intervention success.

Communicative Online Language Teaching in Disruptive Times: A Redesign of the Introductory Spanish Curriculum

In this article, the authors describe the redesign of a first-semester Spanish course at the United States Air Force Academy due to the COVID-19 crisis and the subsequent transition from traditional, face-to-face instruction to fully online language teaching during the fall of 2020. More than 200 learners were enrolled across 11 course sections that were taught by eight different instructors who were required to use the same syllabus, learning platforms, lesson plans, and assessments under the supervision of a course director. The developers integrated a series of pedagogical interventions--such as online integrated performance assessments, lessons and content that were infused with open-access, authentic materials, and a digital storytelling project--to ensure that students engaged in three modes of communication within a meaningful cultural context. The instruction of culture, intercultural communicative competence, and pragmatics figured predominantly into the course design, which could be replicated by instructors who wish to teach language communicatively online.

Effectiveness of Health Education in Covid-19 Prevention for Children Using Comic with Cultural Context Media

Introduction: COVID-19 was a new SARS variance identified in 2019 and declared the cause of the global pandemic in March 2020. Nowadays, the case has experienced a fluctuating case phase, along with the mutation of the SARS Cov-19 variant that has not stopped yet. Confirmation cases and deaths occur in various ages, including in children. Although the data on COVID-19 case in children is low, efforts to prevent the transmission of Covid-19 in children is needed. Objective(s): This study aims to identify the effect of health education efforts to prevent Covid-19 transmission through 3M (wearing a mask, washing hands and physical distancing) habituation which was carried out using comic media with a cultural context. Method(s): This study uses pre-experimental research with one group pretest-posttest design. The study was conducted to see the effect of providing education using culture-based comic media (independent variable) on elementary school students' attitudes in 3M practice (dependent variable). The population in this study were all students aged 10-12 years at MI Al-Kautsar Sorong, a total of 45 children. In this study, the sampling technique used is total sampling. The data were analysed with the Wilcoxon test. Result(s): The mean score post-test was significantly higher than the pre-test (pre-test 70,67;post-test 74,71;p-value 0,01). The difference score pre-test and post-test in categorical scoring showed significant differences;in the post-test group, as much as 46,67% (21 children) scored is good. Students' characteristic related to the post-test scores is age (p-value 0,001);the older children, the higher score they got. Conclusion(s): Comics with cultural context media can be considered alternative health promotion media for children. Copyright © 2022 Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. All rights reserved.

An Investigation of Factors Influencing Online Shopping Behaviors in the Context of China and Australia

Online shopping has gained much popularity over the past decade. Indeed, in a post-COVID world, online shopping is the only medium of shopping for many. A great deal of research effort has been devoted to understanding the factors that positively or negatively influence online shopping behavior of consumers. However, most of these influence relationships have been studied individually, and not how such factors interrelate with each other and thus the underlying complex driving and dependence relationships among those factors are unknown. Moreover, these underlying driving and dependence relationships among online shopping behavior factors can be highly dependent on the cultural context of the consumers. In this research we identify the key factors that have been shown to have influence on online shopping behavior from a rigorous review of literature. We then apply an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) technique to find the underlying complex hierarchical relations of factors related to Australian and Chinese culture. We apply MICMAC analysis to find the driving and dependence power of these factors in context of these two cultures. We finally explain the differences and similarities found for Australian and Chinese culture with reference to Hofstede’s Cross Culture theory. Prominent findings include timeliness of delivery and order accuracy is considered having high dependence and driving power in the Australian context but has low driving and dependence power in Chinese context. Our findings will be beneficial for including better cultural context factors into future online shopping platform design. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The Palgrave handbook of humour research

This Handbook provides new perspectives on humour from transdisciplinary perspectives. It focuses on humour as a resource from different socio-cultural and psychological viewpoints and brings together authors from different cultures, social contexts and countries. The book will enable researchers and practitioners alike to unlock new research findings which give new directions for contemporary and future humour research. By employing transdisciplinary and transcultural perspectives, the volume further discusses humour in regard to different cultural and political contexts, humour over the lifespan, in therapy and counselling, in pedagogical settings, in medicine and the workspace. The contributions also highlight the connections between humour and the COVID-19 pandemic and promise new inspiring insights. Researchers, practitioners and students in the fields of industrial and organisational psychology, positive psychology, organisational studies, future studies, health and occupational science and therapy, emotion sciences, management, leadership and human resource management will find the contributions highly topical, insightful and applicable to practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

The Relationship between Healthcare Providers and Preventive Practices: Narratives on Access to Cancer Screening.

Cancer screening programs are public health interventions beneficial to early diagnoses and timely treatments. Despite the investment of health policies in this area, many people in the recommended age groups do not participate. While the literature is mainly focused on obstacles and factors enabling access to health services, a gap from the point of view of the target population concerns healthcare providers. Within the "Miriade" research-action project, this study aims to explore the dimensions that mediate the relationship between healthcare providers and preventive practices through the narrations of 52 referents and healthcare providers involved in breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening. We conducted ad hoc narrative interviews and used theory-driven analysis based on Penchansky and Thomas' conceptualization and Saurman's integration of six dimensions of healthcare access: affordability, availability, accessibility, accommodation, acceptability and awareness. The results show that 21 thematic categories were representative of the access dimensions, and 5 thematic categories were not; thus, we have classified the latter as the dimension of affection. The results suggest trajectories through which psychological clinical intervention might be constructed concerning health, shared health decisions and access to cancer screening.

Intimate partner violence in Turkey

This chapter gives a brief explanation about intimate partner violence (IPV) in Turkey and explores the agreements and laws on the protection of the family. In order to understand the ongoing IPV problem, socio-cultural context, unwritten-unspoken cultural rules, and current policies in Turkey are discussed. In addition to that, the influence of gender roles, inter-generationally transferred family rules, social acceptance, and how they relate to IPV is briefly explained. The chapter also contains theoretical issues and a literature review on IPV. The importance of addressing the issue of IPV has increased dramatically due to the increase of time spent at home during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and this chapter lays the groundwork for a more significant discussion on IPV in Turkey. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Intimate partner violence in the United Kingdom

This chapter outlines some approaches to intimate partner violence across the four nations of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Although the legal infrastructures vary somewhat across the United Kingdom, as practitioners, we all face similar challenges and opportunities. Although our specialist IPV services remain somewhat patchy, our greatest resource is in the enhanced awareness of IPV and family violence among legal, social care, and health practitioners. In particular the recognition of unprocessed trauma and arousal dysregulation in some family relationships and in some episodes of IPV has created an opportunity for more creative responses and practices across legal and health and social care systems. Our challenges lie in developing our confidence with online working during and post the COVID pandemic, understanding cultural differences within our multicultural communities, and developing services for women and for LGBTQI+ couples. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Integrating Anti-Racism and Social Justice throughout the Chemical Engineering Curriculum to Create More Conscious Engineers

Traditional chemical engineering homework and in-class problems are often theoretical or simplified and lack societal context. However, a design made without context may only work for the demographics of the person(s) creating the design and unmarries the work of chemical engineers from the tangible impacts the field has on the world. In these contextless problems, students aren't given the opportunity to consider the positive or negative impact of their design on different demographic groups. Working towards de-centering western civilization, being sensitive to oppressions, integrating more cultural context and ethics into teaching, and reflecting on the role of identity in and outside chemical engineering will encourage critical thinking with an equity lens [1]. In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Black and anti-Asian racism and violence, institutes of higher learning, which have historically exacerbated systemic inequalities that disproportionately impact minorities and people of color, need to critically rethink and redesign curriculum to be more widely inclusive, accommodating, and thoughtful of social justice. Incorporating context, such as the context in human-centered design or service learning, provides relevancy for students and improves learning, engagement, and increased community engagement [2]-[3]. There are already examples of institutions and faculty incorporating social justice and environmental considerations into their curriculum through human-centered design and service learning and a few who are incorporating context into class examples [4]. However, we have yet to see evidence of incorporating anti-racist and social justice principles in a systematic and curriculum-wide way within a chemical engineering context. Thus, we present an approach to normalize anti-racism and social justice ideals throughout curriculum, rather than presenting them as one-off, disconnected ideas, such that these become virtues students gain and take with them into their professional careers after graduating. Our work is part of a larger effort of the Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ARDEI) Committee in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Northwestern University, which is comprised of undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. The larger goal of the committee is to work together to build and contribute to a Department that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive through actionable ideas that the Department can pursue together to make lasting change in its culture. Collectively we tackled the initiative of incorporating anti-racism and social justice into the undergraduate curriculum. We aimed to find a low-cost, low-barrier-to-entry method for faculty to include anti-racism and social justice into the classroom. Specifically, we advocate for the inclusion of these principles into homework problems and course project designs at all course levels. In order to achieve this goal and get faculty support, we decided to create a bank of example problems, spanning freshmen to senior courses, incorporating critical thinking or example problems with the context of anti-racism and social justice. We subsequently shared these example problems with the faculty and invited them to bring example problems from their courses to a workshop where we help them incorporate these principles into the desired problem. We also aimed to incorporate anti-racism and social justice principles into lectures. For example, in the senior design course, topics of environmental and social justice are worked into lectures along with the term-long process design project, where traditionally economic and technical evaluations were emphasized, now environmental and societal impact evaluations are required for decision making in the feasibility study. Though most faculty are not trained in anti-racism work, we hope to alleviate this challenge and lower the barrier by working with them to create these examples. Additionally, we must carefully manage our work to ensure the anti-racism and social justice ontexts and materials included do not lead to unintentional harm. We hope our work will serve as an example that other institutions can follow to incorporate anti-racism and social justice into the chemical engineering curriculum. However, we importantly note that this should not be the only actions taken by an institution to participate in anti-racism and social justice;otherwise the inclusion of anti-racism into courses will be seen as hypocritical if the institution is not also working towards making more equitable, inclusive, safe learning spaces. This work can be seen as one of many important steps in creating these improved learning spaces and ideally lead to more anti-racist and socially just engineers. © 2021 American Institute of Chemical Engineers. All rights reserved.

Designing Chatbots with Black Americans with Chronic Conditions: Overcoming Challenges against COVID-19

Recently, chatbots have been deployed in health care in various ways such as providing educational information, and monitoring and triaging symptoms. However, they can be ineffective when they are designed without a careful consideration of the cultural context of the users, especially for marginalized groups. Chatbots designed without cultural understanding may result in loss of trust and disengagement of the user. In this paper, through an interview study, we attempt to understand how chatbots can be better designed for Black American communities within the context of COVID-19. Along with the interviews, we performed design activities with 18 Black Americans that allowed them to envision and design their own chatbot to address their needs and challenges during the pandemic. We report our findings on our participants' needs for chatbots' roles and features, and their challenges in using chatbots. We then present design implications for future chatbot design for the Black American population. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Standardized test and the COVID-19 pandemic: A phenomenological multi-site case study of Singapore and Southern Nevada within a culturally responsive evaluation framework

As world governments scramble to contain the spread on Covid-19, temporary closure of schools was enforced, and on-site classes were converted to online or virtual versions within short notice. Yet, as dictated by world society, schools must prepare students for standardized tests in order to be acknowledged as legitimate. World rankings impose pressure on school systems to target high standardized test scores in order to gain and maintain economic viability for jurisdictions. This dissertation presents the pressures of high performance in standardized tests amidst a global pandemic as a problem to be researched within a context of sociopolitical and socioeconomic systems that marginalizes those at historically oppressed cultural intersections. The design of this phenomenological multi-site case study within a culturally responsive evaluation framework is aimed at exploring and interpreting voices of educational stakeholders at marginalized cultural intersections to surface underlying issues in education systems with heavy reliance on standardized test scores for accountability. In line with requirements of a phenomenological case study, the selected sites for the study are jurisdictions where I, as the researcher, have shared lived experiences with the research participants, namely Singapore and Southern Nevada. Additionally, the two jurisdictions share the common traits of being culturally diverse and cosmopolitan with high reliance on tourism. Within five chapters, this dissertation provides details of the study's background, review of the literature, methodology, findings, and discussion of the findings that includes aspects of cultural responsiveness that are present and absent in each jurisdiction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Online Promotion of Private Hospital Promoting Medical Tourism: A Multimodal Analysis from A Cultural Perspective

The medical tourism industry, which was seriously affected by the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID19), needs to give attention to its online promotional message strategy to boost the industry. Cultural variability is also crucial since the market for the medical tourism industry is global. However, studies involving cultural variability have only focused on examining single discourse mode, mainly the linguistic mode and overlooked the multimodal perspective. This study, therefore, examined the way in which the Prince Court Medical Centre (PCMC), a private hospital in Malaysia is presented and how the various modes in the hospital's website are combined to deliver promotional messages to international medical tourists. A total of three web pages from the website of PCMC were analysed using the Systemic Functional Theory framework. This study employed Halliday's metafunction theory (for language analysis and Kress and van Leeuwen's model for image analysis. The ways in which the multimodal features of the website reflect communicative style from the cultural perspective were also explored. Hall's (2000) cultural dimension of context dependency which classifies cultures into high-context and low-context cultures was used to present the analysis. The findings revealed that PCMC's hospital website has elements that are mainly encountered in low-context cultures such as elaborated code systems as well as direct, explicit, and highly structured messages. The findings help create awareness of communicative strategies in designing medical tourism websites that involve meaning making through texts and images and the possible cultural interpretation especially among copywriters, website designers or medical tourism stakeholders.

Antecedents of Vaccine Hesitancy in WEIRD and East Asian Contexts.

Following decreasing vaccination rates over the last two decades, understanding the roots of vaccine hesitancy has become a public health priority. Vaccine hesitancy is linked to scientifically unfounded fears around the MMR vaccine and autism which are often fuelled by misinformation spread on social media. To counteract the effects of misinformation about vaccines and in particular the falling vaccination rates, much research has focused on identifying the antecedents of vaccine hesitancy. As antecedents of vaccine hesitancy are contextually dependent, a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be successful in non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) populations, and even in certain (non-typical) WEIRD sub-populations. Successful interventions to reduce vaccine hesitancy must be based on understanding of the specific context. To identify potential contextual differences in the antecedents of vaccine hesitancy, we review research from three non-WEIRD populations in East Asia, and three WEIRD sub-populations. We find that regardless of the context, mistrust seems to be the key factor leading to vaccine hesitancy. However, the object of mistrust varies across WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations, and across WEIRD subgroups suggesting that effective science communication must be mindful of these differences.