Mediatisation, digital spaces and live performance: Understanding Indian stand-up comedy and evolving performance landscapes

This paper is a reflection on the points of convergence between live performance and the media within Indian stand-up comedy. Traditionally, live performance has been seen in opposition to the media. While the former is defined by spatial and temporal co-presence of the audience and spectators, the latter has neither (Auslander, 2012). While stand-up comedy is primarily live, digital and mass media are used extensively by comedians to build a professional reputation for themselves through their presence and participation on social media. However, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of performance art – including stand-up comedy – has moved online. That is, comedians are experimenting with the online media: Zoom, Instagram Live, Facebook Live and so on, to put up live performances that would otherwise have been performed within a comedy club or café. This paper derives its theoretical basis from Philip Auslander's postulation of liveness in a mediatised culture and digital liveness which ‘results from our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims [technology makes] on us' (2012: 13). The paper attempts a theoretical reflection on how to ‘read' a stand-up comedy performance for pedagogical purposes in these different contexts as the idea of liveness, mediatisation and our experience of the live evolves with time and context. © The Author(s) 2023.

Author multidisciplinarity and disciplinary roles in field of study networks.

When studying large research corpora, "distant reading" methods are vital to understand the topics and trends in the corresponding research space. In particular, given the recognised benefits of multidisciplinary research, it may be important to map schools or communities of diverse research topics, and to understand the multidisciplinary role that topics play within and between these communities. This work proposes Field of Study (FoS) networks as a novel network representation for use in scientometric analysis. We describe the formation of FoS networks, which relate research topics according to the authors who publish in them, from corpora of articles in which fields of study can be identified. FoS networks are particularly useful for the distant reading of large datasets of research papers when analysed through the lens of exploring multidisciplinary science. In an evolving scientific landscape, modular communities in FoS networks offer an alternative categorisation strategy for research topics and sub-disciplines, when compared to traditional prescribed discipline classification schemes. Furthermore, structural role analysis of FoS networks can highlight important characteristics of topics in such communities. To support this, we present two case studies which explore multidisciplinary research in corpora of varying size and scope; namely, 6323 articles relating to network science research and 4,184,011 articles relating to research on the COVID-19-pandemic.

Multi-, Inter-, and Transdisciplinarity within the Public Health Workforce: A Scoping Review to Assess Definitions and Applications of Concepts.

In light of the current public health challenges, calls for more inter- and transdisciplinarity in the public health workforce are increasing, particularly to respond to complex and intersecting health challenges, such as those presented by the climate crisis, emerging infectious diseases, or military conflict. Although widely used, it is unclear how the concepts of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity are applied with respect to the public health workforce. We conducted a scoping review and qualitative content analysis to provide an overview of how the concepts of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity are defined and applied in the academic literature about the public health workforce. Of the 1957 records identified, 324 articles were included in the review. Of those, 193, 176, and 53 mentioned the concepts of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity, respectively. Overall, 44 articles provided a definition. Whilst definitions of multidisciplinarity were scarce, definitions of inter- and transdisciplinarity were more common and richer, highlighting the aim of the collaboration and the blurring and dissolution of disciplinary boundaries. A better understanding of the application of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity is an important step to implementing these concepts in practice, including in institutional structures, academic curricula, and approaches in tackling public health challenges.

COVID-19 survivors: Multi-disciplinary efforts in psychiatry and medical humanities for long-term realignment.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic represents an enduring transformation in health care and education with the advancement of smart universities, telehealth, adaptive research protocols, personalized medicine, and self-controlled or artificial intelligence-controlled learning. These changes, of course, also cover mental health and long-term realignment of coronavirus disease 2019 survivors. Fatigue or anxiety, as the most prominent psychiatric "long coronavirus disease 2019" symptoms, need a theory-based and empirically-sound procedure that would help us grasp the complexity of the condition in research and treatment. Considering the systemic character of the condition, such strategies have to take the whole individual and their sociocultural context into consideration. Still, at the moment, attempts to build an integrative framework for providing meaning and understanding for the patients of how to cope with anxiety when they are confronted with empirically reduced parameters (e.g., severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus type 2) or biomarkers (e.g., the FK506 binding protein 5) are rare. In this context, multidisciplinary efforts are necessary. We therefore join in a plea for an establishment of 'translational medical humanities' that would allow a more straightforward intervention of humanities (e.g., the importance of the therapist variable, continuity, the social environment, etc) into the disciplinary, medial, political, and popular cultural debates around health, health-care provision, research (e.g., computer scientists for simulation studies), and wellbeing.

Managing Perceived Loneliness and Social-Isolation Levels for Older Adults: A Survey with Focus on Wearables-Based Solutions.

As an inevitable process, the number of older adults is increasing in many countries worldwide. Two of the main problems that society is being confronted with more and more, in this respect, are the inter-related aspects of feelings of loneliness and social isolation among older adults. In particular, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its associated restrictions have exacerbated the loneliness and social-isolation problems. This paper is first and foremost a comprehensive survey of loneliness monitoring and management solutions, from the multidisciplinary perspective of technology, gerontology, socio-psychology, and urban built environment. In addition, our paper also investigates machine learning-based technological solutions with wearable-sensor data, suitable to measure, monitor, manage, and/or diminish the levels of loneliness and social isolation, when one also considers the constraints and characteristics coming from social science, gerontology, and architecture/urban built environments points of view. Compared to the existing state of the art, our work is unique from the cross-disciplinary point of view, because our authors' team combines the expertise from four distinct domains, i.e., gerontology, social psychology, architecture, and wireless technology in addressing the two inter-related problems of loneliness and social isolation in older adults. This work combines a cross-disciplinary survey of the literature in the four aforementioned domains with a proposed wearable-based technological solution, introduced first as a generic framework and, then, exemplified through a simple proof of concept with dummy data. As the main findings, we provide a comprehensive view on challenges and solutions in utilizing various technologies, particularly those carried by users, also known as wearables, to measure, manage, and/or diminish the social isolation and the perceived loneliness among older adults. In addition, we also summarize the identified solutions which can be used for measuring and monitoring various loneliness- and social isolation-related metrics, and we present and validate, through a simple proof-of-concept mechanism, an approach based on machine learning for predicting and estimating loneliness levels. Open research issues in this field are also discussed.

Navigating Multidisciplinary Research Using Field of Study Networks

This work proposes Field of Study networks as a novel network representation for use in scientometric analysis. We describe the formation of Field of Study (FoS) networks, which relate research topics according to the authors who publish in them, from corpora of articles where fields of study can be identified. FoS networks are particularly useful for the distant reading of large datasets of research papers, through the lens of exploring multidisciplinary science. To support this, we include case studies which explore multidisciplinary research in corpora of varying size and scope;namely, 891 articles relating to network science research and 166,000 COVID-19 related articles. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Ping-pong of the older adult: (Re)think integrated care

Background and Aim: This study aimed to understand and analyze the experiences and knowledge of various health professionals, the social area and an informal caregiver on the integration of care for the elderly in a pandemic context. Method: a qualitative investigation was carried out in which seven participants with distinct but complementary roles in the essence of care participated. Data collection was carried out through the communications of the participants of the seminar "The ping-pong of our elderly - (Re)think, (re)build and Integrate Care" promoted by the Portuguese Association of Integrated Care (PAFIC) within the scope of the VIII Value Conference of the Portuguese Association of Hospital Administrators (APAH). Results: From the participants' perspective, the integration of care in the person's path is fundamental, and for this, it is necessary to strengthen the articulation between the National Health Service and the social. As well as centering care on the person, allied to the community matrix that leads to the transformation of the current organizational model of care, to the change in management models that have remained unchanged for many years. The integration of people's care depends not only on the activity in the health area but is also conditioned by other sectors of activity, and therefore it is important to assess the role that civil society can play in providing care. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic allowed the reflection on the care of the older people and how partnerships and articulation strategies between the different levels of care, health, social and community could be enhanced.

Covid-19 as an opportunity to teach epistemic insight: findings from exploratory workshops on Covid-19 and science with students aged 15-17 in England.

The contributions of science and scientists to combatting Covid-19 have been at the forefront of media attention throughout 2020 and early 2021, exposing the public to the processes of science in an unprecedented manner. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of scientists working collaboratively with other disciplines in informing thinking about a complex, evolving real-world problem. This draws attention to recent efforts, both in the UK and internationally, towards curriculum reform integrating epistemic insight (knowledge about knowledge, including about what disciplines are and how they interact), with significant implications for the teaching of science in schools. We present findings from two exploratory workshops with 15-17-year-old students in England on the role of science during the pandemic. We found that the workshops provided space for students to begin to develop epistemic insight regarding how science informs decision-making in dialogue with other disciplines. We make recommendations proposing pedagogical approaches using live, complex, real-world problems to address issues around understandings of the nature of science, misinformation, trust and participation in science.