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Online education made the digital divide visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on gender, economic class, locations, and different types of opportunities. Bangladeshi female varsity narratives on gender role stereotypes, economic conditions, household characteristics, family atmosphere, and online teaching strengthen the need for intersectional feminist insights. The study further examines online education potentials and pathways for more online education along intersectional lines. Qualitative methods help gauge how female university students shape their experiences with online education, and emphasize the epistemological importance of voice and women's perspectives for deeper understanding of their experiences. An ‘auto-ethnographic' approach undergirds the paper's analysis, elevating reflexive demonstrations and recommendations for more inclusive online education for female university student. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023.
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This paper draws on a community-based participatory action research project located in Seattle - before and during the COVID-19 pandemic - to examine the unanticipated impact that the pandemic has had on reducing barriers for survivors of domestic violence seeking protection through the legal system. We draw on interviews with survivors and victim advocates, along with autoethnographic participant observation during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings, to trace survivors' experiences navigating the DVPO process before and after its transition from an analogue to digital system. We situate this research at the intersection of legal and digital geographic scholarship to analyze how the law and digital technologies reinforce the spatial operation of power and exclusion, while they simultaneously provide emancipatory potential for women's experiences of security, legal subjectivity and emotional personhood. By focusing on how the courts' transition to a digital system affects the emotional personhood and legal subjectivity of domestic violence survivors, this paper advances feminist calls within legal and digital geographies scholarship that encourage more sustained engagement with feminist thought to understand the varied effects of the law and digital technologies – respectively – on gendered bodies.
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PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic has proven that how supply chain management (SCM) can become a crucial process for sustainability of the world's production/service. The global supply chain crisis during pandemic has affected most of the sectors. Home and personal care products manufacturers are among them. In this study (1) the problems at SCM of personal and home care products manufacturers during pandemic are discussed with the help of medium-size manufacturer and (2) the factors affecting suppliers' performance for the relevant sector during COVID-19 are analyzed comprehensively.Design/methodology/approachThe importance of the factors is evaluated using fuzzy cognitive maps that can help to reveal hidden casual relationships with the help of expert knowledge. In order to eliminate subjectivity due to usage of expert knowledge, the maps are trained with a hybrid learning approach that consists of Non-linear Learning and Extended Great Deluge Algorithms to increase robustness of the analysis.FindingsThe findings of the study indicate that the factors such as general quality level of products/services, compliance to delivery time, communication skills and total production capacity of suppliers have been crucial factors during pandemic.Originality/valueWhile the implementation of the hybrid learning approach on supply chain can fill the gap in the relevant literature, the promising results of the study can prove the convenience of the methodology to model the of complex systems like supply chain processes.
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Born from the force of enchantment, from the struggle for free territories and in a territory crossed by the logistics of developmental projects, Santa Rosa dos Pretos quilombola territory, in the municipality of Itapecuru-Mirim, state of Maranhao, Brazil. Anacleta speaks! She herself carries out systemic and daily analyzes on autonomy, resistance and healing in the face of a society marked by the myth of racial democracy, by racism. Anacleta while narrating everyday ways of resisting and existing, she shows us how black women are from the margins making political use of the body to exist in the face of the paradigm of racial exclusion in Brazil. Black, Afro-Pindoramic voices give birth to a new day daily, hope. These voices narrate dynamic territories guided by other ontologies, which emanate from the relationships with the enchanted ones of Tambor de Mina. We share here an insurgent interview carried out on January 20, 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic caused by Covid-19. The life story will be told by Dona Anacleta herself, a conversation that was carried out by the WhatsApp application and transcribed in full. "To change society the way we want? It's fighting without fear, without fear of being a woman!".
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The present text offers an approach from various theoretical and empirical references close to academic libraries;around the challenges they face from their object of research: the users of information. A rela-tionship is proposed that can be aimed at a dialogue with digital culture and the comunication field, see-king to establish a framework of encounter based on the adaptation that academic libraries have had to incrementally complex information environments. The circulation of information from various sources and approaches in everyday life represents a multiple challenge to produce knowledge and in the case of libraries. The pandemic by COVID-19 puts the subjectivity of the information process back at the center of the discussion, which is accentuated in contexts where uncertainty and the multiplicity of meanings prevail to interpret it. From a literature review and the selection of models of informational behavior and user studies, clues were detected to study digital culture from a research perspective of academic libra-ries. The argumentation developed allowed to detect clues to find an entry framework for the study of users from an interdisciplinary construction between communication, health and information sciences.
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PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic transformed angel investment meetings from in-person to online. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether this move affected angel investors' perception of subjective behavioral cues in pitch sessions within a large Brazilian angel group.Design/methodology/approachThis study followed an exploratory approach using a triangulation process that combined observation, documents and interviews. Data collected by observation, document studies, and interviews were themed, coded, and organized during the research.FindingsThe move from in-person to online pitches did not seem to affect levels of trustworthiness or arrogance as angels assessed more message content during Q&A sessions. Body movement, gestures and "eye gaze” (i.e. the look on a presenter's face) played a central role in passion assessment during in-person meetings. Body language was highly limited during online sessions and tone of voice became the main source of passion assessment.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings of this study suggest that pitches at online meetings affect angel investors' perception of founders' subjective cues, particularly cues pertaining to passion. Entrepreneurs should be trained to convey passion with tone of voice and to improve their body language in the context of webcam use. The interviews with volunteer sampling were subject to volunteer bias. Additionally, the findings may be affected by cultural context.Practical implicationsA practical contribution of this study is to highlight the need for entrepreneurs to be trained for online pitches. In an online setting, body language is limited, but it is still possible to use one's hands and tone of voice to connect better to investors.Originality/valueThis study is unique because it captures the transition of angel investment meetings from in-person affairs before the pandemic to online meetings during the pandemic crisis. These unique circumstances provided a real-world laboratory to observe founders' subjective cue effects on angel investment decision-making.
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Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand's lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.
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This article was inspired by a reflection on what unfolded with the COVID-19 virus, especially how it brought to light the interconnectedness of individual and collective well-being. This calls for a reassessment of the family therapy approach, which has traditionally focussed on the internal dynamics of the family to explain problems faced by individuals inside the family system without taking into account social, political and historical aspects. This approach, which is referred to in the article as ‘familialism,' is challenged using the relational philosophy put forward by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and a fresh viewpoint is also given from the concept of the ‘outside.' This outside perspective seeks to prevent the family system from closing in on itself, allowing for the creation of open systems. By doing so, it is argued, it is possible to incorporate different elements of the social, political and historical order in therapeutic practice and prevent underestimating the complexity of the human experience. © 2023 Australian Association of Family Therapy (AAFT).
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Prediction plays a vital role in every branch of our contemporary lives. While the credibility of quantitative simulations through mathematical modeling may seem to be universal, how they are perceived and embedded in policy processes may vary by society. Investigating the ecology of quantitative prediction tools, this article articulates the cultural specificity of Japanese society through the concept of Jasanoff's "civic epistemology.” Taking COVID-19 and nuclear disasters as examples, this article examines how predictive simulations are mobilized, contested, and abandoned. In both cases, current empirical observation eventually replaces predictive future simulations, and mechanical application of preset criteria substitutes political judgment. These analyses suggest that the preferred register of objectivity in Japan—one of the constitutive dimensions of civic epistemology—consists not in producing numerical results, but in precluding human judgment. Such public calls to eliminate human agency both in knowledge and in policy-making can be a distinct character of Japanese civic epistemology, which may explain why Japan repeatedly withdraws from predictive simulations. It implies the possibility that Western societies' faith in human judgment should not be taken for granted, but explained.
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In this paper, I describe how my painting practice restored and sustained a more coherent and vitalized sense of self during the isolation, loneliness and sense of unrealness, dislocation, and lost world order brought about by Covid. I describe how the intersubjective and physical process of painting, and the nonverbal, embodied experience of creating art re-situated me in a world that felt real and allowed me to know and reflect on emotional experiences not available verbally until represented in visual, concrete form. I present a brief clinical example to illustrate how my artistic practice during Covid decisively informed an appreciation of the importance of a co-constructed selfobject experience that recognized how essential a patient's own affirmed creativity was for enhancing her sense of vitality, agency, and possibility of positive change.
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In this work for academics, international contributors in education, communication, new media, digital learning, and organization studies describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on academics in higher education, and their institutions. The book highlights the personal and professional experiences of academics across varying career stages. Four chapters are devoted to personal stories of sustained resilience in the face of the obstacles and uncertainty of the pandemic. Others chapters demonstrate collective resilience and collaboration, with examples from around the world. In addition, the book presents a conceptual framework, the Academic Resilience Model. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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As the Covid-19 pandemic caused schools, workplaces, and childcare centres to close, pressures in the home increased. Much of the additional unpaid work required under these conditions was done by women. Most women's magazines at this time urged women to stay positive and develop wellbeing routines to help them flourish. This approach reinforces normative neoliberal subjectivity with its roots in therapeutic culture and the happiness industry. While the focus on self-care may seem empowering, it puts more pressure on women in times of upheaval. Based on a thematic analysis of pandemic-related content in Australia's most popular women's magazine, The Australian Women's Weekly, we identified three key themes: ‘finding the silver lining', ‘making lifestyle choices', and ‘recognising hardships and social divides'. While self-responsibilising discourses were prominent, some articles acknowledged the broader structural issues impacting women, revealing a tension between competing discourses. © The Author(s) 2023.
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The pressures brought about by the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020 have amplified the significance of academic resilience and highlight the importance of a shared insights into academics' experiences. The responses to academic work within this context has received little research attention despite its universality during the pandemic. Failing to recognise, or 'invisibilising' the roles and needs of academics during a pandemic, is a significant concern. This chapter explores this uncharted terrain, and presents stories of resilience-being a postdoc in a foreign country (de los Reyes), negotiating (yet another) contract (Mahat), navigating research in a different context (Cohrssen), and digital engagement in academia (Blannin)-from academics in different career stages and global contexts. These stories provide points of reflection for those navigating the complex world of academia during these uncertain times. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
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PurposeGiven the disruption of the COIVD-19 pandemic in higher education, this study seeks to understand possible changes in students' ratings and textual reviews of higher education institutions posted on Niche College Rankings (niche.com) prior to and after the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThis study utilized a text analytics technique to identify the positive and negative keywords of students' sentiments expressed in their textual reviews provided on niche.com. After identifying the positive and negative sentimental keywords, this study performed ordinal logistic regressions and analyzed the statistical effects of these positive and negative sentimental keywords on the types of student ratings of a higher education institution.FindingsResults from 15,666 online reviews provided by students on niche.com indicate the following. First, eight positive sentimental keywords such as "outstanding” and "love” have a significant impact on students' positive ratings of a higher education institution prior to COVID-19, whereas eight positive sentimental keywords such as "amazing” and helpful” have a significant impact on students' positive ratings of a higher education institution after COVID-19. Second, twenty-eight negative sentimental keywords such as "difficult” and "frustrating” have a significant impact on students' negative ratings of a higher education institution prior to COVID-19, whereas thirty negative sentimental keywords such as "complex” and "hate” have a significant impact on student negative ratings of a higher education institution after COVID-19.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first few studies investigating higher education institution ratings and reviews provided by students. Additionally, this study provides an understanding of student positive and negative sentiments expressed in textual reviews posted prior to and after the COVID-19 pandemic. By doing so, this study provides a basis for future research seeking to understand student textual reviews of higher education institutions. Additionally, this study offers higher education administrators some recommendations that may foster student positive campus experience while minimizing negative sentiments.
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Cosmopolitanism claims to be the most just and inclusive of mainstream approaches to the ethics and practice of world order, given its commitment to human interconnection, peace, equality, diversity, and rights, and its concern with the many globalised pathologies that entrench injustice and vulnerability across borders. Yet it has largely remained oblivious to the agency, power, and value of non-human life on a turbulent and active Earth. Without rejecting its commitments to justice for human beings, the article challenges its humanism as both morally and politically inadequate to the situation of the Anthropocene, exemplified by the simultaneous crises of climate change, mass extinction, and the COVID-19 pandemic. In answer, the article develops new grounds and principles for an interspecies cosmopolitanism, exploring how we can reimagine its ontological foundations by creating new grounding images of subjectivity, existential unity, institutional organisation, and ordering purpose. These, in turn, can support political and institutional projects to secure the rights of ecosystems and people to flourish and persist through an increasingly chaotic epoch of human dominance and multispecies vulnerability across the Anthropocene Earth.
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The UK response to Covid-19 has been unusually complex in its ever-shifting classifications of clinical vulnerability. By May 2020, 2.2 million people had been identified as 'clinically extremely vulnerable' (CEV) and were asked to 'shield' at home for over four months. To adhere to this strict guidance, they were enfolded within the patchy infrastructure of the 'shielding programme'. However, membership of the 'shielded list' has changed-often without warning or explanation-through time and across space. Drawing on policy and evidentiary documents, government speeches, reports, press conferences and media analysis of Covid-19 coverage between March 2020 and April 1, 2021, this paper traces the shifting delineations of clinical vulnerability in the UK response across three lockdowns. It argues that the complexities and confusions generated by the transience of the CEV category have fed into forms of biosociality that have been as much about making practical sense of government guidance as a form of mutual support amid crisis. This uncertainty has not eased as restrictions have been relaxed and vaccines rolled out. Instead, tracing individual immune response has become a burgeoning industry as 'the shielded' navigate the uneasy demands of taking 'personal responsibility' rather than being protected by 'the rules'.
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This paper undertakes an analysis of publicly posted videos sharing debtors' strategies for responding to overzealous credit collection agencies during the earliest stages of the pandemic lockdown. It examines how Chinese debtors and credit collection callers responded to the uncertainties surrounding the handling of personal debts when the debtors' economic activities are heavily restricted. Both parties invoked different imagined collectivities to establish their own moral justifications with regards to debt obligations, state regulations and family values. The paper argues for a recognition of the capacity of debt to collectivize people through loose discursive formations that remoralize debt, recasting the defaulter status as morally acceptable and reshaping their defaulter identities. The imaginative and discursive space built upon debt's collectivizing potential presents a valuable analytical tool for understanding the social dimensions of debt and the dynamic emerging of financial subjectivities in the contemporary era. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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This article analyses Ricardo Talesnik's play and film (directed by Fernando Ayala) La fiaca [Idleness] and its critique of the notion of work. Talesnik denounces how modern disciplinary institutions form the workforce and a way-of-life-to-work. He questions the work-system by critiquing the commodity-form, standardised time represented in the money-form, worker subjectivity as a national citizen, and Schuld (debt/guilt). Talesnik's critique is developed when the play's main character performs a "Duchamp-like” strike by refusing to go to work. When analysed with Marx's and Foucault's theories of production and power, La fiaca could be read as a play that supports the abolition of work to question modern life under late capitalism. Therefore, what this play effectively critiques is the commodification of everyday life, which leaves no option but to create another way of life by interrupting the process of capitalist production of value and questioning the primacy of labour. Talesnik's play shows the coercive forces of the capitalist mode of production, but also the institutional framework built to correct anyone who dares to challenge it. This makes La fiaca a crucial intervention that helps us understand current post-work criticism and the present tension between work and social reproduction in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This article examines how the death of Li Wenliang, in February 2020, served as an affordance for Chinese netizens to engage with their intimate sense of themselves as political subjects through the interrogative process of scalar inquiry. Li, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who was sanctioned by Chinese authorities in 2019 for warning friends about the virus, was also an eminently normative and successful Han Chinese citizen who many saw as a reflection of themselves. His persecution, public humiliation, and death thus indexed the vulnerability of even the most compliant subjects and triggered an unprecedented public response that included both grief and outrage. Although largely censored within hours, this response continued to emerge throughout the year in a public mega-thread on his Weibo "Wailing Wall.” This article draws on an alternative archive of censored messages on Li's Weibo page—usually described as an affective, apolitical space—to demonstrate how the Wailing Wall also becomes a unique sociomoral space in which people collaboratively reflect upon their sense of themselves as embodied subjects. Scalar inquiry, I suggest, thus emerges as a continual, collaborative, and simultaneously personal and political process of interrogating citizenship and nationhood vis-à-vis the remembered past, the experienced present, and the anticipated future. © 2023 by the American Anthropological Association.
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This paper employs Michel Foucault's History of Sexuaity: Confessions of the Flesh to shed light on the perplexing phenomenon of vaccine (mandate) resistance. It argues that vaccine (mandate) resistance, while seemingly irresponsible and selfish, is entangled with the same modes of 'truth-telling' that have been part of the basic structure of modern Western governance for centuries. The paper begins by introducing the problem of vaccinate (mandate) resistance as a pedagogical problem for educators who want to teach social responsibility as informed by sound scientific knowledge and research. It then outlines the triad of knowledge/science, power/governance, and subjectivity/being at the heart of Foucault's research as a necessary frame for understanding the sociopolitical and historical entanglements of science in modern Western governance. Lastly, the paper traces Foucault's study of early Christian writers such as St. Augustine in terms of how they help establish basic practices of truth-telling that still impact how subjects relate to power today. The ultimate goal of the paper is to show how exploration of the social, historical, and political realities of science related issues are vital for understanding issues of collective existence today.