Of the many opportunities and affordances that mobile technologies bring to our day-to-day lives, the ability to cheat physical separation and remain accessible to each other—in an instant—also brings pressure to bear on well-established social conventions as to how we should act when we are engaged with others in shared spaces. In this paper we explore some ethical dimensions of mobile communication by considering the manner in which individuals in everyday contexts balance interpretations of emergent social conventions (...) with personal desires to connect in the moment. As we later discuss, the decisions made in response to a ringing mobile phone or flashing text message emerge from consequential versus deontological ethical frames used to determine what to do versus what we ought to do. This is particularly true in western and North American cultural contexts from which our data are collected. Using Goffman's dramaturgy, we suggest that these conflicts occurring on an individual level provide evidence of social structure, and are simultaneously entwined with our less obvious ruminations on the maintenance of social order. (shrink)

This article describes a project involving 13 community focus groups on the topic of anti-racism and belonging where the researchers concluded each group with a robust discussion about how the group would prefer to receive the findings from the project. Analysis of this data, existing literature, and the practical experiences of the researchers revealed that while there are multiple “bridges” researchers can take to connect their research with community-level users, and although it is desirable to offer tailored approaches for specific (...) audiences, there are significant barriers and challenges for truly effective engagement. By describing the various factors that determined which bridges were taken, we hope to help other community-based researchers imagine new ways of mobilizing knowledge, consider promising practices to guide the connection of knowledge to the community and shine a light on the very real constraints of time, budget, personnel, and university system considerations that impact knowledge mobilization decisions. (shrink)

E-commerce conceivable future trade, consumption, and service is a new digital employer mode. Therefore, in order to decorate the customary natural environment of operation, it is quintessential to get rid of the preferred desktop in the true field, create a social logistics and transportation administration computing device with commodity agents and distributors as the key features, and mix freight logistics, business enterprise approach waft and data waft advertising and marketing, and advertising and marketing organically. The notion of e-commerce logistics looks (...) alongside the enchantment vogue of neighborhood technological knowledge and social demand. It is an integral part of ending e-commerce authentic economic value. All kinds of cell networks clear up the problem of data flow communication; in the technological know-how of telephone network, digital cost solves the bother of capital flow; at present, logistics is however a long-standing problem of e-commerce. Logistics has grown to be the last and entirely bottleneck of e-commerce. If logistics cannot adapt to the enchantment of e-commerce, it may also additionally lead to the slow enchantment of e-commerce. The purpose of this paper is to supply an Internet of things e-commerce logistics cloud provider platform based totally absolutely on cell communication, which can be combined with e-commerce and beautify the transport tempo of e-commerce. This paper moreover optimizes the e-commerce logistics system, so that it can combine with e-commerce to increase out the distribution of goods, the distribution tempo of e-commerce is doubled, and e-commerce can in a similar fashion develop rapidly. (shrink)

In this paper, we take a framing perspective to corporate environmental irresponsibility and focus it on the community of place as one among the most affected, yet rarely examined, stakeholders. In particular, we take a framing microprocess perspective, to study how interactions within a community of place affect a mobilization after corporate environmental irresponsibility. We elicit two framing microprocess, losses display and scale augmentation, and show how they significantly, though differently, affect a mobilization. In so doing, we enrich our understanding (...) of how communities of place mobilize, the types of, and venues, where interactions take place in a community of place—and how these affect a mobilization. (shrink)

Communication barriers long-associated with ideographs, including combinatorial grapholinguistic complexity, computational encoding–decoding complexity, and technological rendering and deployment, become trivialized through advancements in interoperable smart mobile digital devices. Such technologies impart unprecedented extended-reality user hazards only mitigated by unprecedented colloquial and bureaucratic societal norms. Digital age norms thus influence natural ideographic language origins and evolution in ways novel to human history.

We take a philosophical look at solitude and community through the phenomenon of the iPod. We observed that this tiny technological wonder is at one and the same time a possibility of shutting oneself off from the world in real or imagined solitude, and a way we can find ourselves in the company of like-minded others, sharing experiences as a member of a community. The first part of the article deals with how iPod enables solitude. Second, we look at the (...) other side of the coin and explore what it means to be in a community of iPodders. Finally, we describe a fascinating phenomenon that, for us, exemplifies the concepts of solitude and community. CLUBISMO MÓVEL: IPOD, SOLITUDE E COMUNIDADEResumoObservamos, sob a perspectiva filosófica, a solitude e a vida em comunidade a partir do fenômeno do iPod. Argumentamos que esta pequena maravilha tecnológica é, ao mesmo tempo, a possibilidade de isolar-se do resto do mundo numa solidão real ou imaginada, e uma maneira de encontrarmo-nos na companhia de outros curtidores, compartilhando experiências como membro de uma comunidade. A primeira parte do artigo trata de como o iPod permite a solitude. Em segundo lugar, olharemos para o outro lado da moeda e exploraremos o que significa estar em uma comunidade de iPodders. Finalmente, descrevemos um fenômeno fascinante que, para nós, exemplifica os conceitos de solitude e comunidade. (shrink)

Emigration from Poland has a rich and complicated history. Also nowadays, international mobility is still a constant element present in the life of Polish society and in worldwide trends. Migrating beyond the borders of a given country has become a feature of contemporary citizens of the world. The new global mobility trends are: globalization, acceleration, diversity and transnationality, feminization. In reference to the issue of the volume, major emphasis was placed on the first of these trends, i.e. globalization. The purpose (...) of this paper is to show how migrants have communicated with members of their families during cumulative dislocations from the late 19th century to modern times. Particular attention was paid to the ways of maintaining contact with family and the country of origin. (shrink)

A mobile-based messaging app (MMA) was implemented as a teachers’ community of practice in the Indian context through a large-scale educational initiative. The development process adopted a Design-based Research approach to test underlying theories in real-world settings. The researchers theorised the pedagogical affordances of the MMA Telegram using Davis and Chouinard's theoretical framework of affordances, defined as a relational process among users, designers, the environment, and the artefact. This paper discusses the iterative design process in detail. The findings showed (...) that the MMA encourages accessibility and for teachers to showcase their practice in the online community of practice and refuses (does not allow) the development of the online community of practice as an epistemic community. (shrink)

Few studies have been conducted into the use of mobile technologies at community-based organizations. Community sport organizations (CSOs) typically operate within a defined geographic area and rely on the primary support of volunteers. Based on the characteristics of mobile-based information services, this article proposes a model that provides a guide for CSOs to classify mobile applications through four mobile utility factors and three innovation adoption determinants (cost, skill requirements, and compatibility). The model is supported visually by (...) the use of Microsoft Excel generated “radar graphs” to illustrate desired practical and actual performance. The contribution of the theoretical model is one of providing a vehicle for evaluating mobile technology applications by CSOs to identify the potential effectiveness of mobile devices, particularly in a preadoption scenario. (shrink)

This study aims to reveal patterns of e-petition co-signing behavior that are indicative of the political mobilization of online “communities”. We discuss the case of We the People, a US national experiment in the use of social media technology to enable users to propose and solicit support for policy suggestions to the White House. We apply Baumgartner and Jones's work on agenda setting and punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that policy issues may lie dormant for periods of time until some event (...) triggers attention from the media, interest groups, and elected representatives. In the case study presented, we focus on 21 petitions initiated during the week after the Sandy Hook shooting in opposition to gun control or in support of policy proposals that are alternatives to gun control, which we view as mobilized efforts to maintain stability and equilibrium in a policy system threatening to change. Using market basket analysis and social network analysis we found a core group of petitions in the “support law-abiding gun owners” theme that were highly connected and four “communities” of e-petitioners mobilizing in opposition to change in gun control policies and in favor of alternative proposals. (shrink)

The changing conditions for the accumulation and transmission of knowledge in the age of multimedia networks make it inevitable that old philosophical problems become formulated in a new light. Above all, the problem of the unity of knowledge is once again a topical issue. The situation-dependent acquisition of knowledge that is made possible by mobile learning transcends the boundaries of traditional disciplines, linking the domains of text, diagram, and picture. Database integration and multimedia search become central problems in the (...) epistemology of the 21st century, while handheld devices are emerging as vital technologies for supporting collaborative learning. -- Kristóf Nyíri has published widely on Wittgenstein, Austrian intellectual history, and the philosophy of communication. He directs the interdisciplinary research program COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY, conducted jointly by the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Westel Mobile Telecommunications, Budapest. (shrink)

This article investigates how text messages and mobile phone calls interrelate as parts of continuous communication sequences. Based on the recorded mobile communication of 14-year-olds in Denmark and a conversation-analytic approach, the article will show that after a text message in a continuous communication sequence, four different types of conversation may follow: the answer, the reminder, the resumption of conversation and the confirmation. In itself, the change from text message to conversation requires no interactional efforts (...) from the participants. However, changes of mode are related to the different communicative possibilities the text message and the phone call offer: text messages and calls have distinct formal qualities that govern their uses, and participants in a given sequence move between the two modes, exploiting the potential of each as they ascribe meaning to the written and spoken media. (shrink)

The major aim of this research is to reopen the study of the subjective experience of upward mobility and to incorporate race and gender into our vision of the process. It examines evidence from a social science study of upward mobility among 200 Black and white professional-managerial women in the Memphis, Tennessee metropolitan area. The experiences of the women paint a different picture from the image of the mobility process that remains from scholarship conducted 20 to 30 years ago on (...) white males. Relationships with family of origin, partners, children, friends, and the wider community shaped the way these women envision and accomplish mobility and the way they sustain themselves as professionals and managers. (shrink)

Reporting systems based on mobile technologies and feedback from regular citizens are becoming increasingly popular, especially as far as protection of environmental and cultural heritage is concerned. Reporting life-threatening situations, such as sudden natural disasters or traffic accidents, belongs to the same class of problems and could be aided by IT systems of a similar architecture. Designing and developing systems for reporting life-threatening situations is not a trivial task, requiring close cooperation between software developers and experts in different domains, (...) who could possibly find industrially recognized languages and notations difficult. Thus, the question is whether using simplified graphical domain-specific languages (SGDSLs) could help in creating a common communication platform. It has been revealed that domain experts have a preference for such languages as they offer good learnability, readability and ability to focus on the idea of application. The perspective of developers (technical persons) is introduced on the basis of feedback obtained from 84 students of Computer Science at the Lublin University of Technology, who attended comprehensive workshops followed by an anonymous survey. All participants received theoretical and practical training in modeling mobile software using the same set of languages as domain experts. An analysis of the results revealed that opinions expressed by technical and nontechnical persons concerning SGDSLs oriented on defining a flow of actions is consistent. Most respondents claimed that such languages might be valuable as tools for creating a common communication platform. (shrink)

There is a trend toward the use of predictive systems in communications networks. At the systems and network management level predictive capabilities are focused on anticipating network faults and performance degradation. Simultaneously, mobile communication networks are being developed with predictive location and tracking mechanisms. The interactions and synergies between these systems present a new set of problems. A new predictive network management framework is developed and examined. The interaction between a predictive mobile network and the proposed network (...) management system is discussed. The Rapidly Deployable Radio Network is used as a specific example to illustrate these interactions. (shrink)

With the increasing use of mobile devices and new technologies, electronic payments, such as near field communication mobile payments, are gaining traction and gradually replacing the currency-based cash payment methods. Despite multiple initiatives by various parties to encourage mobile payments, adoption rates in developing countries have remained low. The purpose of this research is to explore the prime determinants of NFC mobile-payment adoption intention and to develop a model of mobile payment adoption that includes (...) perceived risk as one of the major elements by extending the UTAUT2 theory components. An online survey was used to acquire data from 370 NFC mobile payments users for the current study. To validate the components and their correlations, structural equation modelling was implemented. According to the findings, performance expectancy, hedonic motivation, social influence, and facilitating conditions have substantial impacts on the consumers’ intentions to adopt NFC mobile payments. Effort expectancy and PR were reported to have no considerable effects on the adoption intention. In addition, INFC is revealed to be a major mediator between the associations of the actual adoption of NFC mobile payment with PE, HM, and SI. The findings of the study would assist providers and marketers in better understanding of the consumers’ behavior, designing effective marketing strategies to enhance the consumers’ positive intentions, and achieving the mass adoption of NFC mobile payments in different environmental contexts. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Long before COVID-19 made social distancing familiar, people with cystic fibrosis (CF) already practiced such behaviors. CF is held up as a classic example of genetic disease, yet people with CF are also susceptible to bacteria from the environment and from other CF patients. Starting in the 1980s, a bacterial epidemic in the CF population highlighted clashing priorities of connection, physical safety, and environmental protection. Policymakers ultimately called for the physical separation of people with CF from one another via recommendations (...) that reconfigured the CF community. Simultaneously, medical researchers recognized that one highly transmissible CF pathogen called cepacia was being developed for environmental applications and got the EPA to limit cepacia's environmental deployment. Environmental regulations speak to the challenge of useful microbes that harm a minority, but CF cross-infection also involves legal implications for microbial and genetic discrimination, social consequences for CF communities, and ethical questions about balancing autonomy, harms, and benefits. As scientists increasingly study connections between host genetics, microbial genetics, and infectious risks, CF is a vital referent. (shrink)

The paper looks into prospects of using mobile applications in the regional information market. It reviews global trends in their introduction rates, based on development of mobile devices and new information technologies. Mobile applications are classified, their most popular types for business and community described. The author provides rationale for some directions of market expansion owing to a growing share of smartphones in the total number of mobile phones and an increase in the number of Internet (...) users. Some specific features of the regional information market performance and its main participants are identified. The paper presents economic performances of companies by regions of Ukraine as a critical economic factor in using mobile applications. The banking sector and trade are defined as the most favorable lines of activity. The following bottlenecks in the use of mobile applications by domestic banks are identified as compared to those in Europe, specifically in Poland: a low rate of activity in this field and insufficient number of Internet users. The author analyzes functional capabilities of active software in the most successful banks of Ukraine. Services of the most popular mobile applications offered by major companies with regional representatives are examined. There are some factors identified, which adversely affect the shaping of community demand for mobile applications, such as regional disproportions in the flow of income as well as high purchase costs of food commodities and extremely low purchase costs of household appliances. The author gives some positive examples of promoting mobile applications in local information markets in the field of public transport. It is established that prospects of further use of mobile applications in the regional information market depend on enhancement of financial stability of economic entities and an increase of the income level of the population. (shrink)

This chapter is to offer a critical study of what the human living condition would be like in a new era of hi-tech mobilization, especially the condition of self-government or autonomy, and how, in the Thai perspective, the condition affects culture. Habermas’ analysis of individuation through socialization and Heidegger’s question concerning technology and being are used in the study, and it is revealed that we are now confronted with a new technological condition of positioned individuals in the universe of (...) class='Hi'>communication through mobile phones. This situation surely will be realized in a world highly mobilized by the phenomenon of connectedness. This means that we are concerning ourselves with our concrete individuality for our self-expression in that universe. I offer an interpretation that we would hold this kind of individuality to be valuable because of an effect from technological thinking. In addition, comparing this view on individuality with Buddhism, I found that the view offered here is not similar to the Buddhist concept of self as a construction. I offer an argument to show that these concepts are basically different for ethical reasons; while the Buddhist concept still preserves the nobility of the moral agent (Buddhism, after all, is a religion and needs to concern itself with morality), the concrete individuality discussed here is considered only as an instrumental value in a world of hi-tech mobilization. (shrink)

Conversation analytical methodology was used to specify the new opening practices in Finnish mobile call openings, which differ systematically from Finnish landline call openings. Since the responses to a mobile call orient to the summons identifying the caller, answers have changed and diversified. A known caller is greeted. The self-identification opening that was canonical in Finnish landline calls is mainly used for answering unknown callers, while channel-opener openings involve orientation to ongoing mutual business between the speakers. Some of (...) these changes reflect real-time coordination of the social action that the mobility of mobile phones enables. In all, the adoption of new ways of answering a call shows that people orient themselves to affordances that new technologies allow them. Mobile phone communication opens a salient new area both for the analysis of talk-ininteraction itself and also for understanding communicative behaviour in the era of ubiquitous information technology. (shrink)

Mobile phones are part of a major growth industry in so-called Third World countries. As in other places, the use of this technology changes communication behaviour. The influence of these changes on indigenous social structures was investigated with a mixed-type questionnaire that targeted parameters such as: in-group vs. out-group communication, involvement with dominant industrial culture and the use of financial resources. Data was collected from indigenous representatives at the United Nations, as well as in Africa from subjects (...) of various cultural backgrounds, and from a control group in Berlin. The results reflect widespread use of mobile phones among indigenous persons, having a segregating effect within the indigenous community, but also enhancing ingroup communication and especially the use of the indigenous language. Mobile phones also facilitate moves from village to town, with the opportunity of frequently communicating with other in-group members. (shrink)

Social data mining has become an emerging area of research in information and communication technology fields. The scope of social data mining has expanded significantly in the recent years with the advance of telecommunication technologies and the rapidly increasing accessibility of computing resources and mobile devices. People increasingly engage in and rely on phone communications for both personal and business purposes. Hence, mobile phones become an indispensable part of life for many people. In this article, we perform (...) social data mining on mobile social networking by presenting a simple but efficient method to define social closeness and social grouping, which are then used to identify social sizes and scaling ratio of close to “8”. We conclude that social mobile network is a subset of the face-to-face social network, and both groupings are not necessary the same, hence the scaling ratios are distinct. Mobile social data mining. (shrink)

We present a simple distributed concept that appears to insinuate SWARM behavior in a collection of mobile platforms. The control is based on the inter-mobile platform communication links’ signal-to-noise ratio. This double use of communications is a natural linkage for SWARM behavior.

Communications and categorizations mark the temporality of the possible sequences of network states, and each event thus produced modifies the space of the network by provoking in individual actors various types of learning that present an extensive and intensive dimension. This chapter examines in detail these types of learning and the mobilizations of the network space involved. Like inter‐individual communication, categorization potentially impacts both dimensions of learning. The chapter first discusses learning from inter‐individual communication, and shows that it (...) is synonymous with bringing innovation in a weak sense to the network. It then discusses learning related to categorization, which we will see is likely to introduce novelty in a strong sense within the network. The increasing efficiency of the individual learning process would thus be tempered by the global cognitive network's degree of redundancy. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the data collected through in-depth interviews of migrant workers in Southern China about their mobile cultures. In particular, we focus on understanding the role that mobile cultures play in female workers’ negotiation of their social and romantic relations and leisure space and how these negotiations are directly or indirectly facilitated by development of informal literacies through their frequent short message service communicative practices. These will help us understand the lifestyle aspirations and life trajectories (...) of the new young working women in China who are experiencing the most rapid socioeconomic changes in society and negotiating their ways of life amidst much tension between old and new values governing lifestyle aspirations, familial, and gender relations. (shrink)

The remarkable growth in the application of information and communications technologies indicates a great shift toward a globally integrated society. The urban metropolises are turning into intersections of transit and migration of goods, capital, services, cultures, knowledge and especially people. Moreover the flow of bodies, information and money is changing the rules of what defines national territory, space and identity. Social realities with specific qualities are appearing, implying a new spatial correlation between the local and the global. International airports and (...) within emerging extraterritorial zones have become an important threshold controlling the flow of people in a free market economy. The airport border mutates into an abstract space permeating the physical territory of the airport and beyond. This abstract border space, within which mobile bodies operate, is created by a bureaucratic system of inclusion and exclusion particular to transition states. Transit zones at airports emerge because of a complex set of factors: border crossing as well as increasingly stringent security and safety regulations. The innumerable thresholds within these transit zones are points of congestion governed and increasingly supported by technological systems of identification. Within the transnation state, the movement of bodies is the constant subject of streaming and proceduralization. Increasingly, the conventional system of control based on face-to-face interaction between the controlling and the controlled is being replaced by the algorithmic precision of database logic. The paradigm of pattern matching ensures precise verification of the uniqueness of the body, in turn offering new potentials for permeability and flux. These different orders of legal and economic categorization create manifold sub-territories accessible to select groups of travellers. Nowadays, the airport is a transnation state spatialized through a new order of architecture, a manifestation of technology of abstract procedures of transition, inclusion and exclusion, adopting emergent patterns of socio-spatial mobility in a globalized network. (shrink)

Dans un contexte où les technologies numériques favorisent la traçabilité des échanges et tandis que se répand l'appréhension d'une surveillance globale, le citoyen pourrait craindre que ses télécommunications soient bien davantage écoutées ou écoutables par l'État Big Brother qu'à l'époque des « bretelles » sur téléphones filaires. Or, sans même parler des progrès des protections légales, ce scénario cauchemar « panacoustique » se heurte à la complexité des protocoles et vecteurs de communication, comme aux stratégies d'anonymisation ou de furtivité (...) contre les écoutes légales. En revanche, des acteurs privés, souvent criminels, exploitent les failles sécuritaires notamment des téléphones mobiles des nouvelles générations; truands ou officines peuvent souvent savoir ce que le juge d'instruction ne pourra découvrir, tandis que le matériel d'espionnage privé se banalise. Ce phénomène pose des questions politiques concernant la souveraineté et le contrôle des moyens de violer les secrets.In a context where digital technologies are making it easier to keep track of various types of communication, with attendant fears of globally expanding surveillance, citizens may well suspect that their telecommunications are, or are capable of, being monitored to a much greater extent by the Big Brother State than in the days when surveillance was limited to wiretaps on landlines. However, this nightmare "globalphone-tapping" scenario has to contend not only with advances in legal protection but also with the complexities of communication protocols and vectors and with the various counter-measures that have developed to secure anonymity against legal eavesdropping. However, private groups, often with criminal intent, are becoming adept at exploiting security loopholes, especially in late-generation mobile phone systems. Criminals and shady commercial establishments can often find information that no magistrate would have access to, while private surveillance equipment is becoming available practically over-the-counter. All these developments raise political issues of sovereignty and control over means of violating privacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mobility, Portability, and PlacelessnessJoseph Kupfer (bio)Introduction: A Danger of Electronically Mediated ExperienceA few months ago I was sitting in a Chicago airport, waiting to make my connecting flight. Everywhere I looked, people were talking on cell phones, but the man across from me had gone one better. He had a cell phone and a laptop computer. He was talking on a conference call with two people who were at (...) two different locations as they edited a document that appeared on his laptop. It was a contract that they would soon e-mail to yet a fourth individual for her agreement. In the midst of the conferring, the man across from me broke from the contract to look up something on an Internet Web site. He was able to access data that was needed for the contract work. There is no doubt something astonishing and wondrous about four people hooked up, converging on a document that exists—well, where? Nowhere yet, except in that fanciful ether called cyberspace. Although we need to describe this dimension in familiar language, we realize that the term is just a metaphor. There is no space in cyberspace and no time either for that matter.The portability of information, documentation, and communication enabled the man in the airport to work with people in different places to edit a contract that they would then electronically send to a fourth person. The portability facilitated the individual's mobility since he did not have to be in a particular location to create the document and discuss it with others. The man could have been anywhere. He just happened to be in an airport. But the fact that he, and presumably his colleagues as well, could have been in a car or a park, at home or in a restaurant, rendered the actual place in which he worked—the airport—irrelevant. He did not have to pay attention to his physical environment and probably did not wish to. He was absorbed in his electronically fabricated environment comprised of information, voices, and documents. [End Page 38]As such activity becomes more commonplace, this man and the rest of us become detached from our physical surroundings. When these environments become irrelevant to what we are doing, they will lose meaning for us and we will cease to inhabit them in any meaningful way. Anywhere is nowhere. Obviously, the electronic age of cyberspace provides enormous benefits, and I do not wish to minimize its advantages or seem overly pessimistic. Rather, I wish to call attention to what we risk losing in the hope that awareness of what is at stake can forestall the loss. Just as over-reliance on air travel can undermine our sense of movement through space and the aesthetic of such movement, so too can over-reliance on virtual, electronic connections erode our connection to actual physical places. The more electronically mediated activity replaces place, the more we become dis-placed.In what follows I sketch three dimensions of loss that accompany this exciting new electronic connectedness. With loss of place, with placelessness, we are deprived of the aesthetic experiences particular places provide. Second, we lose touch—with our bodies and other people. Last, we lose a sense of place altogether. Our entire way of being in the world may undergo such a radical change that we foreclose important aspects of our humanity and with it corresponding aesthetic appreciations.Electronic Displacement, Traditional Distance Communication, and Previous Revolutions in MobilitySeveral years ago I wrote about the loss of distinctive places as a result of homogeneity in architecture. The sameness of design in restaurants, motels, sport stadiums, homes, and malls yielded a loss of regionality and locality in our built environment. But these were the result of changes within a pervasive dimension of life—architecture or the built environment. Even if the restaurant, motel, or mall looked the same as others, we nevertheless were functioning within a recognizable spatio-temporal frame. We were aware of it as such and even took some comfort in the familiarity. Americans especially liked the idea of no surprises: the Holiday Inn in Topeka, Kansas, looked and felt and smelled the same as... (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to explore the potential of mobile assistive technology as a vocational tool for blind workers. Specifically, it investigates: Can MAT-enabled BW to perform better at the workplace and will insight into MAT-enabled capabilities impact employer perception regarding BW employability. Design/methodology/approach Exploratory case study which draws on theories of fit to analyze observational and interview data at an organization familiar with employing, training and referring BW. Findings MAT can increase blind worker job fit, positively impacting their (...) performance, self-reliance and managerial perceptions regarding their employability. Research limitations/implications A conceptual framework is articulated which expands current literature on fit to better account for the assistive potential of mobile technology for differently abled workers. Practical implications The positive impact of MAT on managerial perceptions of BW fit and employability can inform the regimes of employers, job skills trainers, vocational rehabilitation specialists and policy makers. Social implications Insights on the use of MAT as a vocational tool can reduce the systemic workplace disenfranchisement of blind people. Originality/value This paper presents novel theory which accounts for the impact of MAT on the job fit of differently abled workers. (shrink)

The article is about the revision, in connection with the crisis, primarily of the communist idea in the twentieth century. stable concepts, such as, for example, community (understood not as a social, institutionally realized form of collectivity, but as an intellectual form, as “an unorganized force, an intense feeling of participation in something), an image (which is not a subjective representation in the mind an absent object, but passive, deprived of a creative authority, mobile in relation to the figures (...) reproduced in them, deprived of the status of a subject or object), individuality, singularity, etc. A methodological question is raised about ways of collecting and thinking through the world, dependent on time and independent of it, in particular, about the meaning of repetition. The role of H. Petrovsky in developing the theme of non-working, indescribable communities and the understanding of freedom, art, ethics, etc. associated with this theme is emphasized. (shrink)

Local foodshed proponents in the United States seek to change the food system through campaigns to “buy local” and to rediscover “good food” in the local foodshed. Presumably, common sense dictates that the word “local” signifies spatial proximity to the consumer. For some populations, however, both the terms “local” and “local food” signify various different meanings. The local food definition generally used by scholars and activists alike as “geographically proximate food” is unhelpfully narrow. Localist rhetoric often does not incorporate the (...) food choices and practices of immigrants, migrants, and refugees. In this paper, I report the various characterizations of local food among Filipino immigrants in San Diego, California: (1) geography-based local food; (2) (US) America-based local food; (3) community-based local food; and (4) immigrant identity-based local food. Local foodshed proponents should acknowledge those who have a starkly different definition of “local”—those who possess translocal subjectivities, for whom “local-ness” is both mobile and embodied. My study underscores how the movement of food—or its containment within a geographic space—cannot be viewed in isolation from the movement of people. (shrink)

In research interviews, interviewees are usually well aware of why they were selected, and in their narratives they often construct ‘default identities’ in line with the interviewers’ expectations. Furthermore, narrators draw on shared cultural knowledge and master narratives that tend to form an implicit backdrop of their stories. Yet in this article we focus on how some of these master narratives may be mobilized explicitly when default identities are at stake. In particular, we investigate interviews with successful female professionals from (...) diverse geographical contexts. We found that the interviewees deal with challenges to their ‘successful professional’ identities by drawing on categorical narratives or categorical statements. As such, the interviewees talk into being a morally ordered gendered worldview, thus making explicit gendered master narratives about their societies and workplaces. In general, this article shows that categorical narratives and statements can bring master narratives to the surface and that these can thus contribute to the narrators’ identity work. (shrink)

The concept of electrical conductivity, or, as initially coined by Stephen Gray , ‘electrical communication’, has always been assigned an important role in the history of electrical research. Some thirty-five years after Gray's ‘electrical communication’ acquired wide attention, Priestley employed the concept of conductivity to define physical reality, thus giving a privileged position to the science he himself endeavoured to cultivate. As he argued in the introduction to The History and Present State of Electricity , ‘the electrical fluid (...) is no local, or occasional agent in the theatre of the world. Late discoveries show that its presence and effects are every where … It is not, like magnetism, confined to one kind of bodies, but every thing we know is a conductor or nonconductor of electricity’. Contemporary historians, for example, Heilbron, Home and Hackmann, link the concept of conductivity to a radical transformation of electrical research which pertained to its mode of organization and the definition of its subject-matter, and which culminated in its emergence as a distinctive branch of eighteenth-century ‘experimental philosophy’. (shrink)

Urban communities experiencing marginalization often disproportionately bear the risks and burdens of research and are left out of research ethics governance processes. To address this, many communities have created place-based and community-led research ethics governance initiatives to ensure that community voice is included in discussions surrounding research conduct. Place-based strategies in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside, the Bronx, and the Philadelphia Promise Zone successfully mobilize community perspectives in research ethics, filling in a significant gap in our current system of institutional research (...) ethics review and oversight. These cases demonstrate that place-based research ethics governance has the potential to account for the community-level risks posed by research projects and to ensure communities receive more felt benefits. Place-based communities sidestep simplistic notions of identity based on single shared features and make space for intersectional analyses and diverse community viewpoints to be considered. Such communities have a unique claim to expertise given their shared experience of place, which grants them the ability to see problematic assumptions embedded in scientific projects as well as community-level concerns within research. Despite this, many marginalized communities are excluded from current research ethics oversight processes. This exclusion demands critical examination and a way forward to facilitate the integration of place-based community oversight strategies within research ethics governance. (shrink)

In this paper, we document the counter-data action and data activism of a grassroots affordable housing advocacy group in Atlanta. Our observation and insight into these data activities and strategies are achieved through ethnographic and engaged research and participatory design. We find that counter-data action through community-collected data is rooted in a legacy of Atlanta’s black activism and black scholarship; that this data activism enabled resource mobilization and critical conscious making; and that design and media production are essential post counter-data (...) action activities in data activism. Based on these findings, we urge the field of open government data to broaden their concept of social impact of data to include the use data to mobilize resources within oppressed communities not to influence policy and government but to build capacities within community in order to transform, not join, political structures. We also advocate that scholars within the fields of open government data, critical data studies, and data activism recognize the legacy and historic practice of data activism by black communities working towards social change. (shrink)