Digital Mental Health and Social Connectedness

A detailed understanding of the mental health needs of people from refugee backgrounds is crucial for the design of inclusive mental health technologies. We present a qualitative account of the digital mental health experiences of women from refugee backgrounds. Working with community members and community workers of a charitable organisation for refugee women in the UK, we identify social and structural challenges, including loneliness and access to mental health technologies. Participants' accounts document their collective agency in addressing these challenges and supporting social connectedness and personal wellbeing in daily life: participants reported taking part in community activities as volunteers, sharing technological expertise, and using a wide range of non-mental health-focused technologies to support their mental health, from playing games to supporting religious practices. Our findings suggest that, rather than focusing only on individual self-care, research also needs to leverage community-driven approaches to foster social mental health experiences, from altruism to connectedness and belonging

XVIII SIM Conference Presentation - Social Media Influencers (SMIs) in Context: a literature review

This review focused on three main areas, “Social Media Influencers (SMIs) in Context, The Impact of SMIs on Adolescents, and Consumer Behaviour in a Digital Era – Generation Z in Perspective.” This article aims to further the overall understanding of SMIs and outlines the impact of SMIs on adolescents’ lives. Thus, the main objective of this literature review is to raise awareness within the marketing field about the influence of social media influencers on adolescents and how brands promote their products and content through social media influencers. The review comprised a deep search using electronic journal databases and secondary data from reports, surveys, and empirical research. The main findings from this review are insights about who social media influencers are, how to recognise them, how they impact adolescents’ lives, how brands and SMIs are partnering

A Primer on the Proposal of Social Connectedness through New Urbanism

Humans are social beings that are driven to communicate and interact with one another. This fact is made evident in the countless apps and media outlets dedicated to increasing social connectedness or the internal sense of belonging and subjective sense of connection with the social world (Lee & Robbins, 1995, 1998). Yet social connectedness has generally been absent from core considerations within land-use development regulations. For New Urbanists, this lack of attention given to social connectedness by planners is a major problem given the rise in asocial behaviours and the ubiquity of suburban sprawl. In consideration of the debates surrounding community and society, I have within this research navigated the solutions New Urbanism posit and question how plausible they are. Based on my readings of the literature, New Urbanist planning has always been concerned with issues around the intersection between built form and social-connectedness. This led me to question whether the social conclusions associated with New Urbanism can be substantiated. New Urbanism advocates for a process of land-use planning that is socially inclusive, equitable, and communitarian, yet I demonstrate that the notion of physically building social connectedness through planning remains problematic. While land-use planning regulations cannot explicitly regulate places for who can use them, professionals can design, market, and price places to control who may generally inhabit these spaces. Nonetheless, proponents of New Urbanism and those more skeptical of its physical determinist views are addressed to weigh the merits of their arguments and their value in furthering the understanding of the social jurisdiction of New Urbanist planning. In the last chapter I present four fundamental reasons why New Urbanism fails to live up to its social conclusions: a romanticized past, the non-deterministic socio-spatial relationship, limitations of empirical research, and the complications of reality

THE MEGACRISIS UNKNOWN TERRITORY - In Search of Conceptual and Strategic Breakthroughs

The nature of major crises has dramatically evolved over the past fewyears: Megcrises become the name of the game. The goal of this contribution is to capture the evolving notion of crisis, and to prepare new references to deal with the new crisis landscapes. The first section aims at building a renewed understanding of the emerging challenges we face – a combination of rogue events made of severity, speed, ignorance, hypercomplexity, inconceivability, and liquefaction-prone contexts that no longer guarantee the “back to normalcy” comforting rule. The second develops the components of a strategic response which includes: a seminal paradigm shift; a switch from management to leadership, and from “Command and Control” to decisive empowerment; and a whole new approach in education and training.Mega-crises, Critical Thinking, Strategic Approach

Older men learning in the community : European snapshots

The full book can be found here: https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar//handle/123456789/1780The learning partnership on older men learning was primarily an opportunity for researchers from different countries to establish a path for a future common understanding of the interface between masculinities and older adult learning, taking as our point of departure our determination to focus on the role of community and informal learning settings in the lives of older men. Project leaders decided not to take a rigid approach to or engage in a unified coordination of the cases being studied. Basically, each partner decided freely which approaches were best suited to each context. Sometimes driven by curiosity and sometimes by our desire to learn more about the relatively unknown locations of leaning for older men learning in our own countries, we considered diversity to be of outmost importance in our exploratory attitude towards a field of inquiry as of yet almost completely unexplored.peer-reviewe

HEALTHY, ACTIVE AND CONNECTED: TOWARDS DESIGNING AN AGE-FRIENDLY DIGITAL NEIGHBORHOOD PLATFORM

Due to declining fertility rates and rising life expectancy, the world’s population is ageing at an unprecedented pace. This demographic change is expected to exert pressure on social security as well as healthcare systems and poses the risk of social exclusion of the elderly. As urban areas are home to the majority of the global elderly population, they are disproportionately affected by this development. Cities have begun responding with strategies ranging from policy and regulation reform to investments in innovative healthcare technologies with the goal of becoming “age-friendly”. Enabling the elderly to live a socially active, healthy and self-determined lifestyle past retirement are among the prime objectives for alleviating the challenges of an ageing society. With increasing urbanization, human, technological and infrastructural resources of urban contexts or neighborhoods have presented themselves as important determinants of elderly well-being. We propose that an age-friendly digital neighborhood platform can activate and leverage these re-sources to the benefit of the elderly population, contributing to the mitigation of the challenges of an ageing society. Following a design science research approach, we develop design principles for such an age-friendly digital neighborhood platform and evaluate a prototypical instantiation in two case neighborhoods in a German metropolitan area

Christianity as a Culture of Mobility: A Case Study of Asian Transient Migrants in Singapore

More than ever before, the global and transnational movements of young people for work and study have become part of everyday life. Yet there is very little research on this phenomenon in relation to how actors in transience create strategies to cope with being away from home nation (place of birth and/or citizenship) and from family. As part of the findings of a larger international study on the identities, social networks and media/communication use of transient migrants, researchers found that Christianity featured prominently during life in transience for Asian respondents. This paper thus puts forward the notion that Christianity may well function as a culture of mobility by looking at its significance to Asian “foreign talent” transient migrants in Singapore. Through face-toface interviews with fifty-seven Asian working professionals and international students, this paper found thirty that not only identified themselves as Christian, but whose social networks were also made up of Asian foreign talent transient migrant Christians. This paper thus suggests that Asian foreign talent transient migrants turn to Christianity as a way of coping with everyday life in transience. The Christian groups they join allow them to create a sense of community while being away from the home nation. This sense of community however is with other transient migrants, rather than with locals

The happiness imperative : a possible solution to the present day social disconnect.

Today, almost every one of us leads objectively better lives than our parents did. However, along with the dramatic improvements, conveniences, and the freedom that we enjoy, there have been some unintended negative consequences that threaten our quality of life. Marked by a widespread culture of personal pursuits of happiness today, the pursuits of (1) personal strivings, (2) materialistic aspirations, and (3) the satisfaction of short-term affiliative needs are inherently antisocial in nature; and perpetuates our sense of loneliness. Based on recent research findings that identified happiness or positive emotions as a resource that predicts certain life outcomes, rather than following them, I explored the ways in which happiness fits in with the issue of our modern day social disconnect. I identified happiness as the mechanism that (1) maintains our psychological resilience, changes our perception (2) of time and (3) of our social others, and (4) activates our psychological reward systems to translate our intentions for sociality into consequential actions. This theoretical thesis is an attempt to identify the ways in which happiness may reduce today’s norm of social loneliness, and reconnect us with our need for belongingness