The Kenyan supreme court recently struck down a government decision to ban the registration of an LGBTIQ+ community rights organisation, sparking new homophobic rhetoric in the country. Kenya is one of 32 African countries that criminalises homosexuality. Those who identify as part of the LGBTIQ+ community are often discriminated against, harassed and assaulted. Lise Woensdregt and Naomi van Stapele, who have researched queer experiences in Kenya for nine years, explain the impact of this ruling.
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This article focuses on the role of ethical perspectives such as deep ecology and animal rights in relation to environmental education, arguing that such perspectives are well-placed to reposition students as responsible planetary citizens. We focus on the linkage between non-consequentialism, animal rights, and deep ecology in an educational context and discuss the broader issue of ethics in education. Finally, we discuss how the inclusion of deep ecology and animal rights perspectives would improve current environmental education programs by deepening the respect for nonhumans and their inclusion in the ethical community. https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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This exploration with ChatGPT underscores two vital lessons for human rights law education. First, the importance of reflective and critical prompting techniques that challenge it to critique its responses. Second, the potential of customizing AI tools like ChatGPT, incorporating diverse scholarly perspectives to foster a more inclusive and comprehensive understanding of human rights. It also shows the promise of using collaborative approaches to build tools that help create pluriversal approaches to the study of human rights law.
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This study explores how TikTok Live’s fusion of immediacy, interactivity, and monetization creates a powerful infrastructure for political communication, one increasingly exploited for extremist mobilisation and disinformation. Focusing on far-right actors in Germany, it combines technical monitoring, content analysis, and policy review to examine how extremist networks exploit the platform’s live-streaming affordances to spread propaganda, monetize hate, and evade moderation, often in ways that outpace both TikTok’s self-regulation and external oversight under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
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Presentation at the European Conference for Social Work Research, Leuven: Belgium
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Over the last decade, sport and physical activity have become increasingly recognised and implemented as tools to foster social cohesion in neighbourhoods, cities and communities around Europe. As a result, numerous programmes have emerged that attempt to enhance social cohesion through a variety of sport-based approaches (Moustakas, Sanders, Schlenker, & Robrade, 2021; Svensson & Woods, 2017). However, despite this boom in sport and social cohesion, current definitions and understandings of social cohesion rarely take into account the needs, expectations or views of practitioners, stakeholders and, especially, participants on the ground (Raw, Sherry, & Rowe, 2021). Yet, to truly foster broad social outcomes like social cohesion, there is increasing recognition that programmes must move beyond interventions that only focus on the individual level, and instead find ways to work with and engage a wide array of stakeholders and organisations (Hartmann & Kwauk, 2011; Moustakas, 2022). In turn, this allows programmes to respond to community needs, foster engagement, deliver more sustainable outcomes, and work at both the individual and institutional levels. The Living Lab concept - which is distinguished by multi-stakeholder involvement, user engagement, innovation and co-creation within a real-life setting - provides an innovative approach to help achieve these goals. More formally, Living Labs have been defined as “user-centred, open innovation ecosystems based on a systematic user co-creation approach, integrating research and innovation processes in real-life communities and settings” (European Network of Living Labs, 2021). Thus, this can be a powerful approach to engage a wide array of stakeholders, and create interventions that are responsive to community needs. As such, the Sport for Social Cohesion Lab (SSCL) project was conceived to implement a Living Lab approach within five sport for social cohesion programmes in four different European countries. This approach was chosen to help programmes directly engage programme participants, generate understanding of the elements that promote social cohesion in a sport setting and to co-create activities and tools to explore, support and understand social cohesion within these communities. The following toolkit reflects our multi-national experiences designing and implementing Living Labs across these various contexts. Our partners represent a variety of settings, from schools to community-based organisations, and together these experiences can provide valuable insights to other sport (and non-sport) organisations wishing to implement a Living Lab approach within their contexts and programmes. Thus, practitioners and implementers of community-based programmes should be understood as the immediate target group of this toolkit, though the insights and reflections included here can be of relevance for any individual or organisation seeking to use more participatory approaches within their work. In particular, in the coming sections, this toolkit will define the Living Lab concept more precisely, suggest some steps to launch a Living Lab, and offer insights on how to implement the different components of a Living Lab.
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Cancer and its treatments cause significant changes in sexuality that affect the quality of life of both patients and their partners. As these issues are not always discussed with healthcare professionals, cancer patients turn to online health communities to find answers to questions or for emotional support pertaining to sexual issues. By using a discursive psychological perspective, we explore the social actions that participants in online health forums perform when discussing sexuality. Data were collected by entering search terms in the search bars of three online health forums. Our analysis of 213 threads, containing 1,275 posts, provides insight into how participants who present themselves as women with cancer account for their sexual issues and, in doing so, orient to two intertwined norms: Having untroubled sex is part of a couple’s relationship, and male partners are entitled to having untroubled sex. We discuss the potential harmful consequences of orienting to norms related to sexual behaviour. Yet, our findings can also help healthcare professionals in broaching the topic of sexuality in conversations with cancer patients. The insights of this study into what female patients themselves treat as relevant can assist health professionals in better aligning with patients’ interactional concerns.
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