This study investigates how destination social responsibility (DSR) improves resident quality of life (QOL) through the lenses of signaling theory and emotional solidarity theory. The study demonstrates the mediating role of resident emotional solidarity toward the destination and the moderating roles of disclosure tone and visual messages. Three experiments indicate that continuous (vs. one-time) DSR positively affects resident emotional solidarity and QOL, whereas emotional solidarity has a mediating role. Emotional solidarity elicited by continuous (vs. one-time) DSR is significantly higher when the disclosure tone of DSR is vivid (vs. pallid). However, when DSR is disclosed using visual messages, emotional solidarity effects of DSR types are not different in vivid tone but have significant differences in pallid tone. This study expands the application of signaling theory and emotional solidarity theory to resident QOL studies and provides suggestions on improving residents’ QOL through DSR.
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This paper provides insights into the operational features of community-based financing mechanisms. These include CAF groups, which are self-financed communities where people save and lend money to each other. The implementation of such self-financed communities in the Netherlands is supported by Participatory Action Research (PAR). This paper discusses the first results of this research by exploring whether and how participation of group members can improve their well-being with regard to social networks, financial household management and entrepreneurial positioning based on the capability approach of Amartya Sen, a well-known economist. For this PAR, three groups were formed, guided, observed, analysed and compared. This paper demonstrates how solidarity economy processes at the grassroots level can contribute to the general well-being of vulnerable people in the Netherlands. For the particular context of overconsumption, inequality and overindebtedness, Sen’s notion of freedom will be reconsidered and adjusted.
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Studies into affective publics often involve textual communication. However, emotive communication is increasingly visual. This study zooms in on the representation of the suffering other in seven re-workings of the Alan Kurdi photographs that resonated significantly on Instagram. Chouliaraki’s concept of post-humanitarian solidarity in The Ironic Spectator (2013) is used as a theoretical framework to analyse the content of re-worked images and their post captions. Her concept outlines how distant sufferers tend to be rendered invisible due to the self-reflexive nature of contemporary solidarity. This self-reflexivity gets in the way of solidarity for others unlike us. The study found that, although the sufferer is visually present in almost all re-worked images, the suffering is ‘replaced’ by emotions or political views of the creators. Both Chouliaraki’s ‘distant other’ as well as Markham’s similar other are ways to visually (re)construct the tragedy of Alan Kurdi and the refugee crisis in general. This study adds to this an understanding of how Instagram users, while visually constructing a similar or distant other, also write themselves – often their personal feelings – into such images. Their public, other Instagram users, engages in self-reflexivity by liking such re-workings, aligning with the communicated emotions or political views conveyed. In this way, the platform ‘like feature’ intensifies the self-reflexive nature of contemporary solidarity.
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Considering recent calls for change towards a more liveable tourism academia, critical participatory action research is combined with duoethnography to develop The Academic Line—a humorous comic project about academic life. Traditional theories of humour are used to leverage the effectiveness of comics as communicative devices and explored how and to what extent the project promoted solidarity, reflexivity, well-being, and change. This study reveals the concrete commitment to fostering change within and potentially improving academia, and to experiment with a form of communication, which is still underexplored in the scholarly sphere but fruitfully applied in other contexts to raise awareness of and prompt discussion about crucially important issues.
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With the EU struggling to maintain itself, it is highly relevant to look into the drive for and original vision on European unification of its principal architect, Robert Schuman, then French Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Schuman Declaration (1950) gave birth to the EU and procured the longest period of peace among its member states since the Treaty of Verdun (843). This article shows how Schuman’s Catholic faith influenced his life and therefore his politics. His drive to be a faithful instrument of Providence, supported by his origins from Alsace-Lorraine, made him strive towards peace on the European continent. He envisaged a European political integration through economic cooperation at the service of man and his transcendence and rooted in the common European spiritual and cultural heritage. This implied reconciliation, effective solidarity, subsidiarity and supranationality for European common interests through an integration in small steps.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked the debate on strengthening European-level cooperation and solidarity in tackling the disease. The debate has focused on several questions: Given the common threat to public health, is conferral of more competences upon the EU (1) desirable and (2) feasible? As for desirability: Can the EU better achieve the public health goals than Member States can and is there an added value in increasing EU competences? As for feasibility: Can a competence increase be carried out in practice - given the cross-country differences in the organizational and managerial features of national healthcare systems? Healthcare systems are influenced by the underlying normative aspirations, historic legacies, and level of economic development of the given country. They are characterized by a high degree of government intervention and absorb a significant share of public funds, so no wonder this sector is politically sensitive. So concretely, if more powers are to be conferred upon the EU, what exactly should these powers consist of, bearing in mind the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality?
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Studying images in social media poses specific methodological challenges, which in turn have directed scholarly attention towards the computational interpretation of visual data. When analyzing large numbers of images, both traditional content analysis as well as cultural analytics have proven valuable. However, these techniques do not take into account the circulation and contextualization of images within a socio-technical environment. As the meaning of social media images is co-created by networked publics, bound through networked practices, these visuals should be analyzed on the level of their networked contextualization. Although machine vision is increasingly adept at recognizing faces and features, its performance in grasping the meaning of social media images is limited. However, combining automated analyses of images - broken down by their compositional elements - with repurposing platform data opens up the possibility to study images in the context of their resonance within and across online discursive spaces. This paper explores the capacities of platform data - hashtag modularity and retweet counts - to complement the automated assessment of social media images; doing justice to both the visual elements of an image and the contextual elements encoded by networked publics that co-create meaning.
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During the first half of 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus had a huge global impact. The physical health of many was (often severely) threatened and affected, resulting in numerous deaths. Furthermore, all aspects of human coexistence came under pressure, such as economic activities and material living conditions, psychological well-being and social contacts, human rights and democratic decision-making, international political relations and global solidarity. As in other parts of the world, COVID-19 kept the Netherlands in its grip.In this article we would like to address the following questions:-What impact did pandemic and policy have on Dutch social work education and how was this experienced by students?-What was the impact of pandemic and policy on social work practices and what were its challenges for social professionals?-What does this all mean for the future of social work education, since it has to take the present concerns of students into account as well as prepare them for social work practice in the near future?
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