scholarly journals "Doing belonging": young former refugees and their active engagement with Norwegian local communities

2020 ◽  
Vol 198 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Tina Mathisen ◽  
Sofia Cele

This article explores the everyday lives of young former refugees in small Norwegian towns and considers how a focus on "doing belonging" can help us understand the processes of place attachment and social inclusion/exclusion in a time of increasing diversity and social division. By looking at these youths' everyday activities and social networks using a range of participatory methods, this article describes how former refugee youths actively work to create and maintain a sense of belonging. The study shows that the youths simultaneously draw on shared knowledge from their social networks and on embodied knowledge gained through the habitual use of place to perform belonging. It is argued that embodiment, as in being a particular type of body interacting with people and place, matters; other crucial aspects are freedom to move and experience the materiality of place, and that former refugees' belonging needs to be understood as relating to other people’s understandings of their right to belong. The study shows that particular structural conditions for doing belonging should be considered by policy makers.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riikka Korkiamäki ◽  
Catherine Elliott O'Dare

Friendship is said to promote psychological and physical well‐being and increase social inclusion. Yet, intergenerational friendship has garnered little research attention due to the assumed dominance of age homophily in friendship. In this article we explore intergenerational friendship from the perspective of “younger” and “older” friends at the “generational book‐ends” of the life course. We focus on the role that intergenerational friendship plays in processes of social inclusion in the everyday lives of the participants, bringing together a study conducted in Finland and one in Ireland. Both studies employ qualitative methodology, drawing from interviews with 31 young people who were refugees (aged 13–18) in Finland and 23 older people (aged 65+) in Ireland. Our findings reveal that the younger and the older participants concur on the qualities and benefits of intergenerational friendship. Additionally, while age is not a uniform definer of friendships, differences in chronological age are not meaningless but support caring, enjoyment, and inclusion in alternative ways compared to peer‐aged friendships. Access to diverse company, distinct support, broader networks, and alternative identities lead to increased experiences of social inclusion at a personal and societal level. We conclude by calling on policy makers and communities to create spaces and opportunities for inclusion through friendship for all generations.


Author(s):  
Mrugendrasinh Rahevar ◽  
Martin Parmar ◽  
Rekha Karangiya

In recent years, the utilization of Internet has turned out to be one of the everyday activities in our life. Social networks constitute a noteworthy segment of the Web and made an upheaval. It incorporates social media, forum conversations, blogs and micro-blogs like twitter. Due to this, large numbers of comments are produced on daily basis. So, nowadays most of the researchers or analyzers are concentrating on extracting significant data from social networks in order to understand the public viewpoint. This research has been reached out outside the computer science to cover other areas like business, political and social science. Hence, Sentiment analysis and Opinion mining are popular field of research in Data mining. This paper delineates various aspects of sentiment analysis in detail inclusive of important concepts, classification, process, importance, challenges and applications. The following paper presents experiment on sentiment analysis of public opinion on demonetization in India. Sentiment analysis is performed on tweets related to demonetization in India extracted from twitter. Polarity of the opinion is observed through the experimental analysis. Through the outcome of this analysis, the sentiments of the citizens that are determined help the government in improving their decisions and work for the welfare of the citizens.


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey H. Cohen ◽  
Bernardo Rios ◽  
Lise Byars

Rural Oaxacan migrants are defined as quintessential transnational movers, people who access rich social networks as they move between rural hometowns in southern Mexico and the urban centers of southern California.  The social and cultural ties that characterize Oaxacan movers are critical to successful migrations, lead to jobs and create a sense of belonging and shared identity.  Nevertheless, migration has socio-cultural, economic and psychological costs.  To move the discussion away from a framework that emphasizes the positive transnational qualities of movement we focus on the costs of migration for Oaxacans from the state’s central valleys and Sierra regions.   


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Vogel ◽  
Josaphat Musamba

ABSTRACTEastern Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) artisanal mining sector is often linked to the violent conflicts that have beset Central Africa for over two decades. While many analyses emphasise its ‘criminal’ and ‘illegal’ nature, less attention has been paid to the ambiguity of this economy, most prominently incarnated by the intermediate mineral traders callednégociants. Focusing on their entrepreneurship, networks and everyday activities, this essay offers a more nuanced understanding of local mineral trade in the context of a ‘crisis economy’ framed by competing governable orders. It investigates the uncertainty along eastern DRC's mineral supply chains, that are undergoing major regulatory changes to curb the trade of so-called ‘conflict minerals’. Drawing from extensive fieldwork, this essay demonstrates how this uncertainty shapes the négociants’ role as brokers of socio-economic life in the provinces of North and South Kivu.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 450-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Vandenbroucke ◽  
Koen Vleminckx

Should we explain the disappointing outcomes of the Open Method of Co-ordination on Inclusion by methodological weaknesses or by substantive contradictions in the ‘social investment’ paradigm? To clarify the underlying concepts, we first revisit the original ‘Lisbon inspiration’ and then relate it to the idea of the ‘new welfare state’, as proposed in the literature on new risks in post-industrial societies. We then discuss two explanations for disappointing poverty trends, suggested by critical accounts of the ‘social investment state’: ‘resource competition’ and a ‘re-commodification’. We do not find these explanations convincing per se and conclude that the jury is still out on the ‘social investment state’. However, policy-makers cannot ignore the failure of employment policies to reduce the proportion of children and working-age adults living in jobless households in the EU, and they should not deny the reality of a ‘trilemma of activation’. Finally, we identify policy conditions that may facilitate the complementarity of social investment and social inclusion.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1092 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrizia Meringolo

This paper talks about the juvenile justice system in Italy. The author describes the interventions done with minors, boys and girls aged from 14 until 18 years, who have committed offenses of the civil or penal code, by the New Code of Criminal Procedure for Minors (1988). The Procedures have had some positive psychological aspects, aimed to avoid detention, thanks to alternative measures and strategies for inclusion, including also the minors living in the South, that are often involved in mafia-crimes. Nonetheless there are more negative psychological issues, because alternative punishments are not often applied to minors that lack social networks, particularly to foreign ones. Three examples of participatory researches will be shown, promoted by the Municipality of Florence, Department of Psychology and Third Sector Associations, aimed to promote psychological and social inclusion of minors (particularly those coming from abroad), with the commitment of active citizenship organizations, with an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Bokányi ◽  
Sándor Juhász ◽  
Márton Karsai ◽  
Balázs Lengyel

AbstractMillions commute to work every day in cities and interact with colleagues, partners, friends, and strangers. Commuting facilitates the mixing of people from distant and diverse neighborhoods, but whether this has an imprint on social inclusion or instead, connections remain assortative is less explored. In this paper, we aim to better understand income sorting in social networks inside cities and investigate how commuting distance conditions the online social ties of Twitter users in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the United States. An above-median commuting distance in cities is linked to more diverse individual networks, moreover, we find that longer commutes are associated with a nearly uniform, moderate reduction of overall social tie assortativity across all cities. This suggests a universal relation between long-distance commutes and the integration of social networks. Our results inform policy that facilitating access across distant neighborhoods can advance the social inclusion of low-income groups.


2008 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Almonacid ◽  
Antonio Luzón ◽  
Mónica Torres

The Chilean educational system is characterized by the functioning of a cuasi (free) market, in which increasing degrees of administrative, financial and curricular decentralization take place within a context where two constitutional rights are in conflict: the right to (free) education and the freedom of teaching. This conflict arose from the design and implementation of said decentralization policy due to its negative effects in the processes of social inclusion of children and youngsters. In order to understand why those two constitutional rights are in conflict, it must be taken into account that such decentralization policy was designed by the military regime (1973-1990) as one of several neoliberal policies implemented in many different fields of the Chilean society, and that said policy has been kept in effect by the subsequent administrations of the “Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia” (Coalition of Parties for Democracy) (since 1990 to present) in a so called “transition process to democracy.” This research paper is intended to understand how the process of educational decentralization was conceived and how the system is in effect up to the present, as well as to understand the effects it has had on the process of social exclusion. To do that, the views of selected policy makers who have had active participation in this process are analyzed. First, there is a reference to the way the Chilean educational system works, and then the opinions of several educational policy makers about the processes of educational decentralization and social exclusion are analyzed.


Author(s):  
Nathalie Huegler ◽  
Natasha Kersh

AbstractThis chapter focuses on contexts where public discourses regarding the education of young adults have been dominated by socio-economic perspectives, with a focus on the role of employment-related learning, skills and chances and with active participation in the labour market as a key concern for policy makers. A focus on ‘employability’ alone has been linked to narrow conceptualisations of participation, inclusion and citizenship, arising in the context of discourse shifts through neoliberalism which emphasise workfare over welfare and responsibilities over rights. A key critique of such contexts is that the focus moves from addressing barriers to participation to framing social inclusion predominantly as related to expectations of ‘activation’ and sometimes, assimilation. Key target groups for discourses of activation include young people not in education, employment or training (‘NEET’), while in- and exclusion of migrant and ethnic minority young people are often framed within the complex and contradictory interplay between discourses of assimilation and experiences of discrimination. These developments influence the field of adult education aimed at young people vulnerable to social exclusion. An alternative discourse to ‘activation’ is the promotion of young people’s skills and capabilities that enables them to engage in forms of citizenship activism, challenging structural barriers that lead to exclusion. Our chapter considers selected examples from EduMAP research in the UK, the Netherlands and Ireland which indicate that as well as framing the participation of young people as discourses of ‘activation’, adult education can also enable and facilitate skills related to more activist forms of citizenship participation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 1199-1218
Author(s):  
Evgeniya D. Zarubina

Minute books (pinkas) constitute one of the most valuable sources for studying the history of the Jewish communal institutions up to the 20th century. They comprise rich and diverse data on the everyday activities of the Jewish people. In the academic language, the word “pinkas” is applied not only to the communal minute books and minute books of the communal bodies but also to private minute books. The article deals with the development of this category of sources which evolved from private minute books dating back to at least the 11th century to the communal ones as well as the minute books of the communal bodies based on the dozen manuscript examples. These are mostly of European origin, however, with a few Eastern additions. This evolution process becomes visible as a result of the analysis of the manuscripts’ internal structure and composition. Special attention is paid to the techniques used to enforce this structure on codicological and paleographic levels. The data at hand suggest that at the beginning of the Modern period some of the minute books were shifted from private to the public domain. This was a response to the demand from the rapidly evolving communal institutions. To suit the widened audience of varying backgrounds the communal minute books compared to those for private use adopted a more uniform structure as well as with a set of “navigation” or referencing tools, such as captions written on margins. The early modern Italian communal minute books tend to be the most structured ones.


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