Migration, housing and attachment in urban gold mining settlements

Mining settlements are typically portrayed as either consisting of purpose-built housing constructed by mining companies to house their workers, or as temporary makeshift shelters built by miners working informally and inhabited by male migrants who live dangerously and develop little attachment to these places. This paper contributes to these debates on the social and material dynamics occurring in mining settlements, focusing on those with urban rather than rural characteristics, by highlighting how misconceived these archetypal portrayals are in the Ghanaian context. Drawing on qualitative data collected in three mining settlements, we explore who is moving to and living in the mining towns, who is building houses, and how attachments to place develop socio-temporally. Through doing so, the paper provides original insights on the heterogeneous nature of mining settlements, which are found to be home to a wide range of people engaged in diverse activities. Mining settlements and their attendant social dynamics are shown to evolve in differing ways, depending on the type of mining taking place and the length of time the mines have been in operation. Significantly, we illustrate how, contrary to popular understandings of incomers to mining settlements as nomadic opportunists, migrants often aspire to build their own houses and establish a family, which promotes their attachment to these settlements and their desire to remain. These insights further scholarship on the social and material configuration of mining settlements and feed into the revival of interest in small and intermediate urban settlements.

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Focus Groups

Communication ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199756841-0179 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Kim Hoffman ◽

Javier Ponce-Terashima

Keyword(s):

Social Sciences ◽

Focus Groups ◽

Research Method ◽

Qualitative Method ◽

Qualitative Data ◽

Late 20Th Century ◽

Body Of Knowledge ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

Similarities And Differences

Focus groups are a research method using multi-person interviews to generate qualitative data from participants’ interaction. The purpose is to induce conversation between participants to answer questions relevant to the study goals. In contrast to one-on-one interviews that are also widely used in qualitative research, the source of the data is in the “interaction” between participants, including similarities and differences between their experiences, opinions, and perceptions. This helps researchers understand not just what the participants think about a topic, but also why they think that way. Focus groups can cover a wide range of topics that are skillfully “moderated” by the researcher. The earliest known focus groups can be traced to Bogardus in 1926 and Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld in 1941 but did not take hold as a qualitative method in the social sciences for another twenty-five years. Since then, a significant body of knowledge has been created; since the late 20th century, more than twenty-five thousand peer-reviewed, published articles using focus groups have been published. This article will focus on uses within the realm of published scholarly research although focus groups are routinely used within the field of market and consumer research, and additional gray literature may be found in other sources.

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An ecosystem perspective in the socio-cultural evaluation of dengue in two Colombian towns

Cadernos de Saúde Pública ◽

10.1590/s0102-311x2009001300010 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 25 (suppl 1) ◽

pp. S104-S114 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Roberto Suárez ◽

Catalina González ◽

Gabriel Carrasquilla ◽

Juliana Quintero

Keyword(s):

Public Health ◽

Qualitative Data ◽

Social Dynamics ◽

Negative Impact ◽

Health Concern ◽

Cross Sectional ◽

The Social ◽

Research Findings ◽

Historical Presence ◽

A Minor

Despite extensive public health efforts, dengue is still a major health concern in Colombia. The objective of this study was to provide an ecosystem and cross-disciplinary perspective on the dengue situation in two Colombian towns. The article focuses on presenting the anthropological methodology and research findings. An interdisciplinary team gathered quantitative (cross-sectional), meteorological, entomological, and qualitative data (based on medical anthropology) through fieldwork and archival research. According to the qualitative data, dengue can be described as a point of convergence between public health policies, the affected population, the environment, and the social dynamics generated through this interaction. Dengue is illustrative as a disease, in that it has a negative impact on public health, but individuals in Colombia have learned to live and cope with it. Dengue prevalence and its on-going historical presence have made it part of everyday community life, viewed as a minor health issue.

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Altmetrics

Advances in Library and Information Science - Handbook of Research on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Library and Information Science ◽

10.4018/978-1-5225-9825-1.ch009 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 119-131

Author(s):

Payel Biswas

Keyword(s):

Peer Review ◽

Qualitative Data ◽

Web Based ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

The World ◽

Areas Of Interest ◽

Citation Metrics ◽

The Impact ◽

Citation Searching

According to information scientists, information is modified into knowledge by adding experience. Researchers need powerful and successful filters to help them stay abreast of literature in their field, as well as methods to track the impact of their own research in often very specialized areas of interest. Traditional mechanisms such as peer review and citation searching using bibliometrics are no longer sufficient tools to aid researchers. How can librarians become leaders and powerful allies in this new landscape? Enter the world of Altmetrics. Altmetrics, or alternative citation metrics, provides researchers and scholars with new ways to track influence across a wide range of media and platforms. Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. Altmetrics is a field of web-based metrics that accounts for total author influence which also looks beyond journal and monographic citation counts to the social web. The aim of this chapter is to explain the concept of library and librarian involvement with altmetrics.

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Employer-Supported Volunteerism in Rural Worksites

Workplace Health & Safety ◽

10.1177/2165079919862295 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 67 (10) ◽

pp. 512-519 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Faryle Nothwehr ◽

Diane Rohlman

Keyword(s):

Employee Engagement ◽

Online Survey ◽

Qualitative Data ◽

Well Being ◽

Resource Conservation ◽

Descriptive Statistics ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

Employee Volunteerism

Employer-supported volunteerism has the potential to benefit employees and ultimately have a positive business impact. Volunteerism has been linked to improved quality of life, reduced morbidity, and higher self-rated health. This study was designed to understand what small, rural worksites are doing with regard to volunteerism, and what their barriers are to such activities. An online survey was distributed to worksites using the social network of a Resource, Conservation, and Development Council, a rural nonprofit entity. Analyses included descriptive statistics, and for qualitative data, review and summary of common themes. Thirty-eight worksites responded, representing a wide range of worksite types. Volunteer activities requiring less time and resources to organize were more commonly employed versus group-based activities. Identified barriers included time, costs, small staffing numbers, perceived employee lack of interest, worksite policies, distance to volunteer sites, language barriers, and lack of awareness of opportunities. Despite a variety of challenges, some forms of employer-supported volunteerism seem feasible even in very small rural worksites. Worksite type, culture, and leadership are likely to be determinants of the extent and nature of employer-supported volunteerism. Strategies to encourage greater volunteerism need to be tailored to the interests and resources of each site. Occupational health nurses should consider incorporating some form of employee volunteerism activities within their health promotion programming, as it is consistent with an overall strategy of enhancing employee well-being. This could lead to positive business impacts such as increased employee engagement, improved recruitment and retention, and improved productivity.

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The bio-politics of population control and sex-selective abortion in China and India

Feminism & Psychology ◽

10.1177/0959353516682262 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 34-55 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Lisa Eklund ◽

Navtej Purewal

Keyword(s):

Social Dynamics ◽

Population Control ◽

Sex Selection ◽

Reproductive Health Services ◽

Selective Abortion ◽

China And India ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

The Face ◽

Sex Selective Abortion

China and India, two countries with skewed sex ratios in favor of males, have introduced a wide range of policies over the past few decades to prevent couples from deselecting daughters, including criminalizing sex-selective abortion through legal jurisdiction. This article aims to analyze how such policies are situated within the bio-politics of population control and how some of the outcomes reflect each government’s inadequacy in addressing the social dynamics around abortion decision making and the social, physical, and psychological effects on women’s wellbeing in the face of criminalization of sex-selective abortion. The analysis finds that overall, the criminalization of sex selection has not been successful in these two countries. Further, the broader economic, social, and cultural dynamics which produce bias against females must be a part of the strategy to combat sex selection, rather than a narrow criminalization of abortion which endangers women’s access to safe reproductive health services and their social, physical, and psychological wellbeing.

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Toward a Sociology of the Body

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190842475.013.1 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. xviii-20

Author(s):

Katherine Mason ◽

Natalie Boero

Keyword(s):

Social Dynamics ◽

Social Institutions ◽

Theoretical Framework ◽

The Body ◽

Social Body ◽

Sociology Of The Body ◽

Methodological Choices ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

Detailed Outline

This essay is designed to establish the theoretical framework and goals for The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, foremost of which is delineating what a sociology of the body must entail. Critically, a sociology of the body must recognize bodies as both cause and consequence of societal forces. It must also investigate how bodies change in response to their surroundings: not just through the centuries-long process of evolution but within a single individual’s lifetime. We also suggest not only a sociology of the body but also the body in sociology. This approach holds that consideration of bodies—including both the body of the researcher as well as that of the researched—can help to enrich sociological understandings of a wide range of social dynamics and institutions. In sociological subfields ranging from law to labor, and from medicine to migration, attending to the social body has the potential to newly illuminate the mechanisms that underlie our social institutions. This handbook’s early chapters focus primarily on method, debating and elaborating the method(s) that the authors find most useful for studying the body in society. Subsequent chapters shift focus toward the presentation of empirical findings and analysis, but with a continuing focus on detailing their methodological choices and innovations. A detailed outline exploring the twenty-seven chapters of the handbook is provided in this essay.

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Transgressive Arabic discourse in Lebanese political protest

Multilingua ◽

10.1515/multi-2020-0138 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Diane Riskedahl

Keyword(s):

Waste Management ◽

Social Dynamics ◽

Arabic Language ◽

Political Protest ◽

Code Choice ◽

Contemporary Politics ◽

The Social ◽

Wide Range ◽

Written Form ◽

The Government

Abstract A wide range of Arabic language variation in form, code choice and orthographic script was wielded by Lebanese political protestors in their graffiti and political placards in Beirut in 2015. That summer, civil protests spilled out into the streets to critique the government inaction over waste management and overall corruption. I will focus on four tactics that highlight a trend towards linguistic transgression and strategic recontextualization of Arabic discourse in these protests: reworking of state iconography; inscribing irreverent spoken dialect in written form; incorporation of hashtag (#) participant and interpretive frameworks; and the recontextualization of traditional calligraphic forms in new contexts. This paper explores the intertextuality of protest signage and consider the ways in which the transgression of traditional linguistic boundaries might inform understandings of the social dynamics of contemporary politics in Lebanon.

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