scholarly journals Alone in a Time of Pandemic: Solo-Living Women Coping With Physical Isolation

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-217
Author(s):  
Tanja Kamin ◽  
Nina Perger ◽  
Liza Debevec ◽  
Blanka Tivadar

For people in single households, living alone has become literal and absolute during the social-distancing measures related to COVID-19 and can lead to decreased health and wellbeing. In this article, we examine how solo-living women think, feel, make sense of, and practice COVID-19-related social-distancing measures and, consequently, physical isolation. During lockdown, we interviewed 23 solo-living women between the ages of 25 and 69 years living in Slovenia. We present three levels of responses to social-distancing measures: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. We identified dissonances between these levels of responses, and we learned that affective responses play a significant role in shaping one’s orientation toward and respect for the social-distancing measures.

REGION ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Lise Bourdeau Lepage ◽  
Balázs Kotosz

In response to the Covid‑19 health crisis, the French government has imposed various measures, referred to as social-distancing measures, including a lockdown with the primary objective of reducing face-to-face interactions between people in order to limit the spread of the virus. This paper seeks to determine if the social-distancing measures and lockdown lead to social isolation for certain people and have an impact on French people’s well-being. First, it reveals that the feelings of social isolation have substantially increased in France during this lockdown.  Second, it explores the factors that help to explain these changes by developing a predictive model and reveals that living alone, being a woman, being young are factors that explain this increase in felling of social isolation. Third, the estimation of the effects of changes in feelings of social isolation on changes in the reported level of well-being of French respondents during lockdown shows that people who reported feeling more socially isolated than others has the lowest levels of well-being among the French population; and that the increase in people’s feelings of social isolation during lockdown is a factor that has a negative impact on their level of well-being.


Author(s):  
Nesreen Al-Harby

This paper explores Mathias Besong’s My Struggle with COVID-19 (2020), Nikita Gill’s Love in the Time of Coronavirus (2020), and Elizabeth Mitchell’s The Doctor and Apocalypse (2020) and focusses on how these poems illustrate authors’ reactions to the spread of coronavirus. Therefore, it engages genre theory and argues that the examined verse adopts features and themes of post-apocalyptic literature. The research employs a comparative approach that divides the poems into three categories: the poetry of despair, the poetry of hope, and the ambivalent poetry that depicts responses to the pandemic inconsistently. The study shows that the explored poems express contradictions between social distancing, physical isolation, and global connectedness and oneness. This paper scrutinizes the concept of survival and examines features of coronavirus survivors as significant elements in the explored genre. The research debates that human reactions to distress are universal. It also draws attention to the effectiveness of writing poetry to aspire to hope, achieve global human solidarity, and challenge fear and hardships. The research demonstrates the social impacts of Covid-19 and how poetry becomes a means that expresses fear and hope through its employment of post-apocalyptic conventions and tropes. Finally, the researcher suggests that the examined poets depict their anxieties and psychological distress; however, they overlook illustrating the physical pain associated with coronavirus. This study contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions that focus on selected poems produced during the Covid-19 context and sheds light on their genre, conventions, and tropes.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nesreen Al-Harby

This paper explores Mathias Besong’s My Struggle with COVID-19 (2020), Nikita Gill’s Love in the Time of Coronavirus (2020), and Elizabeth Mitchell’s The Doctor and Apocalypse (2020) and focusses on how these poems illustrate authors’ reactions to the spread of coronavirus. Therefore, it engages genre theory and argues that the examined verse adopts features and themes of post-apocalyptic literature. The research employs a comparative approach that divides the poems into three categories: the poetry of despair, the poetry of hope, and the ambivalent poetry that depicts responses to the pandemic inconsistently. The study shows that the explored poems express contradictions between social distancing, physical isolation, and global connectedness and oneness. This paper scrutinizes the concept of survival and examines features of coronavirus survivors as significant elements in the explored genre. The research debates that human reactions to distress are universal. It also draws attention to the effectiveness of writing poetry to aspire to hope, achieve global human solidarity, and challenge fear and hardships. The research demonstrates the social impacts of Covid-19 and how poetry becomes a means that expresses fear and hope through its employment of post-apocalyptic conventions and tropes. Finally, the researcher suggests that the examined poets depict their anxieties and psychological distress; however, they overlook illustrating the physical pain associated with coronavirus. This study contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions that focus on selected poems produced during the Covid-19 context and sheds light on their genre, conventions, and tropes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 563-572
Author(s):  
Yumin Park ◽  
Yong-Wook Shin

Background and objective: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restricted daily life, forcing people to spend time indoors. With the growing interest in mental health issues and residential environments, ‘pet plants’ have been receiving attention during the unprecedented social distancing measures. This study aims to analyze the change in trends of pet plants before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide basic data for studies related to pet plants and directions of future development.Methods: A total of 2,016 news articles using the keyword ‘pet plants’ were collected on Naver News from January 1, 2018 to August 15, 2019 (609 articles) and January 1, 2020 to August 15, 2021 (1,407 articles). The texts were tokenized into words using KoNLPy package, ultimately coming up with 63,597 words. The analyses included frequency of keywords and topic modeling based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify the inherent meanings of related words and each topic.Results: Topic modeling generated three topics in each period (before and during the COVID-19), and the results showed that pet plants in daily life have become the object of ‘emotional support’ and ‘healing’ during social distancing. In particular, pet plants, which had been distributed as a solution to prevent solitary deaths and depression among seniors living alone, are now expanded to help resolve the social isolation of the general public suffering from COVID-19. The new term ‘plant butler’ became a new trend, and there was a change in the trend in which people shared their hobbies and information about pet plants and communicated with others in online.Conclusion: Based on these findings, the trend data of pet plants before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 can provide the basis for activating research on pet plants and setting the direction for development of related industries considering the continuous popularity and trend of indoor gardening and green hobby.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 5492
Author(s):  
Cristina Maria Păcurar ◽  
Ruxandra-Gabriela Albu ◽  
Victor Dan Păcurar

The paper presents an innovative method for tourist route planning inside a destination. The necessity of reorganizing the tourist routes within a destination comes as an immediate response to the Covid-19 crisis. The implementation of the method inside tourist destinations can bring an important advantage in transforming a destination into a safer one in times of Covid-19 and post-Covid-19. The existing trend of shortening the tourist stay length has been accelerated while the epidemic became a pandemic. Moreover, the wariness for future pandemics has brought into spotlight the issue of overcrowded attractions inside a destination at certain moments. The method presented in this paper proposes a backtracking algorithm, more precisely an adaptation of the travelling salesman problem. The method presented is aimed to facilitate the navigation inside a destination and to revive certain less-visited sightseeing spots inside a destination while facilitating conformation with the social distancing measures imposed for Covid-19 control.


Author(s):  
Lillian Mwanri ◽  
Leticia Anderson ◽  
Kathomi Gatwiri

Background: Emigration to Australia by people from Africa has grown steadily in the past two decades, with skilled migration an increasingly significant component of migration streams. Challenges to resettlement in Australia by African migrants have been identified, including difficulties securing employment, experiences of racism, discrimination and social isolation. These challenges can negatively impact resettlement outcomes, including health and wellbeing. There has been limited research that has examined protective and resilience factors that help highly skilled African migrants mitigate the aforementioned challenges in Australia. This paper discusses how individual and community resilience factors supported successful resettlement Africans in Australia. The paper is contextualised within a larger study which sought to investigate how belonging and identity inform Afrodiasporic experiences of Africans in Australia. Methods: A qualitative inquiry was conducted with twenty-seven (n = 27) skilled African migrants based in South Australia, using face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Participants were not directly questioned about ‘resilience,’ but were encouraged to reflect critically on how they navigated the transition to living in Australia, and to identify factors that facilitated a successful resettlement. Results: The study findings revealed a mixture of settlement experiences for participants. Resettlement challenges were observed as barriers to fully meeting expectations of emigration. However, there were significant protective factors reported that supported resilience, including participants’ capacities for excellence and willingness to work hard; the social capital vested in community and family support networks; and African religious and cultural values and traditions. Many participants emphasised their pride in their contributions to Australian society as well as their desire to contribute to changing narratives of what it means to be African in Australia. Conclusions: The findings demonstrate that despite challenges, skilled African migrants’ resilience, ambition and determination were significant enablers to a healthy resettlement in Australia, contributing effectively to social, economic and cultural expectations, and subsequently meeting most of their own migration intentions. These findings suggest that resilience factors identified in the study are key elements of integration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 3179
Author(s):  
Minh Hieu Nguyen ◽  
Jimmy Armoogum

The rapid and widespread of COVID-19 has caused severe multifaceted effects on society but differently in women and men, thereby preventing the achievement of gender equality (the 5th sustainable development goal of the United Nations). This study, using data of 355 teleworkers collected in Hanoi (Vietnam) during the first social distancing period, aims at exploring how (dis)similar factors associated with the perception and the preference for more home-based telework (HBT) for male teleworkers versus female peers are. The findings show that 56% of female teleworkers compared to 45% of male counterparts had a positive perception of HBT within the social distancing period and 63% of women desired to telework more in comparison with 39% of men post-COVID-19. Work-related factors were associated with the male perception while family-related factors influenced the female perception. There is a difference in the effects of the same variables (age and children in the household) on the perception and the preference for HBT for females. For women, HBT would be considered a solution post-COVID-19 to solve the burden existing pre-COVID-19 and increasing in COVID-19. Considering gender inequality is necessary for the government and authorities to lessen the adverse effects of COVID-19 on the lives of citizens, especially female ones, in developing countries.


Asian Survey ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 220-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Paul Tan

Abstract In 2011, Singaporeans voted in parliamentary and presidential elections. The social networking media, dominated by alternative reporting and commentary, played a significant role in generating political interest and mobilizing oppositional thinking and support. Faced with a stronger oppositional presence and a politically emboldened electorate, the People's Action Party government won the elections but achieved its worst results ever.


Author(s):  
Mr. Kiran Mudaraddi

The paper presents a deep learning-based methodology for detecting social distancing in order to assess the distance between people in order to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The input was a video frame from the camera, and the open-source object detection was pre-trained. The outcome demonstrates that the suggested method is capable of determining the social distancing measures between many participants in a video.


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