Working Together Apart through Embodiment

Computer-mediated collaboration has long been a core research interest in CSCW and HCI. As online social spaces continue to evolve towards more immersive and higher fidelity experiences, more research is still needed to investigate how emerging novel technology may foster and support new and more nuanced forms and experiences of collaboration in virtual environments. Using 30 interviews, this paper focuses on what people may collaborate on and how they collaborate in social Virtual Reality (VR). We broaden current studies on computer-mediated collaboration by highlighting the importance of embodiment for co-presence and communication, replicating offline collaborative activities, and supporting the seamless interplay of work, play, and mundane experiences in everyday lives for experiencing and conceptualizing collaboration in emerging virtual environments. We also propose potential design implications that could further support everyday collaborative activities in social VR

Coping with Conundrums: Lower Ranked Pakistani Policewomen and Gender Inequity at the Workplace

Scholarship on gender and policing has frequently applied gendered organizational theory to understand how this type of organization and the men who run it produce gendered difference and inequity at the workplace. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research on lower ranked policewomen in Pakistan and contend that to fully fathom women’s marginalization at work, an analysis must not limit itself to the organization or the men who create the inequity but must also focus on women’s workplace behavior. My research sheds light on women’s anxieties about working with a large number of men and about people questioning their morality and character because they do so. I also demonstrate how their subsequent coping strategies can impede their professional development and reproduce their marginalization at their workplace. This woman-centric approach, which examines how policewomen navigate gendered landscapes in different patriarchal social spaces, therefore shows that workplace inequity is the collective result of the interplay between different actors and social structures, and leads to a more complex understanding of this phenomenon.

Nethnography and Social Network Analysis for Studying Online Social Space

This chapter contributes to the current methodological debate on digital, internet-based studies in social research. Based upon an introductive analysis of the research's perspectives, trajectories, and stages that have brought the online social spaces into social research, the chapter focuses on the advantages of combining quanti-quali approaches for approaching online complexity. In particular, the authors offer a deep discussion concerning the value, the methodological, and ethical challenges of netnography and social network analysis (SNA) methods for inquiring online social research by proposing a possible emerging methodological framework guiding further empirical studies.

Everyday Lives in Peripheral Spaces: A Case of Bengal Borderlands

This article (part of a special section on South Asian border studies) is an ethnographic study of the daily lives and narratives of borderlands communities in the border districts of Cooch Behar and South Dinajpur along the West-Bengal–Bangladesh border. In order to emphasise the significance of borderland communities’ narratives and experiences to our understanding of borders, this paper explores the idea of borders as social spaces that are inherently dynamic. In attempting to understand the idea of borders through everyday lives of people living in borderland communities, this paper highlights tensions and contradictions between hard borders manifested through securitization practices, and the inherently dynamic social spaces that manifest themselves in people’s daily lives. Conceptually and thematically, this paper is situated within and seeks to contribute to the discipline of borderland studies. Key Words: Borders, Social Spaces, Security, Bengal Borderlands, South Asia

Stranger spaces: Embodiment, space and language in the collaborative life writing novel The Fortune Finder

The present study takes The Fortune Finder (2008) by Edward van de Vendel and Anoush Elman as a case in point to demonstrate how interactions between material bodies, space and power constitute some characters as strangers or, in other words, as bodies deemed out-of-place. The novel is an example of collaborative life writing and describes how a young, Afghan refugee and his family flee the Taliban regime and seek asylum in the Netherlands. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work (2000), I demonstrate how their bodies are recognised as stranger bodies through a demarcation of social spaces, which involves including or excluding particular bodies based on matters of normativity and deviance. Protagonist Hamayun and his family are implicated in shifting relationships with power and space that cause their bodies to be recognised as out-of-place in various ways, dependent on their circumstances. The notion of dwelling takes centre stage in these dynamics. It denotes the actual spaces that Hamayun and his family (are allowed to) inhabit, but it also features in a metaphor that links friendship with spaces of belonging. An implied lack thereof suggests how Hamayun eventually seems to perceive himself as a kind of stranger.

Christian experiences and imaginings of the Secular in New Zealand

<p>This thesis explores how the Secular comes to materialise in the lives of a small group of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians in Wellington, New Zealand. It presents an ethnographic account of how Christians experience and imagine the intertwined relationship between the religious and the Secular as they navigate social spaces, construct their identity, and make sense of the world. I argue that the Secular is not simply a residual state following the demise of religion, but rather, it is a discursive sensibility that produces religious subjects, and shapes a particular way of thinking about religion and its place in society. The Christians in this study seek to reject, counter and shape secular sensibilities, but they are also embroiled in producing the Secular. Consequently, they problematise dominant understandings of the Secular and religion as intrinsically separate and opposed domains. Based on four months of fieldwork in a Pentecostal-Charismatic church, and interviews with nine church congregants, this thesis reveals that Christian lives involve complex and multifaceted ways of being both Christian and secular.</p>

Christian experiences and imaginings of the Secular in New Zealand

<p>This thesis explores how the Secular comes to materialise in the lives of a small group of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians in Wellington, New Zealand. It presents an ethnographic account of how Christians experience and imagine the intertwined relationship between the religious and the Secular as they navigate social spaces, construct their identity, and make sense of the world. I argue that the Secular is not simply a residual state following the demise of religion, but rather, it is a discursive sensibility that produces religious subjects, and shapes a particular way of thinking about religion and its place in society. The Christians in this study seek to reject, counter and shape secular sensibilities, but they are also embroiled in producing the Secular. Consequently, they problematise dominant understandings of the Secular and religion as intrinsically separate and opposed domains. Based on four months of fieldwork in a Pentecostal-Charismatic church, and interviews with nine church congregants, this thesis reveals that Christian lives involve complex and multifaceted ways of being both Christian and secular.</p>

The Early Modern Period, 1530–1650

The final main chapter looks at the early modern period, assessing how far it saw a ‘Reformation of the landscape’ and a secularization and commodification of the way land was valued as a resource. It is argued that, as earlier, a group sense of attachment to place was strongest in vibrant, socially ‘open’ settlements with considerable shared spaces, the kind of settlements found mainly in the vale part of the hundred. Village social space is examined in detail through an archaeological analysis of standing buildings and their relationship to the wider streetscape. Court depositions supply data about inhabitants’ attitudes to different social spaces and the ways in which they were used.

Classification of Social Spaces of Shopping Malls by the Prevailing Element

A new wave of shopping malls development is expected in Ukraine, which makes the study of this type of building and its social spaces even more relevant. The aim of this study is to develop a classification of shopping malls’ social spaces by prevailing element for further research and usage in regulatory frameworks. The article analyzes 16 malls located in different countries in Europe, with different sizes and planning layouts. The analysis of their floor schemes is carried out. The study identified 3 types of social spaces by the prevailing element: linear type (the most popular), court type and mixed type.