Echoes of the Past: Women, Memories and Disc-on-Bow Brooches in Vendel- and Viking-period Scandinavia

This article examines the development, handling, and depositions of disc-on-bow brooches from the sixth to tenth centuries ad in the Vendel and Viking periods in Norway and mainland Sweden. A revised typological framework is presented, and the context of these brooches explored. The authors discuss their preservation, re-use, fragmentation, and ritual meaning within ongoing social negotiations and internal conflicts from the late Vendel period into the Viking Age. References to the past in Viking-Age society and the significance of women for maintaining narratives of the past are considered, as are levels of access, control, and definition of narratives of the past in times of social redefinition.

Shaping Asia Through Student Mobilities

While most Asian students still opt for Western universities when envisioning international destinations, growing numbers turn to Asian countries and their universities. This new development has received increasing attention among practitioners and policy makers, while social science research only recently turned to Asia-to-Asia students’ international flows. This contribution offers, first, a literature review, reflecting on trends and the magnitude of inter-Asian students’ movements. These movements are seen as multiple and complex mobilities, not only in spatial but also in the social and ideational sense. Student strategies in making choices while moving to foreign Asian universities as well as their pathways within the social spaces of universities—paying attention to the multiscalar dimensions of movements and the assemblages they recreate—constitute the second part of the article. The third and main part discusses what we learn about the changing shape of Asia while following students’ pathways and aspirations. These movements shape Asia’s academic space that is embedded in the shifting dimensions of Asian economies, polities, social negotiations, cultures, and values.

Unaccompanied refugee minors and resilience: A phenomenological study

Unaccompanied child migration, propelled by war, political strife and instability is an increasingly serious global problem. Refugee youth contends with numerous challenges as they adjust to living in a new country. Although their capacity for resilience is being given the deserved recognition, studies where their views are taken into account greatly outweigh in number those where the voices of young refugees directly narrate how they bounce forward in the face of an uncertain future (Walsh 2002). Resilience scholars are challenged to move beyond a narrow understanding of youth refugee resilience by conducting research on their life situations exploring their own perspectives. This article describes some of the insights gained from a phenomenological study— whose methods are particularly effective at capturing and illuminating the experiences and perceptions of individuals from their own perspectives— undertaken with unaccompanied minors living in Germany. The narrative approach used to explicate their narratives highlights seven major coping strategies: (1) Treasuring personal identity, (2) Maintaining cultural identity, (3) Networks of support and social negotiations, (4) Nurturing the need to belong, (5) Embracing a positive outlook, (6) Perceived self-efficacy and personal characteristics, (7) Adopting a growth mindset & self-enhancement expectations. The empirical data of this research show that URMs are active agents in choosing meaningful pathways to resilience and purposefully navigate through the numerous challenges in their lives.

Interrogating Social Negotiations Within Online Discussion Platforms in Nigeria

One of the dividends of internet revolution in Africa relates to the privilege it accords all and sundry to access news online and share their views with the online community through online discussion platforms. However, the kind of heated discussions emanating from these platforms recently is becoming an issue of concern. Abusive language and arguments revolving around religion, politics, and ethnical sentiments appear to pervade most online commentaries. This article assesses online discussion platforms in Nigeria, its contributions to the society and its setbacks; further, it critically explores the connection between discussion platforms and violence. The article concludes with some recommendations on how Nigeria can further use the platforms for its benefit.

Networked Decisions: Decision-Making Thresholds in Child Protection

Families are significantly affected by decisions made in the child protection context, yet decision outcomes differ even when cases are similar. Understanding the concepts, practices and processes of differentiation that push some cases over the threshold of key decision points, but not other similar cases, is crucial. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with child protection social workers from three site offices in Aotearoa New Zealand (interviews, n = 26; focus groups, n = 25) and using thematic analysis, this study identified the case, internal organisational, inter-site organisational and external elements that contributed to threshold decisions. Case factors such as children’s age, abuse type and chronicity recorded family history and perceptions of family compliance interacted with internal organisational processes and practices, social negotiations and hierarchical power differences to produce decision outcomes. Inter-site differences in decision thresholds resulted from differences in site managers’ perceptions of acceptable case type, site workloads, resources, size and cultural commitment to family preservation. External demographic inequalities were perceived as causing differing levels of site workload. This ‘networked decision-making’ process is theorised drawing on an extended version of the decision-making ecology (DME), by using qualitative methods to examine interactions between the DME elements and their relationship with risk regimes.

Imagining and Making Material Encounters: Skateboarding, Emplacement, and Spatial Desire

In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to explore skateboarders’ skilful mobility and perceptive competence. By combining findings from Swedish and Danish ethnographic studies, we illustrate how skateboarders imagine and make new material encounters both in urban environments not originally built for skateboarding and in skateparks. These imaginations and makings include memories of previous material encounters and are a part of ongoing social negotiations, but they also have a component of imaginary novelty. Making and imagining are discussed as materialization and formation, which include the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Two types of material encounters were imagined and made: transitions and smooth lines. Subsequently, two characteristics of these types of encounters were described: “kind” and challenging. The processes of imagination and making took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the body in the ever-changing material environment. We argue that a conceptualization of spatial desire as emplaced and highly imaginable is fruitful for research on skateboarding and other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore.

Conflict and Cooperation in Labour-Management Relations. A Comparative Approach: Canada-Poland

Until 1980, labour relations in Poland were entirely run by the state. As a result of massive strikes and social negotiations the first independent trade union “Solidarność” was established. The 1989 elections, which lead to the defeat of the Communist government, finally opened the door for legal reform of the Polish industrial relations model. In this article, the author examines the evolution and development of the Polish labour relations system in contrast with the situation and latest trends of labour negotiations in Canada, a democratic country with a market economy.

Culture-specific and individual affective factors in professional communication

In this paper we set out to consider the place of the English language in globalised communities. The hegemony, which English enjoys, has ramifications for how it is taught, how and why it is learned and how it is used. We argue that there is a need to consider more socio-cultural and individual factors in the learning and use of English as a lingua franca as these factors constitute crucial aids to successful cross-cultural interactions in professional environments. The latest research on lingua franca English (LFE) (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Kramsch, 2002; Larsen-Freeman, 2002; Block, 2003; House, 2003; Canagarajah, 2006a; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Atkinson, Churchill, Nishino & Okada, 2007) confirms our position since it reveals what has always been the experience of multilingual speakers, i.e., “Language learning and use succeed through performance strategies, situational resources, and social negotiations in fluid communicative contexts. Proficiency is therefore practice-based, adaptive, and emergent” (Canagarajah, 2007: 923).

The social appropriation of the Portuguese inner colonisation in Boalhosa

Like other European regimes, the Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974) implemented an agricultural colonisation policy that, influenced by the ideals of modernism and neo-Physiocracy, aimed at economic development, social pacification and the fostering of national identities, resulting in the settlement and populating of modern rural landscapes. However, the Portuguese regime coped with an enduring financial crisis, and relied on an official nationalism built upon a conservative-traditional society under the union of God, fatherland, work and family. Unsurprisingly, Portuguese inner colonisation was comparatively small-scale, aimed at converting farmhands into rural homeowners, and its modernising experiments had limited impact on the landscape. However, landscape and place are not passive concepts. They concurrently build and are built by political and economic agencies, social negotiations, embodied experiences, plural meanings and affections. Looking into primary sources and the outcomes of a micro-ethnography in Boalhosa, this paper intersects official-written history and emotional-sensory memory to illustrate consistencies and dissonances between political and social actors’ representations of the Portuguese inner colonisation. Based on exploratory observations in Boalhosa, it argues that while the lack of political assertiveness may have curtailed the Portuguese project, it also favoured its social appropriation by local communities and economies within a contextualised historical spatial continuum.