Ghost Homes

‘Ghost Homes’ explores the evolving sense of community in a village in rural West Wales, deeply affected by the pandemic. It looks critically at the linguistic and cultural tensions between English holidaymakers and Welsh inhabitants. Using Welsh-English code-switching, it tells the story of a mother and son on the outskirts of Cardigan, navigating illness alongside the isolating pressures of lockdown, highlighting the limitations as well as support of ‘community’. Welsh-speaking Judy is alone at the height of the pandemic, suffering from debilitating back pain. She relies on her middle-aged son, Will, with whom she has a strained relationship. The short story shows the fragile nature of ‘community’ in rural places, especially in West Wales where seaside villages have been bought up as second homes for wealthy English families and, during the pandemic, became ghost towns for the few (often elderly) individuals who continued to live there.

The Role of Armed Conflict in Developing a Subculture of Hate and its Consequences

When Libyan youth took to the streets in a populist uprising in 2011, which became known as the 17 February 2011 revolution, many Libyans thought they were on the verge of removing one of the most vicious dictators of the twentieth century, Muammar Gaddafi, and building a new democratic state. Gaddafi responded forcefully, hoping to eliminate the movement in its infancy. But clashes between Gaddafi’s forces and those who took to streets soon turned into a civil war, during which Libyan society was split into two major groups: one supporting the uprising, the other the regime. In addition to armed conflict, these warring groups regarded each other with contempt, generated slander, and accused each other of betrayal, using words and phrases in a discourse of hate speech. This vocabulary of hate manifested in demonstrations and social media. Eight months later Gaddafi was dead, and the political system he built over four decades collapsed. But the war did not stop: yesterday’s allies became enemies, competing for political and economic gains. The number of contesting groups expanded as different clans, tribes, and cities joined the fray for personal gains. Strategies and techniques first used during the Libyan uprising were applied in the civil war, and are still manifest today. Every militia has a Facebook page, owns a television station, or has access to one. These media have been widely used to spread hate speech and to widen the rift between neighbors, creating refugees and internally displaced people. At least five cities became ghost towns during the uprising. When the concept of subculture first appeared in the sociological literature, it referred to members of a group that behaved according to a set of values and norms that deviated from those of mainstream society. Reviewing the language of militia members and their supporters that is articulated in social media or on television, it becomes obvious that such language has devolved into hate speech, creating social fragmentation among Libyans. This language has created a new set of values and norms in Libya that are different from preexisting mainstream Libyan culture. The new language has created a subculture of hate, which serves to sustain and accelerate continuing divisions within Libya, while further fragmenting the social fabric of the country.

Protest March Restrictions in Cameroon

Southern Cameroonians stage protest marches because of their low or negative social status identity comparative to their French-speaking compatriot. This produces a negative perception of themselves: that of a marginalized people which is a negative or a low social identity. Accordingly, they try to change this situation by mobilizing their members for a protest march as it was on the 22nd September and 1st October, 2017 and their clamor for absolute independence is much clearer today than before. They have therefore constructed a collective identity with a common goal and an emotional bond of organizing protest marches, lockdowns and executing the weekly ghost towns among other. The shared goal of the Anglophone is different from that of the Francophone while one is protesting against the form of state and the protection of their English culture, the other is protesting against a change of government or better governance. In each protest, law enforcement officers brutalized, injured, harassed, seized and destroyed their phones, barred some from joining the demonstrations and dispersed them ruthlessly by violently repressing them, using teargas as well as shooting live bullets on the crowds. While southern Cameroonians share a collective identity and massively organize protest marches, their French-speaking compatriots have conflicting interests and low protest march participation.

Financial Literacy Education Program Post Financial Housing Crisis

As Americans faced financial devastation resulting from the 2008 housing financial crisis, left them in a critical financial hardship. Many affluent suburban neighborhoods now resembled desolate ghost towns as families abandon homes in the middle of the night to avoid ugly snares and embarrassment (Bradford, 2011). Homeowners that once lived in upper middle-class communities achieving the American dream faced the horrifying reality of facing foreclosure, bankruptcies that will force themselves into financial ruin (Bradford, 2011). As a result of the financial housing crisis, 6.9 million homeowners faced mortgage delinquency causing financial institutions to begin foreclosure proceedings (Bradford, 2011; Crotty, 2009). This research focuses on the background to the problem, the underserved populations that were deeply impacted by the financial housing crisis and financial literacy education program that can assist the community toward financial recovery.

Cities of the Future? The Potential Impact of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI), like many revolutionary technologies in human history, will have a profound impact on societies. From this viewpoint, we analyze the combined effects of AI to raise important questions about the future form and function of cities. Combining knowledge from computer science, urban planning, and economics while reflecting on academic and business perspectives, we propose that the future of cities is far from being a determined one and cities may evolve into ghost towns if the deployment of AI is not carefully controlled. This viewpoint presents a fundamentally different argument, because it expresses a real concern over the future of cities in contrast to the many publications who exclusively assume city populations will increase predicated on the neoliberal urban growth paradigm that has for centuries attracted humans to cities in search of work.

Renovation of depressed areas using methods of transpersonal socionics

Depressed areas are naturally degraded sections of urbanized territories. Their existence is always a cause of deterioration in social, economic and environmental conditions. Renovation of depressed areas is an activity that ensures the restoration of favorable conditions in the areas they occupy. Renovation is necessary to ensure the safety of the population and normal living conditions. There are several types of depressed areas that differ in their scale. Depressed objects are individual abandoned buildings and territories around them. Depressed urban districts include parts of the territory of cities with low or naturally declining quality of life, which is characterized by destroying buildings and structures, as well as undeveloped and unsettled sections. Depressed industrial zones are vast territories surrounding complexes of abandoned industrial enterprises. A separate type of depressed areas are ghost towns. They are considered urban-type localities with collapsing buildings and degraded infrastructure, abandoned by residents or a significant part of them. A characteristic feature of all types of depressed areas is their uncontrolled colonization by various organisms. For this reason, depressed areas can be considered as unmanageable natural and technical systems. Transpersonal socionics is an interdisciplinary science, the subject of which is the study of the interaction of various organizational structures and social groups consisting of individuals united by common interests. Such aggregate elements of society can be divided into several categories that differ in the nature of their involvement in the renovation process. They are designated as economic, territorial, technological, administrative, political, and social stakeholders. For each of the categories, the nature of risks caused by the existence of depressed areas is described. Special attention is paid to the problems of environmental risks of various categories of stakeholders. Based on the use of the principles of transpersonal socionics, a method is proposed that allows providing a systematic unified approach to the development of programs for the renovation of depressed areas on the basis of the consideration of all parties involved in this problem (stakeholders).

MMOmuseums: A Proposal for the Creation of Experiential Memory Archives

The visibility and longevity of popular and well-known massively multiplayer online (MMO) communities (World of Warcraft, Second Life) eclipse a greater number of virtual worlds that have been abandoned. While hundreds of inactive and closed-down massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) have been documented, most online virtual worlds are not included in archival and preservation initiatives due to issues relating to intellectual property and proprietary technologies, and most MMORPG ghost towns are not even accessible online. Their evaporated geographies live on only in the memories and stories posted by players to archived message forums. What if these worlds could be booted up once again, not to play in, but to explore as virtual archaeology sites, sites redesigned to host stories and memories from the players that once inhabited and originally populated these architectures with action, conflict, cooperation, and event? Such virtual archive spaces would feature player experiences and emergent narratives, represented as embedded narratives in a simulated recreation of the computer-generated geographies that they took place in, so that visitors to such sites experience a sense of presence as they receive a combination of both experience and story that preserves these spaces as lived worlds. Using the now-defunct City of Heroes MMO as an example, this paper discusses ways of directly involving diasporic communities of players in the memorialization of virtual spaces that they once inhabited.