Heterotopic and Neo-Victorian Affinities: Introducing the Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias

The introduction to this special issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias investigates the affinities between the spaces designated by Michel Foucault’s ambivalent and protean concept of ‘heterotopia’ and the similarly equivocal, shifting, and adaptable cultural phenomenon of ‘neo-Victorianism’. In both cases, cultural spaces and/or artefacts prove deeply intertwined with chronicity, at once juxtaposing and blending different temporal moments, past and present. Socially produced sites of distinct emplacement are exposed not just as culturally and historically contingent constructs, but simultaneously enable forms of resistance to the prevailing ideologies that call them into being. The fertile exercise of considering heterotopias and neo-Victorianism in conjunction opens up new explorations of the Long Nineteenth Century and its impact on today’s cultural imaginary, memory and identity politics, contestations of systemic historical iniquities, and engagements with forms of difference, non-normativity, and Otherness.

Refugee-led socio-spatial organization in Al Baqa’a camp, Jordan

The increase in refugee numbers is an increasingly important concern globally. Many countries in different regions have been accommodating refugees by providing temporary shelters made from ineffective and inadequate materials to provide thermal comfort for refugees. However, the shelters provided are often inadequate solutions for shelter and neglect the social and cultural diversity of the refugees. Socio-cultural norms, practices and values are rarely considered in the design of shelters and this has an adverse impact on how refugees live in these spaces. Using insights from the Al Baqa’a refugee camp in Jordan as a case study, this paper uses a mixed-method approach to explore how the challenges of inadequate shelter has consequently led refugees to self-organize and create new socio-cultural spaces to adapt to the place. The findings suggest that historically, Al Baqa’a camp has reorganized by users due to social needs and climate challenges. When the camp was created in 1967, the inadequacy of the housing and infrastructure to provide comfort influenced refugees to self-organize and create adaptive spaces of comfort. However, over the decades, these spaces have evolved into spaces of enterprise, belonging and memory of their homeland. Therefore, this paper argues that refugee shelter design should have an integrated consideration of the climatic elements and the social and cultural aspects of refugees. The paper concludes with lessons learned drawn from the evidence to act as guideline for the consideration of official humanitarian organizations in other camps and local communities.

Violations of Islamic Law in Male–Female Relations: The Shifting of Nyubuk Tradition of the Customary Peoples of Lampung

Advances in media and communication technology have wrought significant shifts in the nyubuk tradition of the customary peoples of Lampung Pepadun. Male–female relations, once clearly regulated by customary doctrine through nyubuk, are now mediated by social media technology that facilitates the violation of customary and Islamic laws. This article examines how nyubuk, a cultural medium for communication that has traditionally been used in spouse selection, has shifted as social media has become widely available. More specifically, it seeks to understand how the nyubuk tradition has come to disappear without any significant resistance. In doing so, it applies a qualitative descriptive approach, with data having been collected through interviews. This study finds that despite generations of practice, shifting social and cultural practices have threatened nyubuk with extinction, and the practice has increasingly been replaced by social media. As a result, behaviors that violate social and religious norms have become increasingly common in society. Male–female relations, traditionally regulated under Islamic norms through nyubuk, have become increasingly open as cultural spaces have been replaced by social media. This has facilitated transgressions and other violations of Islamic law by young men and women. Obeisance of religious law depends significantly on local cultural authorities, and where these authorities are ignored, once dominant laws and practices may become extinct. Received: 28 September 2021 / Accepted: 16 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

Research of the Health, Aging, and Society Laboratory

This chapter describes the work being done in North-East Brazil to clarify how social issues are constructed and reconstructed in processes driven by the values, symbols, and patterns that characterize the area’s social and cultural spaces. Aging, but also care, quality of life, and work are studied, analyzing them in the process of their naturalization guided by daily communication and practices. The Lab at the Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), in Joao Pessoa, also draws on contributions from other areas of Brazil (especially Rio de Janeiro) and focuses mainly on studying the aging process. Its work is guided by principles of interprofessionalization in the field of gerontology, especially in its critical advancements. The Aging Institute founded at the UFPB (the first in the whole country) aims to combine research and a third mission, exploiting the potential of social representations theory for engaged research.

The Place of Chinese Doramas in the Russian Socio-Cultural Landscape

The increasing interest of people around the world towards the popular cultures of China, Korea and Japan leads researchers to question how these countries influence the socio-cultural spaces of other countries through the export of their mass culture products. This study focuses on the analysis of Chinese doramas in the Russian sociocultural space. The increasing number of online fan communities, the activity of translators and dubbers of Chinese TV series, and the widespread use of the Internet in Russia make Chinese dramas easily accessible to a wide audience. Using quantitative methods, the author of the study came to the conclusion that people in Russia are very interested in Asian cultures, and audiences of Asian TV series are growing at a tremendous rate every year. While Korean dramas remain the most popular in Russia, Chinese serials have great competitive potential against their Korean and Japanese counterparts. This article may be useful to all researchers of mass and popular culture and television series.

Semantic Trajectory Analytics and Recommender Systems in Cultural Spaces

Semantic trajectory analytics and personalised recommender systems that enhance user experience are modern research topics that are increasingly getting attention. Semantic trajectories can efficiently model human movement for further analysis and pattern recognition, while personalised recommender systems can adapt to constantly changing user needs and provide meaningful and optimised suggestions. This paper focuses on the investigation of open issues and challenges at the intersection of these two topics, emphasising semantic technologies and machine learning techniques. The goal of this paper is twofold: (a) to critically review related work on semantic trajectories and knowledge-based interactive recommender systems, and (b) to propose a high-level framework, by describing its requirements. The paper presents a system architecture design for the recognition of semantic trajectory patterns and for the inferencing of possible synthesis of visitor trajectories in cultural spaces, such as museums, making suggestions for new trajectories that optimise cultural experiences.

Inclusive trends of urban development: Temporalspatial social practices

The article presents the results of a review of the data of Russian and international research of social-urban development as presented at the scientific events in the Saratov region. In contemporary urbanism, there is a number of trends: temporal, of universal design, and social-cultural. The Russian urban development follows agglomeration trends that are increasingly evident in the processes of settlement, which means active development of suburban areas, changes in their landscape characteristics, cultural spaces, and mobility of citizens. The covid-19 pandemic had a complex impact on the social-urban features of cities in Russia and the world by transforming the structure and functionality of many urban locations, creating conditions for the emergence of a post-coronavirus city. The empirical data show that such a city is the most socially sensitive to negative and positive aspects of social life and to manifestations of inclusive practices that unite people. Under the low, fragmented accessibility of social, cultural and other infrastructure of cities that are designed for healthy people, there is a synchronization of urban infrastructure elements in the context of inclusion due to the social demand for a coronavirus transformation of the architectural and urban environment in terms of social distancing. Based on the research data from different regions of Russia, the authors identify priority directions of the inclusive development of social urbanism: models of the inclusive culture of urban communities; monitoring of the city accessible environment for citizens of different age and mobility (in particular, with the tracing and walk along approaches); model of participatory urban planning and social expertise of the inclusiveness of the urban space; educational model of professional training in the field of social urbanism and universal design.

Facilitating Semantic Interoperability of Trustworthy IoT Entities in Cultural Spaces: The Smart Museum Ontology

Nowadays, cultural spaces (e.g., museums and archaeological sites) are interested in adding intelligence in their ecosystem by deploying different types of smart applications such as automated environmental monitoring, energy saving, and user experience optimization. Such an ecosystem is better realized through semantics in order to efficiently represent the required knowledge for facilitating interoperability among different application domains, integration of data, and inference of new knowledge as insights into what may have not been observed at first sight. This paper reports on our recent efforts for the engineering of a smart museum (SM) ontology that meets the following objectives: (a) represent knowledge related to trustworthy IoT entities that “live” and are deployed in a SM, i.e., things, sensors, actuators, people, data, and applications; (b) deal with the semantic interoperability and integration of heterogeneous SM applications and data; (c) represent knowledge related to museum visits and visitors toward enhancing their visiting experience; (d) represent knowledge related to smart energy saving; (e) represent knowledge related to the monitoring of environmental conditions in museums; and (f) represent knowledge related to the space and location of exhibits and collections. The paper not only contributes a novel SM ontology, but also presents the updated HCOME methodology for the agile, human-centered, collaborative and iterative engineering of living, reused, and modular ontologies.

Narațiune și interacțiune: preliminarii teoretice comparate

The present study aims to put forward a state of the art regarding interaction in narratives, providing a blueprint for further analysis of the phenomenon in Romania. It starts by taking into account in a comparative manner the “popular” definitions of narrative and how these might affect the general reception of narratives in various cultural spaces, comparing the Anglo-American tradition to the Romanian one. It then proceeds to identify and correlate different theories of interaction in narrative, focusing on models by Janet Murray, Jan van Dijk and Eric Zimmerman.

Being together, doing together and going forward together: echoes from France’s cultural third places in times of covid-19

In France, as in many other countries, cultural production and management practices are facing numerous transformations. Being understood as experimental; intermediary cultural spaces that redefine the relationship of culture with the public and the local territory, cultural third places provide a vivid example of this changing reality. Before the current health crisis, the social role of these constructs in regard to the local context were made even more visible. On a first level, this article aims to present the uniqueness of those spaces in the French context. Secondly, it describes the preliminary results of an exploratory study analyzing the reactions and adjustments to working dynamics of a number of spaces in the PACA region, in France, during the first months of the pandemic. Finally, we propose further lines of research.