“Come and live in my Shoes”: Food Access and social isolation for People living in poverty IN GANANOQUE, Ontario

This community-based research project, in collaboration with the Gananoque and Area Food Access Network (GAFAN), gathered data from self-reported food insecure residents of Gananoque and area to determine how to improve their access to healthy, personally acceptable food. In March 2016, I recruited 14 participants for three focus groups and one personal interview with those struggling to put food on the table for themselves and others in the household. Participants were single parents, adults over the age of 50, and adults who could benefit from improved access to healthy food but do not currently use existing services. Health issues, social isolation, scraping by, and lack of income were four themes that underscored the impact of poverty on the lives of participants. Lack of income, transportation, cost of food, lack of affordable or accessible childcare, and inadequate access to support services proved to be major barriers to food security: strongly influenced by the impact of rurality. The results of this research have the potential to help GAFAN improve food access for those living in this community. It may also have implications for enhancing food security in other rural Canadian communities.

Leadership in the community sector: promoting collaboration and social change in Belfast

Community development is centrally concerned with people in communities working together to achieve a common goal, that is, to collaborate, whether within local geographical communities, in communities of shared interests or among groups sharing a common identity. Its overarching goal is one of progressive transformational social change. As Belfast transitions from a conflict to a post-conflict society, there is a need for greater, more effective work at local community level in order to address a range of ongoing social and economic issues facing communities, including high levels of disadvantage and division. Given the significance of leadership in building effective collaboration and the centrality of collaboration for community development, it is important to understand how leadership is currently enacted and what kinds of leadership are required to support communities to collaborate effectively to bring about social change. This thesis thus centers on the kind of leadership practised and required to support collaboration for social change within the community sector in Belfast, a city that contains an estimated 28% of the total number of community and voluntary sector (CVS) organisations in Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, 2012). Through a series of qualitative, in-depth interviews with people playing leadership roles in local communities, the study critically explores and analyses their experiences and perceptions in relation to leadership and collaboration. Community development in Belfast today is practised within a wider context of neoliberal policies, characterised by austerity and public spending cuts. Whilst not the only influencing factor, this context has had a particular and profound impact on the nature and role of community development practised, and on the kind of leadership enacted within it. The space for reflection and transformative action appears to be shrinking as the contraction of resources to support community development in local communities continues unabated. Those playing leadership roles increasingly find themselves compelled to spend time seeking resources and managing complex funding arrangements rather than focusing on the social change dimensions of their work. Collaboration as promoted by the state seems to have become an instrumental tactic used to implement its austerity measures and curtail the potential of the community sector. Despite this, local leaders are driving initiatives that attempt to push back, helping the sector refocus on its transformational goals of social change. To do this requires support. Those playing leadership roles require resources, including time, to encourage and enable communities to reconnect with the purpose and underpinning values of community development. Leaders also need support to develop and promote new, progressive narratives and visions and pursue these through building collaboration and solidarity.

Islam and the question of reform : critical voices from Muslim communities

Reform, by definition, is not a complete break with tradition, but a determination by scholars, activists, politicians and critical thinkers to re-claim the tenets of their faith. Muslim communities have historically displayed a tendency to preserve the status quo.By contrast, the individuals and movements in Islam and the Question of Reform are determined—often at great personal risk—to push aside existing political and social elites and the historically accepted interpretations of Islam and its place in society.The perspectives examined in this volume avoid superficial or apologetic examinations of Islam's political and social role. Instead, they meticulously scrutinise the religion's public role, often questioning the validity of dogmas that have acted as tools of empowerment for existing elites for centuries.

Boys, productive pedagogies and social justice

The issue of boys' education continues to dominate the gender agenda in Australian Education. Whilst concerned with the direction much of this debate has taken, we recognise that there are issues for some boys stemming from the ways in which certain masculinities have been valorised within the various communities that different boys inhabit. This paper will draw on a range of voices from schools to stress the importance of providing boys with curricula, pedagogies and assessment tasks that provide them with opportunities to explore and critically analyse their personal experiences of what it means to be 'masculine'. We argue that such an approach to boys' education has to avoid treating boys as 'disadvantaged' and instead has to be cognisant of the complexities surrounding gendered relations of power operating within boys' various communities. We suggest that the productive pedagogies framework provides an avenue through which such an approach to boys' education can be taken up in schools. We are mindful, however, that the gender just enactment of this pedagogical framework requires that teachers draw on key threshold knowledges about gender, masculinity and schooling. We present some of these knowledges and demonstrate their imperative in moving beyond reinscription to transformation of the gendered relations that constrain boys' and girls' schooling experiences.

Discovering latent affective dynamics among individuals in online mental health-related communities

Discovering dynamics of emotion and mood changes for individuals has the potential to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. In this paper we study affective transitions and dynamics among individuals in online mental health communities. Using social media as form of 'sensor', we crawl a large dataset of blogs posted by online communities whose descriptions declared to be associated with affective disorder conditions such as depression, anxiety, or autism. We then apply nonnegative matrix factorization model to extract the common and individual factors of affective transitions across groups of individuals in different levels of affective disorders. We examine the latent patterns of emotional transitions and investigate the effects of emotional transitions across the cohorts. Our framework is novel as it utilizes social media as an online sensing platform of mood and emotional dynamics. Hence, our work has implication in constructing systems to screen individuals and communities at high risks of mental health problems in online settings.

Increasing physical activity among young children from disadvantaged communities: study protocol of a group randomised controlled effectiveness trial.

BACKGROUND: Participation in regular physical activity (PA) during the early years helps children achieve healthy body weight and can substantially improve motor development, bone health, psychosocial health and cognitive development. Despite common assumptions that young children are naturally active, evidence shows that they are insufficiently active for health and developmental benefits. Exploring strategies to increase physical activity in young children is a public health and research priority. METHODS: Jump Start is a multi-component, multi-setting PA and gross motor skill intervention for young children aged 3-5 years in disadvantaged areas of New South Wales, Australia. The intervention will be evaluated using a two-arm, parallel group, randomised cluster trial. The Jump Start protocol was based on Social Cognitive Theory and includes five components: a structured gross motor skill lesson (Jump In); unstructured outdoor PA and gross motor skill time (Jump Out); energy breaks (Jump Up); activities connecting movement to learning experiences (Jump Through); and a home-based family component to promote PA and gross motor skill (Jump Home). Early childhood education and care centres will be demographically matched and randomised to Jump Start (intervention) or usual practice (comparison) group. The intervention group receive Jump Start professional development, program resources, monthly newsletters and ongoing intervention support. Outcomes include change in total PA (accelerometers) within centre hours, gross motor skill development (Test of Gross Motor Development-2), weight status (body mass index), bone strength (Sunlight MiniOmni Ultrasound Bone Sonometer), self-regulation (Heads-Toes-Knees-Shoulders, executive function tasks, and proxy-report Temperament and Approaches to learning scales), and educator and parent self-efficacy. Extensive quantitative and qualitative process evaluation and a cost-effectiveness evaluation will be conducted. DISCUSSION: The Jump Start intervention is a unique program to address low levels of PA and gross motor skill proficiency, and support healthy lifestyle behaviours among young children in disadvantaged communities. If shown to be efficacious, the Jump Start approach can be expected to have implications for early childhood education and care policies and practices, and ultimately a positive effect on the health and development across the life course. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry No: ACTRN12614000597695 , first received: June 5, 2014.

In good faith: benefits and challenges of a secular NGO working with Melanesian communities of faith

Christian belief across the Pacific region of Melanesia is almost universal. Resulting primarily from missionary activity that in many instances predated colonial interactions, Christian beliefs and institutions are tightly embedded in the political and social domains of these countries (Leach et al. 2013). Melanesian countries, such as the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, also experience constraints to economic development due to limited comparative advantage, poor terms of trade, small and dispersed populations, and geographical disconnectedness (both internal and external). As such, they are highly dependent upon foreign assistance (Feeny and McDonald 2015).

Social media as sensor for healthcare: A machine learning approach.

This thesis advances the area of applied machine learning, sentiment and psycholinguistic analysis in social media for health analytics. In particular, the thesis views social media as a gigantic form of 'sensor' to inform about mental health community and related topics.

Sydney Opera House on eBay: enabling technologies, community and social value

Digital forms of participation with significant places, such the Sydney Opera House, are increasing. What can they reveal about communities of this World Heritage site? How do contingent forms of participation evidence the interconnectedness of tangible, intangible and digital forms of cultural heritage? Critical heritage scholars assert that social value is a central issue in cultural heritage. In an Australian context, ‘social value’ is used to denote the significance that communities have for places of cultural heritage. Unlike other forms of place-significance such as scientific, historic or aesthetic values, the assessment of social value is complex and difficult to evidence. This theoretical paper explores participation in place through two digital instances, buying a real tile on eBay and a virtual one on Own Our House a crowdfunding venture by the Opera House Trust. The paper seeks to reveal the way in which such online artefacts demonstrate how cultural significance is entangled in the everyday and the individual experience. It argues that these seemingly insignificant moments of participation are implicated in the personal and the emotional by connecting work within critical heritage studies with the work of media scholar Jose van Dijck. Then the paper reflects on the way in which these everyday forms of participation through digital technologies disrupts and complicates established ideas about communities upon which local, state, national and international heritage systems are based.

The structure of communities in scale-free networks

Scale-free networks are often used to model a wide range of real-world networks, such as social, technological, and biological networks. Understanding the structure of scale-free networks evolves into a big data problem for business, management, and protein function prediction. In the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in exploring the properties of scale-free networks. Two interesting properties have attracted much attention: the assortative mixing and community structure. However, these two properties have been studied separately in either theoretical models or real-world networks. In this paper, we show that the structural features of communities are highly related with the assortative mixing in scale-free networks. According to the value of assortativity coefficient, scale-free networks can be categorized into assortative, disassortative, and neutral networks, respectively. We systematically analyze the community structure in these three types of scale-free networks through six metrics: node embeddedness, link density, hub dominance, community compactness, the distribution of community sizes, and the presence of hierarchical communities. We find that the three types of scale-free networks exhibit significant differences in these six metrics of community structures. First, assortative networks present high embeddedness, meaning that many links lying within communities but few links lying between communities. This leads to the high link density of communities. Second, disassortative networks exhibit great hubs in communities, which results in the high compactness of communities that nodes can reach each other via short paths. Third, in neutral networks, a big portion of links act as community bridges, so they display sparse and less compact communities. In addition, we find that (dis)assortative networks show hierarchical community structure with power-law-distributed community sizes, while neutral networks present no hierarchy. Understanding the structure of communities from the angle of assortative mixing patterns of nodes can provide insights into the network structure and guide us in modeling information propagation in different categories of scale-free networks.

Deindustrialisation and industrial communities: the Lanarkshire coalfields c.1947-1983

This thesis examines deindustrialisation, the declining contribution of industrial activities to economic output and employment, in Lanarkshire, Scotland’s largest coalfield between the early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. It focuses on contraction between the National Coal Board’s (NCB) vesting in 1947 and the closure of Lanarkshire’s last colliery, Cardowan, in 1983. Deindustrialisation was not the natural outcome of either market forces or geological exhaustion. Colliery closures and falling coal employment were the result of policy-makers’ decisions. The thesis consists of four thematic chapters: political economy, moral economy, class and community, and generation and gender. The analysis is based on archival sources including Scottish Office reports and correspondence relating to regional policy, and NCB records. These are supported by National Union of Mineworkers Scottish Area and STUC meeting minutes, and oral history testimonies from over 30 men and women with Lanarkshire coalfield backgrounds, as well as two focus groups. The first two chapters analyse the process of deindustrialisation, with the first offering a top-down perspective and the second a bottom-up viewpoint. In chapter one deindustrialisation is analysed through changes in political economy. Shifts in labour market structure are examined through the development of regional policy and its administration by the Scottish Office. The analysis centres upon a policy network of Scottish business elites and civil servants who shaped a vision of modernisation via industrial diversification through attracting inward investment. In chapter two the perspective shifts to community and workforce. It analyses responses to coalfield contraction through a moral economy of customary rights to colliery employment. A detailed investigation of Lanarkshire colliery closures between the 1940s and 1980s emphasises the protracted nature of deindustrialisation. Chapters three and four consider the social and cultural structures which shaped the moral economy but were heavily altered by deindustrialisation. Chapter three focuses on the dense networks that linked occupation, community, and class consciousness. Increasing coalfield centralisation and remote control of pits from NCB headquarters in London, and mounting hostility to coal closures, contributed to an accentuated sense of Scottish-ness. Chapter four illuminates gender and generational dimensions. The differing experiences of cohorts of men who faced either early retirement, redundancy or transfer to alternative sectors, or those who never attained anticipated industrial employment due to final closures, are analysed in terms of constructions of masculinity and the endurance of cultural as well as material losses. This is counterpoised to women who gained industrial work in assembly plants and the perceived gradual attainment of an improved economic and social position whilst continuing to navigate structures of patriarchy.

Ciudad Verde: una mirada desde el reconocimiento social hasta la diferenciación a través de los espacios

La presente monografía se refiere a la vida cotidiana de los residentes del macroproyecto de vivienda de interés social Cuidad Verde en el municipio de Soacha para comprender las formas de reconocimiento que se tejen entre los residentes, transeúntes y visitantes de la ciudadela. Asimismo, analiza los imaginarios espaciales para entender las relaciones sociales entre unos y otros, abordando al macroproyecto no sólo como un lugar físico sino como un espacio que permite reproducir estereotipos sociales, crear mecanismos de distinción, transformar las maneras de apropiación de la vivienda y tejer nociones de progreso a partir del lugar donde se vive.

Evaluating social and environmental impacts at Embrapa.

A strategic planning process has been implemented at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Agency (Embrapa) to introduce sustainable development objectives in all steps of agricultural Research and Development. An essential component of the institutional mission statement hence devised has called for the systematic assessment of social and environmental impacts (in addition to the traditionally studied economic ones) of all technology innovations resulting from R&D. The proposed approach emphasizes the interest of promoting close interaction between R&D teams and technology-adopting producers, under actual field contexts, in order to improve both the technology development and the demand probing processes. Given the multiplicity of technological applications ensuing from Embrapa?s very broad research encompassment, and the variety of environmental and productive contexts involved, a customized impact assessment system has been proposed. Directed at the appraisal of agricultural technology development research projects (ex-ante) as well as their ensuing innovations (ex-post), the Ambitec-Agro System comprises a set of integrated socio-environmental indicators, constructed in modules suited to Agricultural, Animal husbandry, and Agro-industrial activities, besides a specific module for Social Impact Assessment. The system has been routinely applied in technology appraisal in all of Embrapa?s Units, as a basis for their institutional performance evaluations, and toward the formulation of the annual Social Balance Report. Following the inception of this institutional technology appraisal initiative, several methodological innovations have been proposed within Embrapa, including technical improvements and applicability adaptations of the Ambitec-Agro system, and approaches to further-reaching objectives, such as the sustainable development of rural communities, and the environmental management of agricultural activities.

El abuso sexual a niñas, niños y adolescentes: un secreto familiar, un problema familiar, un problema social

This investigation has the purpose of identifying how to prevent through educational processes, and then eradicate, the sexual abuse against children and adolescents in rural communities from Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The premise is that sexual abuse cannot be approached in an isolated way; it requires integral and committed actions of the institutions in charge of children and adolescents’ integral protection and development. This implies considering: the legal framework, the response offered by government and private organizations towards the prevention and attention of rights as well as their actions to penalize and restore the violated rights; the role of families as main responsible of the well being of their children and the role of children and adolescents.