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The purpose of this study is to explore whether immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles that hinder effective communication and collaboration. Immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles hindering effective communication and collaboration. VR technologies boost discussion participants' sense of presence and immersion; however, studying emerging VR technologies for their applicability to e-participation is challenging because of the lack of affordable and accessible infrastructures. In this paper, the authors present a novel framework for analyzing serious social VR engagements in the context of e-participation.

The authors propose a novel approach for artificial intelligence (AI)-supported, data-driven analysis of group engagements in immersive VR environments as an enabler for next-gen e-participation research. The authors propose a machine-learning-based VR interactions log analytics infrastructure to identify behavioral patterns. This paper includes features engineering to classify VR collaboration scenarios in four simulated e-participation engagements and a quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach performance.

The authors link theoretical dimensions of e-participation online interactions with specific user-behavioral patterns in VR engagements. The AI-powered immersive VR analytics infrastructure demonstrated good performance in automatically classifying behavioral scenarios in simulated e-participation engagements and the authors showed novel insights into the importance of specific features to perform this classification. The authors argue that our framework can be extended with more features and can cover additional patterns to enable future e-participation immersive VR research.

This research emphasizes technical means of supporting future e-participation research with a focus on immersive VR technologies as an enabler. This is the very first use-case for using this AI and data-driven infrastructure for real-time analytics in e-participation, and the authors plan to conduct more comprehensive studies using the same infrastructure.

The authors’ platform is ready to be used by researchers around the world. The authors have already received interest from researchers in the USA (Harvard University) and Israel and run collaborative online sessions.

The authors enable easy cloud access and simultaneous research session hosting 24/7 anywhere in the world at a very limited cost to e-participation researchers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the very first attempt at building a dedicated AI-driven VR analytics infrastructure to study online e-participation engagements.

Cuba’s 1959 Revolution brought about dramatic changes not only in that island‐nation but also in the USA. Cubans, and later Cuban‐Americans, have changed the face of Miami and south Florida. The economic and social successes of Cuban‐Americans, the third largest Latino group in the USA, are prevalent in scholarly and popular literature. In this annotated bibliography, the author presents journal articles, chapters in books, books, and human rights reports, published between 1990 and 1998, as well as World Wide Web sites, that discuss the Cuban‐American experience. Articles from the popular literature are not included, nor are materials that deal primarily with Cuba or Cuba‐USA relations.

This study aims to show the complexities of engagement between students - Venezuelan and Brazilian - and their teachers. This qualitative ethnographic study documents the everyday pedagogies and practices that take place in elementary schools with high levels of refugee and immigrant children. While Brazilian law ensures the basic right to public education, forbidding discrimination based on nationality or immigration status (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação, 1996), the barriers remain. Through the frameworks of multicultural (USA) and intercultural (Brazil) education, this paper shows how Brazilian teachers and students of Venezuelan and Brazilian backgrounds engage, learn from one another and build welcoming spaces, but also how stereotypes are reinforced inside classrooms and schools.

This qualitative study uses ethnography to understand how recent Venezuelan migratory flow influences Brazilian and Venezuelan children’s educational experiences in elementary education. Participants were Venezuelan (N = 57) and Brazilian (N = 76) children in two elementary schools in the city of Boa Vista. Data sources for the study are school observations in four elementary classrooms (1st and 2nd grade) and semi-structured interviews with caregivers, teachers, administrators and other educators. This paper also collected children’s drawings and writings and documents like curricula, strategic planning, guidelines, policies, grades, reports and any other textual or photographic material made available at the city level.

In the field of education, there is a critical need for understanding children’s education experiences. This paper focuses on the experiences of teachers and students in two elementary schools in Brazil. This paper focus on two findings: first that teachers promote the learning of Portuguese to show care toward their Venezuelan students. Second, children in the classroom show solidarity with one another and resist some of the more rigid Portuguese-only practices enacted by teachers. This work uses the frameworks of intercultural (more commonly used in Brazil) and multicultural education to inform the analysis.

In this study, this paper puts these frameworks of interculturalism, multiculturalism, language use and solidarity into conversation to understand the dynamics of two elementary classrooms in the city of Boa Vista, Brazil. While this paper shows the shortcomings of a seemingly multicultural and multilanguage classroom, it also shows how children actively resist the rigidity of teaching and learning in elementary schooling.

This study is a response both to the increasing South–South migration trend in Latin America and its consequences on public education systems. Through multicultural and intercultural lenses, this research highlighted the complexity of interactions within multicultural classrooms by delving into a two-year ethnographic study conducted in Boa Vista, Brazil, focusing on Venezuelan and Brazilian children in two local elementary schools. This paper focused on two main observations this paper refers to as “Teaching Portuguese as a Way of Caring” and “Children's Solidarity Work.” Teachers primarily centered their instruction on teaching Portuguese to migrant children, believing it to lead to quicker integration in the classroom and beyond – thus as a way of caring for their migrant students.

This article delves into the antecedents of business performance. The main aim of this study is to analyze the effect of knowledge transformation on business performance in firms in the tourism industry and how cognitive and structural social capital heterogeneously moderate this relationship.

The empirical study was conducted on a sample of 300 firms from the tourism industry in Arequipa-Perú. The analysis was performed by means of partial least squares structural equation modeling, using the Smart PLS software.

Our findings show that knowledge transformation is key factor for increasing business performance. The results also highlight the significance of interorganizational relationships in this effect and the importance of analyzing each dimension of social capital separately. Thus, it is observed that cognitive social capital enhances the relationship between knowledge transformation and business performance, while (Sari and Indriani, 2023) structural social capital hinders it.

The findings assist practitioners in developing a shared culture, values and goals with their contacts to improve business performance. Furthermore, firms should establish bridging ties with external agents to avoid be stuck in excessively dense networks. Relationships with institutions can act as a bridging agent.

This paper analyses the unresolved question of how knowledge transformation affects the business performance of companies in the tourism sector as well as how different dimensions of social capital influence in this relationship. Addressing these two critical, but as yet unresolved questions, this study draws on absorptive capacity and social capital theories as an overarching framework to present a conceptual model that integrates both theories in order to analyze the effect of knowledge transformation on business performance in tourism firms and the role of structural and cognitive capital on this relationship.

Agriculture is one of the oldest socio-economic activities. It involves growing valuable plants and animals for human existence. Sustainable agriculture should be understood in light of the global sustainable development movement, which emphasizes balancing environment, society and economics. With the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent war between Russia and Ukraine, sustainable agriculture can help eliminate food insecurity caused by food shortages and agricultural sector disruptions. Recently, investors, practitioners, academicians, researchers, regulators and financiers are increasingly interested in using Islamic financing products and qualified Shari'ah-compliance contracts to promote sustainable agriculture. Many Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) states still rely on agriculture for socioeconomic growth. These countries are major contributors to Islamic financial growth. This study assesses Islamic finance’s role in promoting sustainable agriculture in selected OIC countries. The researchers use qualitative methods and meta-analysis data to determine the constraints and benefits of implementing Islamic financial products for sustainable agriculture. This study suggests that OIC state governments should promote sustainable agriculture. OIC member states have different achievements relating to their sustainable agriculture. Based on socio-economic factors, agriculture policies or plans, leadership and political will, Islamic finance products and Shari'ah-compliance contracts are found underutilized in meeting sustainable agriculture and sector stakeholders’ needs. A solid Islamic financial framework for sustainable agriculture, good governance and improved agriculture policy are needed.

Colombia has been one of the main cocaine producing countries. The state’s response has been a repressive approach against the primary levels of the coca economy, such as cultivators and consumers. Although recent literature has documented the gendered impacts of drug policy, that is not the case for women who grow illicit crops. This chapter examines the ways drug policy has impacted women coca growers, cocaleras, in Putumayo, Colombia. Cocalero or cocalera is the term referred to rural workers dedicated to the cultivation and harvest of coca leaf. The term is a vindication from these communities, dignifying the rural activities they perform. In this chapter, we will use the term cocalera to refer to women coca growers.

From an intersectional gender perspective, the chapter explores the implications of rural life, gender, armed conflict and illegality over the trajectories of cocaleras in Putumayo, southern Colombia, a region where non-state armed actors, poverty and a precarious state presence converge. In this context, cultivating coca has become the main livelihood for rural families. It has transformed women’s roles within their communities, providing them with economic autonomy they previously did not have, but also located them in vulnerable positions. This chapter – which is an adaption from some chapters of the book ‘Voices from the coca fields: Women Building Rural Communities’ (Dejusticia, 2018 ) – is the outcome of research undertaken through in-depth interviews and social mapping exercises.