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The purpose of this paper is to draw on data from interviews with six Italian migrant service providers and media stories in Italy and Australia to weave a comparative snapshot of the plight of precarious migrant and refugee communities in these two countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The article draws attention to prejudicial shortcomings towards vulnerable migrant communities enacted by the states of Italy and Australia in response to COVID-19.

While the unequal ecology of the pandemic has flared up the need for the State to strengthen participation and inclusion policies, it has also provided opportunities to foreground the disadvantages vulnerable communities face that also demand policy attention and sustained funding. Governments in migrant-receiving countries like Australia and Italy need to articulate culturally sensitive and inclusive responses that foreground agencies give vulnerable migrants, asylum seekers and refugees clear, supportive messages of solidarity leading to practical solutions.

This paper relays preliminary data from the coalface (migrant service providers) and media as the pandemic evolved in the two countries, whose support mechanisms had never before been critically compared and evaluated through the lens of racial inequality in the face of a health and social crisis.

Purpose – Building on the work of Wenner (2011) and Messner and Montez de Oca (2005), this study provides an updated critical stocktaking of the narrative tendencies in sport-related alcohol advertising on television. Set in contemporary understandings of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ and in the political economy of the alcohol industry, this study anchors a critical reading of masculinity, the sporting context and alcohol advertising in Wenner's (2007, 2013) ‘dirt theory of narrative ethics’.

Design/methodology/approach – Our theoretical and methodological approach is grounded in a dirt theory of narrative ethics. Set at the intersection of reader-oriented literary theory (Iser, 1978) and ethical criticism (Gregory, 1998), we ‘follow the dirt’ to understand how contagion from imported communicative meanings (McCracken, 1990) exerts power (Leach, 1976) by influencing reading and interpretation. We draw upon a diverse sample of 20 television ads representing a balanced cross-section of sport-dirtied beer commercials produced between 2010 and 2019. To balance this sample, we divided the ads by their opposing tendencies to characterize men as either ‘real men’, drawn in mythical masculinity terms, or ‘himbos’, drawn as ‘losers’ or slackers. To address the dominance of Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) in the American market, we further divided our ‘real men’ and ‘himbo’ samples, contrasting five ads produced for ABI brands with five ads produced for beer brands not held by ABI.

Findings – We contend that contemporary sports-dirtied beer ads combine to form a schizophrenic picture of American manhood. Male sports fans are alternatively hailed through mocking and misandry, through playfully saluting the norms of ‘bro culture’, and through encouraging men to understand themselves as proud keepers of tradition. We critically consider the ethical implications of building brand affinities through staking disparate positions in contemporary cultural and political debates about the place of men and masculinity in contemporary society.

Research limitations/implications – We discuss the difficulties involved in holding advertisers accountable for balancing ethical and market demands. Nevertheless, we call on the industry to engage in a more reflexive and responsible approach to crafting sports-dirtied alcohol advertising.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach.

The story completion method was brought together with De Certeau's concept of tactics and more-than-human theoretical perspectives. Participants were presented with four story stems on an online platform. Each story stem introduced a fictional character confronted with a digital privacy dilemma. Participants were asked to complete the stories by typing in open text boxes, responding to the prompts “How does the character feel? What does she/he do? What happens next?”. A total of 29 participants completed the stories, resulting in a corpus of 116 narratives for a theory-driven thematic analysis.

The stories vividly demonstrate the ways in which tactics are entangled with relational connections and affective intensities. They highlight the micropolitical dimensions of human–nonhuman affordances when people are responding to third-party use of their personal information. The stories identified the tactics used and boundaries that are drawn in people's sense-making concerning how they define appropriate and inappropriate use of their data.

This paper demonstrates the value and insights of creatively attending to personal data privacy issues in ways that decentre the autonomous tactical and agential individual and instead consider the more-than-human relationality of privacy.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174

Seeks to prove that studies conducted over the past several decades repeatedly indicate that information‐seeking behavior by members of the general public involves consultation of a variety of potential information sources, including libraries.

This article focuses on information seeking with regard to recreation activities in wilderness areas including, but not limited to, hiking.

The study results indicate that respondents do turn to the internet for some of their information needs. Web sites providing information on three hiking areas were also analyzed to determine their accuracy and access to information. The study concludes that information‐seeking behavior on the internet represents investigation of sources that existed in the pre‐internet era but that access has altered from earlier mechanisms, such as paper mail, telephone, or on‐site visits, to electronic investigation.

Libraries continue to represent a potential information source, provided that they take advantage of electronic access.

The economics literature on gender has expanded considerably in recent years, fueled in part by new sources of data, including from experimental studies of gender differences in preferences and other traits. At the same time, economists have been developing more realistic models of psychological and social influences on individual choices and the evolution of culture and social norms. Despite these innovations, much of the economics of gender has been left behind, and still employs a reductive framing in which gender gaps in economic outcomes are either due to discrimination or to “choice.” I suggest here that the persistence of this approach is due to several distinctive economic habits of mind – strong priors driven by market bias and gender essentialism, a perspective that views the default economic agent as male, and an oft-noted tendency to avoid complex problems in favor of those that can be modeled simply. I also suggest some paths forward.

This chapter draws on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork collected in gay bars from three American cities to explore the strategies LGBTQ subcultures deploy to recreate meaningful places within the vestiges of local queer nightlife. As gentrification and social acceptance accelerate the closures of LGBTQ-specific bars and nightclubs worldwide, venues that once served a specific LGBTQ subculture (i.e., leather bars) expand their offerings to incorporate displaced LGBTQ subcultures. Attending to how LGBTQ subcultures might appropriate designated spaces within a gay venue to support community (nightlife complexes), how management and LGBT subcultures temporally circumscribe subcultural practices and traditions to create fleeting, but recurring places (episodic places), and how patrons might disrupt an existing production of place by imposing practices associated with a discrepant LGBTQ subculture(place ruptures), this chapter challenges the notion of “the gay bar” as a singular place catering to a specific subculture. Instead, gay bars increasingly constitute a collection of places within the same space, which may shift depending on its use by patrons occupying the space at any given moment. Beyond the investigation of gay bars, this chapter contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, unstable, and ephemeral nature of place and place-making in the postmodern city.

This study examines Iran-US migrants' use of the most popular messaging application in Iran—Telegram—and shows how they use it to manage their migration information practices.

This study took a qualitative observation approach. Over the course of six months, over 80 h of observations were conducted on Iran-US migration-related settings within Telegram.

This work identifies the information practices that emerge as users seek and share information related to Iran-US migration. Telegram plays a vital role across the immigration stages, predominantly in the pre-migration stage. This work also shows how the constraints and features of Telegram influence users' information sharing and seeking practices.

The findings support the implication that a social media platform that provides multiple ways to interact is likely to better support niche or unanticipated uses.

This study is the first of its kind to explore Iranian Immigrants information practices in the US. The immigration information practices observed during this study represent a valuable example of end-user appropriation within extraordinary constraints, which may be of use in other information-seeking contexts where dedicated or bespoke tools are impractical or ill-advised.

This paper aims to understand the opportunities and challenges to engage emerging adult gamers (aged 18–25) in adopting healthier diet behaviours through online games and related platforms such as esports and streaming. The study uses a socio-ecological approach to understand influences and suggests approaches to changing behaviours.

Purposive and convenience sampling were used to identify (n = 13) online gaming industry professionals and emerging adult (EA) gamers for interview. Qualitative thematic analysis of data using NVivo was undertaken.

Bi-directional influences were found that are potentially impacting EA diet behaviours. Food industry advertising and sponsorships were identified as dominant influences within the behavioural ecology, using microcelebrities and esports events to target EAs. The study identifies a need for social marketers to engage EA gamers in healthful behaviours through interventions across various levels of the behavioural ecology, including those upstream with industry and potential government regulation, to promote better health and balance food marketing. It also identifies future research avenues for engaging gamers in good health.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of the gaming behavioural ecology on EA diet behaviour. It identifies new channels that social marketers can use to engage EAs, who are difficult to reach through more traditional marketing channels.

The purpose of this paper is to underline the importance of taking work practices into account for quality improvement (QI) purposes, highlight some of the challenges of doing so, and suggest strategies for future research and practice. Patient status at a glance, a Lean-inspired QI intervention designed to alleviate nurses of their knowledge mobilisation function, is deployed as an illustrative case.

Ethnographic data and practice-based theories are utilised to describe nurses’ knowledge mobilisation work. The assumptions about knowledge sharing embedded in patient status at a glance white boards (PSAGWBs) are analysed drawing on actor network theory.

There is a disparity between nurses’ knowledge mobilisation practices and the scripts that inform the design of PSAGWBs. PSAGWBs are designed to be intermediaries and to transport meaning without transformation. When nurses circulate knowledge for patient management purposes, they operate as mediators, translating diverse information sources and modifying meaning for different audiences. PSAGWBs are unlikely to relieve nurses of their knowledge mobilisation function and may actually add to the burdens of this work. Despite this nurses have readily embraced this QI intervention.

The study is limited by its focus on a single case and by the inferential (rather than the empirical) nature of its conclusions.

This paper illustrates the importance of taking practice into account in healthcare QI, points to some of the challenges of doing so and highlights the potential of practice-based approaches in supporting progress in this field.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of blogging (writing online weblogs) in facilitating healing following sexual assault.

To explore how blog writing may facilitate healing and recovery, 30 blog posts written by survivors of sexual assault were analysed using thematic analysis.

The analysis revealed three themes: the aftermath of abuse, the need for support and helping others. In accordance with past research, bloggers frequently did not receive the supportive reaction to a face-to-face disclosure that they desired. Instead, blogging provided a safe environment in which victims could deal with the ongoing challenge of coping with, and recovering from the abuse. Moreover, blogging enabled victims to use their negative experience to educate and support others going through a similar experience, therefore allowing the bloggers to achieve some positive growth.

The results suggest that blogging and reading blogs may be beneficial to victims of sexual assault. Therefore, the findings support the recommendation of blogging by professionals working with victims of sexual assault.

The study presents the first analysis of blogs written by victims of sexual assault to facilitate their healing.