Search Results (793)

Background/Objectives: Digital technologies and data-driven approaches are rapidly transforming healthcare practice and enabling more personalized and preventive care. As personal health data becomes increasingly embedded in healthcare systems, understanding how future healthcare professionals interpret these developments is essential for shaping responsive health education. This study aims to identify the factors that students in health-related programs consider important regarding the increasing use of personal health data in healthcare. Methods: An exploratory qualitative focus group study was conducted between March 2024 and July 2025 across five higher education institutions in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. Seven focus groups were conducted with forty students from health-related programs, including nursing, public health, occupational therapy, and social work. Participants discussed the use of personal health data in healthcare and reflected on short fictional future scenarios designed to stimulate discussion about possible developments in data-driven healthcare. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis using ATLAS.ti. Results: Three overarching domains were identified: (1) personalization and prevention, (2) data quality and ethical considerations, and (3) organizational implications and conditions. Students described personal health data as a powerful tool for personalization, prevention, and informed decision-making. At the same time, they raised concerns about data reliability, overreliance on automated systems, patient anxiety, potential dehumanization of care, privacy risks, and emerging inequalities related to access to and representation within data systems. Overall, students appeared neither purely techno-optimistic nor technophobic, but articulated nuanced ethical, cultural, and professional tensions surrounding data-driven care. Conclusions: Preparing future healthcare professionals for data-driven healthcare requires integrating critical data literacy, ethical reflection, interdisciplinary collaboration and opportunities to critically engage with the societal and professional implications of data-driven technologies into health professional education, while ensuring that organizational conditions support the responsible use of personal health data. Full article

This article examines the representation of mental illness, emergency treatment, and recovery, in Ned Vizzini’s 2006 Young Adult novel, It’s kind of a funny story. Existing criticism has predominantly pursued what we term “diagnostic realist” approaches, which evaluate fictional representations against clinical criteria. We both affirm what this work achieves and make the case for extending it. Drawing on work on disability representation in Young Adult Literature and perspectives from Mad Studies, we propose that a social model lens, which locates mental difference within social and structural contexts rather than within individual pathology, opens out further possibilities for understanding what this and related novels do. We then demonstrate how close attention to Vizzini’s artistry—including to his use of romance conventions, figurative language, intertextuality, and first-person focalisation—reveals a text that does not simply mirror mental illness realistically, but which actively dramatises how social environments, institutional structures, and modes of creative expression shape the experience of and recovery from mental ill health. Rather than displacing diagnostic approaches, we argue that these wider critical paradigms, inclusive of the social model and attendant attention to craft, can enhance understanding of the help such novels can provide for different kinds of readers. Full article

This article considers the literary exploration of women’s celibacy through the prism of science fiction, beginning with an overview of the genre’s often-retrograde engagements with the subjects of marriage, reproduction and heteronormative ideology. Alongside this genre context, a 19th-century Irish historical context is outlined, juxtaposing genre history with the ‘matrimonial’ rhetoric that arose following the 1801 Act of Union, which framed the merging of Ireland into the United Kingdom as a ‘marriage’ between Ireland and Great Britain, with Ireland represented as the bride. In the overlap between these two contexts, this article identifies several future-set Irish novels that address this rhetoric directly, while also tracing its (perhaps unconscious) impact in other texts, before moving on to consider one novel in particular: Mercia, the Astronomer Royal (1895) by Amelia Garland Mears. The article concludes by arguing that science fiction’s past missteps with regard to marriage and sex can be explained by the fact that traditional, patriarchal marriage is in fact fundamentally unsuited to a genre primarily concerned with the future, resulting in reactionary overcompensation. Full article

In our current moment, sport and romance are uniting in the creation of YA sports fiction titles that are flooding the market and enjoying widespread popularity. Despite this exciting intersection between sport and romance in the world of fiction for young people, little research has been conducted on the realities and possibilities of the genre. This paper employs inductive thematic analysis to explore answers to the question: How does sport function across three current, contemporary, high-quality YA sport romances? Findings reveal how, within each text, the protagonist’s relationship with sport is initially represented as a romance trope that is, at best, idealized, and at worst, dangerous. This is followed by the introduction of a fellow teen who foments romantic interest in the protagonist, and serving as an unwitting rival, reveals the flaws and failings of the initial sporting suitor. The protagonist, now under the spell of a new love, is forced and enabled to see, confront, and redefine their relationship with sport. This paper is important in the way it invites purposeful consideration of sport and romance and their intersections in young adult literature at a time when YA sport romances abound but scholarly examination of the genre is just beginning to emerge. Full article

This exploratory study examines whether chatbot-mediated written interaction supports adult B2 English learners’ performance in online interaction, pluricultural competence, and mediation in Official Language Schools (OLS) in Spain. The intervention was built around a fictional-culture scenario in which learners had to resolve a cultural misunderstanding between a Spanish visitor and a host from an invented culture. In the experimental condition, students interacted with a chatbot previously configured with information about the fictional culture; in the control condition, students worked in pairs in a chatroom, with one peer acting as the cultural expert. Interaction texts were independently rated by two researchers using a Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) Companion Volume-informed rubric. The dataset comprised 16 learners in the control group and 24 in the experimental group, each rated by two evaluators. Inter-rater reliability reached acceptable levels for all aggregated dimensions, with ICC(2,1) values above 0.70. Mann–Whitney U tests showed no significant between-group differences in online interaction or pluricultural competence, whereas the chatbot-supported condition, which included sustained-questioning scaffolding, was associated with significantly higher mediation scores. The findings suggest that chatbot use may be pedagogically promising for mediation-oriented writing tasks, although the evidence should be interpreted cautiously because the study is exploratory, the sample is small, and the scenario relied on a fictional cultural frame. Full article

This essay examines an experimental, site-specific performance of The Tempest conducted over a three-day immersive trip to Nantucket, where undergraduate students and faculty collaboratively engage in a practice of “not-acting” Shakespeare’s play. Drawing on Michael Kirby’s theory of “not-acting” and postdramatic theatre frameworks, the authors describe a pedagogical and performative model that minimises conventional acting—eschewing memorisation, rehearsal, costumes, and stable roles—while maximising environmental engagement. The Nantucket landscape itself becomes a dynamic stage, or “sea-marge”, in which natural elements, physical movement, and lived experience displace the primacy of character and narrative. Participants alternate fluidly between performer and spectator, reading the text aloud across shifting locations while responding to weather, terrain, and chance occurrences. This approach foregrounds presence over representation, allowing meaning to emerge through embodied interaction with place rather than through illusionistic performance. The essay situates this practice within broader discussions of postdramatic theatre, contrasting it with immersive productions that retain character-driven frameworks. Here, the fictional world of The Tempest coexists with, rather than subsumes, the real-world environment and identities of participants. Particular attention is given to the ethical and aesthetic implications of “not-acting”, especially in the portrayal of Caliban. By resisting full embodiment, the performance avoids reinscribing colonial and racialised stereotypes historically associated with the role. Designed for digital publication, the essay incorporates embedded video and photographic documentation of the performance. Full article

During China’s social transformation, the spiritual life of young people exhibits a dual tendency toward secularisation and consumerization. While traditional institutional religion continues to wane, a consumption-based religiosity has surfaced, marking a shift from collective, class-based subcultural expressions to post-subcultural practices centred on individual affect, meaning bricolage, and fluid identities. Through a comparative analysis of historical Real Person Fiction and Yonghe Temple bracelets, this study reveals how contemporary youth transform historical memory and religious symbols into flexible cultural resources. Crucially, this transformation is not a wholesale rupture with tradition but rather a selective appropriation and recontextualization of religious concepts inherited through family upbringing and folk customs. Their practices thus embody a dialectic of discontinuity and continuity: what is discontinued is institutional allegiance to prescribed rituals; what continues is the deep-seated impulse to seek meaning through symbolic practices. The research finds that young people construct temporary scene-based tribes through emotional identification and symbolic consumption, using fluidity and multiplicity to counter anxieties in daily life. Compared to traditional communities, such tribes offer individuals meanings that are more personalised and immediate, reflecting the lifestyles individuals wish to cultivate. Within a context of high uncertainty, they convey fragmented responses to the predicaments of modernity through the reinterpretation and re-narration of historical and sacred symbols. Full article

Taylor Swift’s songwriting is frequently analyzed through the lens of confessional songwriting, blurring the boundaries between factual and fictional storytelling. This article proposes understanding her work as transmedia meta-autobiographies, a genre characterized by self-reflexivity and the questioning of autobiographical rules. Drawing on Mueller-Greene’s definition of meta-autobiography and intersectional theories, the study analyzes Swift’s lyrics, music videos, and paratextual elements, specifically focusing on selected works after her split with Big Machine Records, as this marks a different era in her creative work and is also linked to the discourse around her re-recordings. The analysis demonstrates how Swift utilizes transmedia storytelling to perform the act of remembering and writing, effectively staging her “self” across various media formats. This self-representation could according to the rules of the genre function as a counter-narrative to traditional male-centric autobiographical forms by centering girlhood. However, the article also highlights contradictions regarding authenticity and the commodification of this identity. Full article

This paper examines the influence of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision—particularly Brave New World—on Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, arguing that Smith’s post-Brexit novels can be read as contemporary, politically embedded responses to the dystopian tradition Huxley helped establish. While Smith’s fiction is rarely labelled dystopian in genre, the Quartet is deeply informed by a dystopic sense of cultural, ecological, and political decay in 21st-century Britain. I propose that Smith adopts and adapts key dystopian motifs from Huxley but repurposes them through a radical humanist lens that privileges relationality, art, and memory as sources of resistance and repair. The paper will be structured in three sections. The first outlines Huxley’s dystopian framework, with a focus on Brave New World’s criticism of technological control, emotional appeasement, and the suppression of dissent through pleasure. The second analyzes Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as a world not governed by totalitarian regimes but by apathy, misinformation, and ideological fragmentation. The final section traces Smith’s divergence from Huxley: where Huxley’s world often excludes hope in favor of bleak satire, Smith inserts gestures of resistance, particularly through intergenerational friendships, the presence of art and literature, and the recurrence of seasonal cycles as metaphors for renewal. Although Autumn explicitly references Huxley’s Brave New World, sustained critical comparisons between the two authors remain relatively rare. Most scholarship approaches Huxley through the tradition of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, while Smith’s Quartet is typically discussed within the context of Brexit literature and contemporary narrative experimentation. Reading the Quartet alongside Huxley, therefore, reveals an unexpected dialogue between early twentieth-century dystopian critique and twenty-first-century literary responses to political crisis. Full article

In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot (1819–1880) repeatedly stages moments in which gentile characters project expectations onto Jewish women, drawing on inherited cultural representations from literature, history, and the performing arts. These moments reveal how limited their real-world knowledge of Jews—particularly Jewish women—was, and how readily they relied on cultural templates rather than lived experience. George Eliot herself, however, had undertaken extensive study of Jewish history, religion, and culture in preparation for the novel, including research into the Talmud, Mishna, kabbalah, and halacha (Jewish law). Yet this knowledge is purposefully not afforded to her characters. This article examines George Eliot’s increasing understanding of Jewish society, and her shifting attitudes towards Judaism, and explores how allusions to Jewish women in history, literature, and performance shape the gentile characters’ othering of Mirah Lapidoth, a young Jewish woman fleeing enforced familial exploitation, whom Daniel rescues from drowning in the Thames. Two significant conceptual terms underpin my argument. Objectification refers here not only to eroticisation or aestheticisation, but to the broader process by which Mirah is perceived as a symbolic figure—as an image, a type, or role—rather than a fully realised person. Othering denotes the interpretative habit by which gentile characters position Mirah through pre-existing stereotypes or literary precedents, instead of understanding her as a subject with her own history and interiority. Rescue describes the narrative mechanisms by which Mirah is brought into focus, first through Daniel’s intervention, then through her placement within the Meyrick household, and finally through marriage, though always within structures that continue to idealise, discipline, or contain her. I argue that George Eliot’s deployment of familiar stereotypes does not reinforce them; instead, she exposes them as cultural constructions that must be deconstructed or exorcised before she reconstructs her own version of Jewish culture and identity, which she referred to as “the inner life of modern Judaism” in her notebooks. I also argue that Daniel’s rescue of Mirah, rather than an act of pure benevolence, becomes a further site of objectification, othering her as an idealised model of Jewish womanhood rather than acknowledging her as an autonomous individual. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how organizations develop human potential, offering scalable and data-driven support for coaching and capability building. This study proposes and validates a conceptual framework for integrating AI into organizational coaching processes to enhance competence development and strategic alignment. AI-supported coaching in this research is treated as an emerging organizational technology whose potential organizational value depends less on model capability and more on governance design, decision rights, and auditable evaluation outputs. Following a mixed-methods, multi-phase design, the research combined a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with the construction of a layered design architecture in which OSCAR serves as the primary coaching-process scaffold, complemented by KSA for competency specification, Situational Leadership for adaptive guidance, and KPIs for monitoring and governance. The framework structures AI-supported coaching across 10 interrelated phases, from contextual anchoring to review and measurement, while preserving iterative re-entry to earlier phases whenever review evidence, contextual change, or insufficient progress makes adjustment necessary. Prototyping demonstrated feasibility and coherence across models, while the focus group provided qualitative expert feedback on the framework’s clarity, governance needs, and perceived usefulness for competence development. At this stage, however, the KPI structures generated by the framework and the descriptive comparison across AI tools should be interpreted as prototype-level outputs rather than as empirically validated performance measures or evidence of added value over baseline approaches. Because the evaluation relied on two fictional prototyping scenarios and a small expert-oriented focus group (n = 6), the findings should be interpreted as evidence of prototype demonstration and qualitative refinement rather than of real-world effectiveness or organizational impact. The study also does not include a control group or comparison with traditional human coaching, so the added value of the AI-supported framework over alternative coaching arrangements remains a question for future empirical testing. Findings suggest that AI can usefully support organizational coaching by personalizing dialogue, structuring reflection, and generating auditable development artefacts, provided ethical safeguards and human oversight remain integral. The research contributes a preliminarily validated, ethics-informed, and governance-aware framework for AI adoption in organizational coaching and offers practical insights for embedding AI-enabled development in learning organizations. Full article

This article brings visual thinking into the speculative fiction classroom, drawing on critical autism studies and on work on Indigenous futurism. It is the collaborative work of a neurotypical academic and an artist on the autism spectrum. Using one Canadian short story by a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, David A. Robertson, as a sample primary source, the project offers strategies for developing a multimodal classroom through assigning visual close readings as forms of literary criticism and critical thinking. This project aims to show the value of thinking in pictures as a respectful tool for both decolonization work in the classroom and for the encouragement of student creative work. Focused on a lesbian love story, the project presents critical love in the academy as queer and creative. Full article

Parasocial experience describes the psychological, emotional, and behavioural bonds that audiences form with media figures—celebrities, fictional characters, and other on-screen personalities. It encompasses three related constructs: parasocial interaction, parasocial relationship, and parasocial attachment. Following the Joanna Briggs Institute framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review synthesises 59 empirical studies published between 2019 and 2024. Results show that PSRs were the most studied dimension (n = 42), followed by PSI (n = 20). PSA, in contrast, appeared in just one study. Key characteristics across these studies include perceived familiarity, imagined intimacy, behavioural engagement, intuitive personality traits, and compensatory motivations. The review highlights PSA as a particularly underexplored yet affectively intense form of engagement. Its limited empirical attention reveals a critical theoretical gap and calls for further investigation into attachment-related audience behaviours. Full article

Maintaining high-fidelity character personas and tracking trusted narrative facts remain significant challenges for LLM-based role-playing systems, particularly in long-context scenarios. Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches, which typically rely on static, stateless retrieval, often struggle to capture evolving plot dynamics, leading to character hallucinations and logical inconsistencies over prolonged interactions. To address these limitations, we present FictionRAG, a novel stateful retrieval-augmented framework designed to enhance long-narrative role-playing. FictionRAG introduces a hierarchical memory architecture that decouples narrative information into three distinct lanes: factual events, persona traits, and worldview constraints. Furthermore, it employs a failure-driven metacognitive regulatory loop that dynamically identifies and corrects retrieval deficiencies—such as persona drift or conflicting world rules—before response generation. By treating role-playing as a dynamic state tracking problem rather than simple question answering, FictionRAG ensures that generated responses are strictly grounded in both the narrative timeline and the character’s psychological profile. Extensive experiments on a dataset comprising twenty classic novels demonstrate that FictionRAG significantly outperforms existing baselines in factual accuracy, persona stability, and worldview consistency. Beyond literary role-playing, these results suggest that stateful, evidence-constrained retrieval can serve as a general mechanism for long-form controllable generation tasks that require persistent state tracking and multi-dimensional consistency. Full article

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for musculoskeletal health information, yet their safety in time-sensitive shoulder and elbow presentations with red-flag features remains insufficiently defined. We evaluated safety behavior using standardized vignettes, focusing on safety-critical under-triage and prompt-dependent performance differences. Methods: Eighty fictional vignettes (40 shoulder, 40 elbow) were created and classified a priori as red-flag (n = 24) or non-urgent (n = 56). Each vignette was queried in a single-turn format using three fixed prompt types (patient-, general physician-, and specialist-oriented), yielding 240 responses. Two blinded orthopedic surgeons rated outputs using a prespecified 0–8 rubric across four domains. Safety-critical under-triage was defined as failure to recommend timely urgent evaluation in red-flag presentations. Decision stability was assessed using 20 paired vignette sets differing by one predefined clinical variable. Results: The overall mean score was 6.42 ± 1.12 and was lower for red-flag than for non-urgent responses (5.28 ± 1.21 vs. 6.93 ± 0.81). Across the 72 prompt-specific responses generated for the 24 red-flag vignettes, urgency was correctly recognized in 53 responses (73.6%). Safety-critical under-triage occurred in 19 of 72 red-flag responses (26.4%) and was most frequent with patient-oriented prompts (10/24, 41.7%), followed by general physician-oriented prompts (6/24, 25.0%) and specialist-oriented prompts (3/24, 12.5%). Decision instability, defined as an inconsistent directional change after modification of a single risk-related variable, occurred in 6 of 20 paired vignette sets (30.0%). Conclusions: The evaluated LLM performed consistently well in non-urgent scenarios but showed prompt-dependent safety vulnerabilities in red-flag conditions, driven primarily by under-recognition of urgency. These findings support caution for unsupervised patient-facing use, highlight the need for explicit safeguards in high-risk presentations, and underscore the value of safety-focused evaluation frameworks in musculoskeletal care. Full article