Search Results (424)

Background: Physical activity in urban green environments contributes to both physical and psychological well-being. Although negotiation strategies help individuals overcome barriers to participation in recreational sport, their interaction with environmental factors such as urban green spaces remains underexplored. This study examines the relationship between negotiation strategies and well-being among urban residents and introduces “Green Commitment” to capture engagement with green exercise environments. Methods: The sample consisted of 233 adults (28.8% men, 71.2% women) aged 19–77 years living in Athens. Data was collected using the Negotiation Strategies Scale (33 items across eleven dimensions) and an adapted PERMA Profiler, which assesses well-being across five dimensions: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Six additional items measured engagement with urban green environments. Exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, ANOVA, MANOVA, and Pearson correlations were conducted using SPSS v.29. Results: The analysis confirmed satisfactory reliability and a five-factor structure of well-being, including Green Commitment, explaining 64.97% of total variance. Self-motivation recorded the highest mean value (M = 6.2). Significant positive correlations were found between most negotiation strategy dimensions and well-being, particularly for physical health and engagement–achievement (e.g., r = 0.469). Demographic differences were also observed. Conclusions: Negotiation strategies facilitate participation in recreational sport and enhance well-being in urban populations. Engagement with urban green environments, reflected in Green Commitment, further supports these outcomes. The study offers an integrated framework linking behavioral strategies, environmental context, and well-being. Full article

Although apartheid ended in 1994, its legacy continues to shape South Africa’s higher education system, reinforcing disparities in access, funding, and representation. This study aims to critically examine how apartheid diplomacy has influenced higher education and asks: how do its strategies continue to shape academic practices, institutional relationships, and systemic inequalities in post-apartheid South Africa? It conceptualises apartheid diplomacy as the use of education to entrench racial hierarchies, reproduce class domination, and suppress indigenous knowledge. Grounded in Marxist and Weberian class theories and Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework, the analysis traces how apartheid-era policies institutionalised systemic inequalities and how these legacies persist within institutions. A scoping review was conducted using five databases (EMBASE, APA PsycINFO, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and Scopus) between January 2007 and April 2025, guided by PRISMA ScR and Arksey and O’Malley’s six-stage framework. Of 75 articles retrieved, 15 met the inclusion criteria. Findings reveal that apartheid diplomacy shaped academic governance, resource distribution, and knowledge production, leaving enduring inequities despite ongoing reforms. Transformation efforts, including financial aid schemes, equity policies, and curriculum debates, have achieved progress but remain constrained by structural, cultural, and intersectional barriers. The study underscores that achieving lasting equity requires continuous policy interventions, inclusive leadership, and curriculum decolonisation, alongside advocacy and interdisciplinary research. It reframes higher education as a diplomatic arena where equity and epistemic justice are negotiated, offering an original lens for understanding and dismantling apartheid’s enduring influence on South African academia. Full article

Population ageing has renewed interest in the capability approach (CA) as a framework for understanding wellbeing in later life. Yet research applying the CA to ageing remains fragmented, and its empirical focus is still not well understood. This study examines how CA-based ageing research has developed and how it explains capability constraints and adaptive responses in later life. Using Web of Science Core Collection records from 2000 to 2025, we combine comparative bibliometric analysis with a focused qualitative interpretive synthesis. A general CA corpus (n = 3416) was first constructed and then refined to identify a CA-in-ageing subset (n = 142). The bibliometric results suggest that CA-in-ageing research is more problem-oriented than the broader CA literature, with health and care evaluation, as well as mobility and accessibility, emerging as particularly prominent thematic concentrations in the retrieved corpus. The qualitative synthesis of five appraised studies further shows how capability loss may be experienced in everyday life through shrinking life-space, disrupted social participation, and threats to dignity. It also identifies adaptive strategies through which older adults rebuild routines, negotiate selective support, and re-establish participation through enabling environments and services. Given the small qualitative corpus, its reliance on several COVID-19-related studies, and its Western empirical contexts, the findings should be read as an explanatory account of possible mechanisms rather than as a comprehensive representation of later-life capability loss across all ageing settings. By integrating bibliometric mapping with qualitative evidence, this study clarifies how the CA has been operationalised in ageing research and highlights the importance of environmental accessibility, service stability, and participation opportunities in sustaining wellbeing in later life. Full article

Urban planning and design increasingly address systemic complexity, involving heterogeneous actors, multi-scalar interactions, and long-term uncertainty. Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) have emerged as instruments for data-driven urban analysis and decision support, yet their relationship to City Information Modelling (CIM) remains insufficiently articulated. This paper argues that UDTs should be understood not as self-contained technological artefacts, but as operative configurations within CIM, which provides the organisational and conceptual infrastructure for structuring urban information. To clarify this relationship, the paper introduces a distinction between imperative and declarative modes of Urban Digital Twinning. Imperative modes translate urban ambitions into indicators, thresholds, and evaluative metrics that support benchmarking, negotiation, and decision-making. Declarative modes use relational reduction strategies that preserve underlying configurations and support interpretive reasoning before evaluative closure. The argument is developed through a comparative conceptual–analytical reading of two practice-oriented applications in the Netherlands, Eindhoven and the Schiphol Area Development Corporation, and an exploratory research project centred on Graz, Austria. The comparison examines data sources, spatial units, transformation procedures, output forms, uncertainty treatment, and validation logic. The Dutch cases show how imperative UDTs support policy translation and multi-stakeholder coordination, while the Graz case demonstrates how declarative twinning can articulate structural tendencies for early-stage environmental interpretation. The paper contributes to CIM discourse by clarifying the role of UDTs within broader informational frameworks and positioning declarative twinning as a practical complement to performance-oriented approaches for engaging urban complexity beyond benchmarking alone. Full article

This article investigates Black American Islam as a semiotically mediated New Religious Movement (NRM), hybrid in nature and emerging from conditions of racialized governance, state surveillance, and social marginalization. Focused on the intersection of NRMs and political environments, the work engages in the reconstruction of a historical and conceptual lineage between Black Muslim movements and their mediated negotiation by Hip Hop artists. Grounded in Hall’s model of encoding/decoding and Hebdige’s subcultural theory, the transition of Islam-inspired semiotic markers from esoteric subcultural opacity to explicit orthodox adherence is demonstrated using historical analysis and close reading of symbolic expression in lyrics. The findings support a consideration of religious illegibility as aesthetic negotiation and strategy for political survival in circumstances of state scrutiny, with the subsequent consolidation of orthodox interpretations in Hip Hop signifying a recalibration of religious legibility in the securitized climate of a post-9/11 world. The contribution asserts that Black American Islam exemplifies NRMs’ instrumentalization of doctrinal elasticity and semiotic mediation in challenging socio-political surroundings, and its impact on negotiations of citizenship, political opposition, and religious identity. Full article

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence in higher education positively affects student satisfaction, engagement, and learning outcomes. However, students frequently report ethical unease, guilt, and concerns about dependency. The current literature offers a limited explanation for their coexistence, as both have been treated as parallel or independent outcomes. Hence, this review extends and integrates existing theories by reconceptualising cognitive and moral dissonance as a central psychological process that explains how student satisfaction with AI-mediated learning is produced, negotiated, and sustained. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we adopted a two-layer explanatory review design, synthesising 40 Scopus-indexed studies (Layer 1 = 15 studies; Layer 2 = 25 studies) from 2016 to 2025. Layer 1 studies explicitly define dissonance-related explanatory mechanisms that influence satisfaction and continued AI use across contexts such as dissertation writing, programming education, and problem-based learning. Layer 2 encompasses satisfaction-based studies that report ethical or affective concerns in parallel without theorising their interaction. The findings suggest a recurring satisfaction–dissonance paradox, in which students often experience genuine or conditional satisfaction from performance gains while simultaneously managing their psychological discomfort through one or more regulation mechanisms. Further, persistent and escalated dissonance leads to withdrawal or full or partial adaptive behaviour. We propose these dynamics as a testable Dual-Process Satisfaction–Dissonance Framework (DPSDF), which includes five dissonance triggers, five regulation strategies, three feedback loops, and four behavioural outcomes. Further, five domain experts’ suggestions have been taken to provide specific practical implications. This framework extends understanding of AI-mediated learning and provides foundations for future theory and policy development in higher education. Full article

Background: Family-centered care (FCC) is a foundational principle in pediatric healthcare, yet its implementation in culturally specific contexts remains poorly understood. In Saudi Arabia, Islamic values, collective family structures, and gendered caregiving norms shape how mothers engage with pediatric intensive care in ways that existing Western-derived FCC models do not fully capture. The aim of this study was to explore Saudi mothers’ experiences of family-centered care during their children’s pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) admissions, focusing on perceived barriers, cultural negotiations, and evolving advocacy strategies. Methods: A qualitative descriptive study was conducted with 17 Saudi mothers whose children had been admitted to PICUs across major hospitals in Saudi Arabia within the preceding 12 months. Semi-structured interviews lasting 40–70 min were conducted in Arabic using a pilot-tested, 15-item guide. Data were analyzed through Braun and Clarke’s six-phase reflexive thematic analysis. Trustworthiness was strengthened through member checking, reflexive journaling, negative case analysis, and investigator triangulation. Reporting adheres to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ). Result: Five interconnected themes emerged: (1) confronting crisis and uncertainty, (2) renegotiating maternal identity, (3) brokering culture within biomedicine, (4) forging trust with care teams, and (5) evolving into advocates. These themes trace a developmental arc from initial disorientation through progressive empowerment, shaped at every stage by culturally grounded resources and constraints. Mothers functioned as cultural brokers performing invisible labor that healthcare systems neither recognized nor supported. Conclusions: Saudi mothers in PICUs engage in sophisticated cultural mediation between family systems and biomedical institutions under conditions of acute stress. Findings underscore the need for structurally embedded cultural responsiveness in PICU policy, including continuous cultural assessment, care-team continuity, and family advocacy support. Full article

As higher education becomes more digitally mediated and internationally oriented, social media interaction has increasingly become a crucial way across linguistic and cultural boundaries. It functions as a space where interaction unfolds, and meanings are negotiated. To explore how it contributes to the development of intercultural digital communication competence, this study conducted a systematic literature review. Following a PRISMA-guided process, we identified 19 empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025 and evaluated them using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT). The findings suggested that this competence develops through the combined influence of pragmatic resources, ongoing behavioral adjustment, and affective factors. Features of politeness strategies, stance-taking, and multimodal cues play a noticeable role in shaping interaction. The result showed that participation alone does not automatically lead to improvement, and structured support and opportunities for reflection also make a difference. These findings offered implications for communication training and digitally mediated learning in higher education. Full article

Background: The primary goal of root canal treatment is the prevention and healing of apical periodontitis through the meticulous elimination of pathogenic bacteria and infected tissues. Within this framework, apical patency remains a fundamental yet debated clinical concept. Objectives: This review aims to evaluate the clinical significance of maintaining apical patency, its influence on postoperative discomfort, and the technical strategies required for predictable negotiation. Methods: We performed a comprehensive review of existing literature, including clinical studies and recent meta-analyses, focusing on the correlation between patency maneuvers and postoperative pain, the role of preoperative CBCT imaging, and the efficacy of specialized negotiation instruments and motor kinematics. While patency facilitates thorough debridement, evidence regarding its impact on postoperative pain is conflicting, with recent meta-analyses suggesting it may actually alleviate discomfort intensity. Preoperative CBCT was identified as essential for identifying complex anatomy, such as the MB2 canal. Furthermore, the use of specialized files and reciprocating motor modes enhances the predictability of glide path establishment. Conclusions: Although failure to achieve patency does not always dictate a negative outcome, it is associated with improved long-term healing. Clinicians should prioritize “Anatomical Patency”—respecting original morphology—over forceful “Operative Patency” to ensure procedural integrity and clinical success. Full article

This article examines how Sephardic Jewish delegations from Livorno and Senigallia framed their petitions to the Bourbon court during the negotiations for their resettlement in the Kingdom of Naples (1739–1740). Drawing on forty-four chapters presented by the Livornese representatives and complementary Senigallian requests, this study explores the legal and rhetorical strategies employed to secure corporate rights: judicial autonomy, exemption from corporation jurisdictions, commercial privileges, and the right to self-govern through elected Massari and rabbinical courts. While rooted in the contractual language of privileges and capitulations, these petitions also evoke a sacred lexicon, implicitly referencing biblical and halakhic categories such as the ger (resident foreigner), exile, divine providence, and covenantal continuity. This dual register—juridical and religious—allowed Jewish elites to legitimize their claims within a framework recognizable to Bourbon authorities while reinforcing a resilient communal identity. Analyzing the intersection of legal discourse and sacred rhetoric, this paper situates the Sephardic negotiations within the broader dynamics of eighteenth-century Catholic statecraft and minority governance. It argues that these petitions reveal not only pragmatic strategies to secure economic and legal stability but also a conscious use of covenantal and scriptural motifs to articulate endurance and justify corporate autonomy in a contested socio-political environment. These petitions, overall, must be situated within a longer continuum of forced displacement. The negotiations of 1739–1740 emerge not merely as administrative exchanges but as the latest chapter in a centuries-long history of expulsion, conditional return, and regulated residence. In this sense, the Sephardic petitions articulate a legal response to the structural precarity produced by forced migration. Full article

Negotiation is a complicated process that requires skills like strategic reasoning and communication. Most research aims at training dialogue agents for negotiation tasks using a few fixed opponents, which causes the agents to be effective only for these opponents and limits their strategy styles and performance across varying opponents. To yield better and more comprehensive strategies, we propose a novel self-play reinforcement learning (RL) framework for negotiation dialogues, named $\alpha$-Nego, which allows one to train an RL agent against continuously improving opponents. For training, we introduce a holistic scoring approach that integrates utility with dialogue quality metrics (Agreement, Length, Social welfare), and we implement a tiered criterion for pool admission of selected opponents: utility dominance is primary, with holistic score components serving as deterministic tie-breakers to ensure selection pressure reflects both task success and dialogue quality. Furthermore, $\alpha$-Nego uses a value distribution to enhance the ability of policy evaluation. This enables different styles of negotiation strategies to capture different risk attitudes by incorporating different criteria with a value distribution. Empirical evaluation on the Craigslistbargain and Dealornodeal dataset shows that the $\alpha$-Nego agent clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Full article

This article examines Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex (1995) and his culminating public artwork, Mobile Homestead (2005–2013), as speculative architectures that negotiate the fraught intersections of pedagogy, memory, and public engagement. While Educational Complex mobilizes the language of architectural models and dioramas to materialize “blanks” as forms of pedagogical repression and institutional affiliation, Mobile Homestead extends this inquiry into public space through a community-oriented artwork that simultaneously invites access and withholds subterranean, private zones. Situating these projects within discourses of socially engaged and public art, the article argues that Kelley stages a productive paradox: his sustained skepticism toward public art’s political agency is folded into works that nonetheless generate collective encounters, informal pedagogies, and disaffiliated publics. Read together, these speculative architectures reconceptualize failure, disobedience, and disaffiliation not as negations of public engagement, but as critical strategies for exposing institutional complicity while constructing alternative architectures of memory, play, and social relation. By repositioning Kelley—often read primarily through psychoanalytic frameworks—as a pivotal yet overlooked figure in the histories of socially engaged and public art, the article unsettles prevailing narratives of community, resistance, and the public good. Full article

This study investigates peri-urban land management in Uttar Pradesh through a comparative analysis of Varanasi, Kanpur, and Prayagraj, focusing on the gap between planned frameworks and actual urban growth. As rapidly expanding Tier-II cities, they represent critical sites where formal planning intersects with complex peri-urban transformations. The study employs a mixed-method approach, combining GIS-based master plan conformance analysis using Effective Boundary Control (EBC) with semi-structured expert interviews. This integration enables both spatial measurement of urban expansion and interpretive understanding of underlying governance and institutional dynamics. The results reveal significant divergence between planned and observed development, particularly in peripheral areas, with clear variation across cities. Kanpur exhibits the highest level of non-conformance (EBC: 2.23), indicating weak boundary control and pronounced peri-urban sprawl. Varanasi also demonstrates substantial deviation (EBC: 2.06), reflecting persistent gaps between planning intent and implementation. In contrast, Prayagraj shows relatively stronger conformance (EBC: 1.04), though underlying challenges remain. These differences are shaped by local conditions, including land acquisition conflicts, fragmented governance structures, infrastructure deficits, and limited financial mechanisms. Importantly, the findings underscore that even where spatial conformity appears stronger, it does not necessarily translate into effective planning outcomes. The study concludes that peri-urban growth is not simply unplanned but is shaped by negotiated and context-specific processes. It highlights the need for adaptive, implementation-focused planning, stronger institutional capacity, and integrated financial strategies. By bridging spatial and qualitative analysis, the research provides a more comprehensive framework for understanding and managing peri-urban development in rapidly urbanizing regions. Full article

In the renewal of rural self-built houses, dispersed construction patterns, insufficient design guidance, and resource constraints often lead to tensions between individual building needs and the overall settlement landscape. Grounded in the theory of spatial self-organization, this study proposes a roof interface renewal framework of “Clustering–Collaboration–self-organization,” and takes Dianju Village in Anning City, Yunnan Province, as a case study to explore how limited architectural interventions can address the fragmentation of roof landscapes in rural settlements. This research adopts a mixed-method approach combining ethnographic fieldwork, resident design observation, and post-occupancy evaluation (POE). The POE was conducted with 16 participating households, focusing on residents’ perceptions of roof usability, visual order, material acceptance, opportunities for neighborhood interaction, and maintenance issues. The findings indicate that residents generally perceive that continuous roof treatment, the application of bamboo–timber materials, and adjustable structural units have improved the usability of roof spaces, while enhancing their recognition of the overall village image and the expression of local materials. At the same time, residents’ feedback suggests that the long-term performance of bamboo–timber materials still depends on continuous maintenance and appropriate structural protection. The contribution of this study lies in translating spatial self-organization theory into a participatory and locally adaptive process of rural landscape renewal. Rather than providing a directly replicable roof typology, this case offers exploratory insights into key interface identification, resident negotiation, and localized construction strategies for the renewal of rural self-built houses in developing and transitional contexts. Full article

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are central to the industrial fabric of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Yet, they confront increasing demands to implement sustainability practices originating from institutional contexts markedly different from their own. Existing research has tended to neglect the cultural and institutional negotiations inherent in this process, often framing sustainability adoption as a technical or compliance-oriented exercise rather than as a multifaceted cultural adaptation. This study proposes and empirically examines the concept of sustainability acculturation—the process by which firms align global sustainability norms with local business cultures. Drawing on Institutional Theory, the Resource-Based View, and Berry’s Acculturation Model, we present a context-specific framework, tested using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods approach: survey data from 284 manufacturing SMEs across six SSA countries, followed by 24 semi-structured interviews. Structural equation modeling reveals that international market pressure and owner–manager values are direct drivers, whereas local regulatory pressure exhibits only a weak association with deep cultural integration. Managerial commitment and organizational learning mediate these relationships, while Ubuntu values enhance social sustainability integration, and institutional voids diminish regulatory effectiveness. The model accounts for 57% of the variance in sustainability acculturation. Findings show that SSA SMEs employ distinct acculturation strategies—Integration, Assimilation, Resilient Adaptation, and Decoupling—shaped by the interplay of external pressures, internal capabilities, and contextual conditions. The study underscores the importance of culturally attuned, context-specific interventions for sustainable industrial development in SSA. Full article