Search Results (425)

Mentoring has become a central mechanism of teacher support and professional learning, while the conditions of teaching have been reshaped by socio-political uncertainty, teacher shortages, digitalisation, increasingly diverse student needs, and the COVID-19 pandemic itself. This study aimed to map the conceptual structure and temporal evolution of research on teacher mentoring and professional learning. A longitudinal bibliometric and science-mapping analysis was conducted on 2843 peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Scopus database and published between 2010 and 2025, using co-occurrence (co-word) analysis of author and indexed keywords in VOSviewer 1.6.20, complemented by network, overlay and density visualisations. The final co-word map comprised 123 keyword elements organised into four clusters, with 3312 links and a total link strength of 17,024. The central node was ‘mentoring’ (532 occurrences; 121 links; total link strength = 2212; average publication year = 2019.40). Four thematic lines structured the discourse: (1) professionalisation in the wider sense, including health education mentoring; (2) initial teacher education and the induction of new teachers; (3) higher education and digitally mediated environments of professional learning; and (4) bridging concepts of collaboration and professional identity formation. The findings indicate that, within the literature mapped, mentoring functions as a relational, context-sensitive form of support connecting several arenas of professional learning. This study contributes a longitudinal conceptual map of the field; the results describe the intellectual structure of the literature and do not constitute evidence of the effectiveness of mentoring practices. Full article

The Spanish democratic transition inaugurated in 1977 an uninterrupted electoral cycle in which the campaign poster became the foremost propagandistic medium and the most immediate expression of the political culture of each moment. No longitudinal analysis has yet covered the full arc from the first democratic elections of 15 June 1977 to the general elections of 23 July 2023, nor has the transition from ideological propaganda to personalised political marketing and multiplatform communication been systematically examined across all sixteen electoral contests. This study analyses campaign posters from the Spanish general elections available in the Dipòsit Digital de Documents of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) through a mixed-methods longitudinal design that is explicitly framed as a qualitative historical–comparative interpretation supported by descriptive quantitative evidence, combining critical visual discourse analysis, semiotic image analysis, quantitative content analysis, and the historical–comparative method, applied to a representative corpus of posters from the main political parties in each contest. The findings reveal three major evolutionary stages characterised by shifts in partisan identity construction, leadership personalisation, and the progressive integration of poster imagery into multiplatform communication ecosystems. These results indicate that electoral poster design both reflects and actively shapes transformations in Spanish political culture, and that the poster retains significant strategic and symbolic relevance within contemporary digital campaign environments. Full article

Deborah Rodriguez’s The Kabul Beauty School belongs to the body of Western humanitarian literature produced post-9/11 portraying the significant role of America in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. This study analyzes how the memoir embodies what is conceptualized as ‘autoethnographic orientalism’, a critical framework that identifies how the Western subject constructs knowledge of the Orient through personal narratives that prioritize self-discovery by using autoethnographic conventions of reflexivity, participant observation, personal disclosure and affective engagement. Integrating intersectional complicity into the framework reveals the reproduction of orientalist hierarchies while claiming feminist solidarity with Afghan women. The close reading and qualitative analysis of the memoir identifies five dimensions of representational politics—memoir as an orientalist form, the autoethnographic gaze, intersectional complicity, rescue narratives and agential empowerment, and narrative blind spots. The study demonstrates how Rodriguez’s observation and documentation of cultural practices reinforce colonial discourse of perceived differences and deficiencies rather than arriving at a deeper cultural understanding. The findings suggest that post-9/11 humanitarian memoirs need to employ a critical reading practice that will engage with both the empathetic dimensions of the text as well as the structural complicity embedded in them. Full article

This article theorizes conscience as a political principle in the context of polarized democracy, examining its strategic articulation in the rhetoric of Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu between 2010 and 2023. While existing scholarship on polarization and majoritarianism has focused primarily on identity politics and institutional erosion, less attention has been paid to the moral vocabularies through which opposition actors reconfigure democratic legitimacy. Drawing on conscience and theories of secularism, this study conceptualizes conscience as a mediating category that unsettles the binary between religious authority and secular reason. Through qualitative discourse analysis of parliamentary speeches, campaign addresses, and party documents, the article demonstrates how conscience is framed simultaneously as transcendent and universal—invoked as divinely resonant yet politically inclusive. I argue that this formulation constitutes a heterodox model of religion–politics relations that departs from both assertive secularism and majoritarianism. By privileging individual moral deliberation over collective identity claims, Kılıçdaroğlu articulates a liberal-pluralist alternative aimed at depolarizing democratic contestation. The findings contribute to political theory by advancing an account of conscience as a performative and strategic resource in democratic struggles. More broadly, the study offers a framework for understanding how moral rhetoric can be mobilized to foster democratic resilience in deeply divided societies, with implications extending beyond the Turkish case. Full article

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia are growing global health challenges, yet public understanding of these conditions remains poorly characterized. Methods: This study analyzed 17,578 English-language tweets from Twitter/X collected throughout 2024 to characterize public discourse using dual sentiment analysis and topic modeling. Sentiment was assessed using two lexicon-based tools, VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) and TextBlob, with inter-method agreement evaluated via Cohen’s Kappa and confusion matrix analysis. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with coherence-based model selection (c_v) identified latent discussion topics. Results: All reported sentiment proportions are tool-specific estimates rather than absolute characterisations of public discourse and should be interpreted in light of the fair inter-method agreement observed between VADER and TextBlob. VADER classified 43.3% of tweets as positive, 32.2% as negative, and 24.5% as neutral (mean compound score = 0.065, SD = 0.499; 95% CI: 0.058 to 0.073; note that the large SD relative to the mean reflects the broad, near-zero-centred distribution of compound scores). TextBlob produced a partially divergent distribution (45.9% positive, 36.2% neutral, 17.8% negative) with fair inter-method agreement (κ = 0.297), indicating that exact sentiment proportions depend meaningfully on the choice of classifier. Approximately 14% of tweets contained political content related to the U.S. presidential election cycle, which may represent an important source of noise in health discourse. LDA identified six optimal topics (c_v = 0.407): research studies, blood-based diagnostics, comorbidities and personal loss, research advocacy, clinical developments, and risk factors and treatment. Sentiment differed significantly across topics (Kruskal–Wallis H = 235.92, p < 0.001), with research and advocacy topics showing the most positive VADER-classified sentiment (50.0%) and comorbidity discussions showing the highest negative proportion (41.4%). Positive tweets received significantly higher engagement than negative tweets (Mann–Whitney p < 0.001), though follower count was the strongest predictor of engagement (β = 0.198). Conclusions: These findings, interpreted as tool-conditional estimates, have implications for health communication strategies, public education campaigns, stigma reduction, and the responsible design of social media-based health surveillance systems. Full article

This study examines how Indonesian university students negotiate the meanings of extremism and tolerance across digital and campus environments. Using phenomenology, the research examines the lived experiences of 35 students from Yogyakarta, Jakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, and Bandung to understand how digital platforms, everyday interactions, and symbolic practices mediate their religious identity work. The analysis applies Castells’ concept of communication power and Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and symbolic power to explore how digital platforms shape ideological narratives and emotional framing. Key Findings reveal that extremism is experienced not merely as ideological deviation but as a communicative rupture—manifested through coercive discourse, exclusionary framing, and digitally amplified moral authority—while tolerance emerges as a socially cultivated practice embedded in relational norms, affective positioning, and strategic self-presentation in mediated environments. Social media functions simultaneously as a site of exposure, contestation, and subtle resistance, enabling students to reframe, soften, or oppose dominant narratives through micro-activism and selective curation. This study offers a novel contribution by integrating data-driven phenomenological insights with a theory-driven account of mediated power, demonstrating how symbolic power circulates through digital infrastructures and shapes the cultural politics of religious pluralism among youth in contemporary Indonesia. Full article

This article examines how media discourse in South Korea constructed Filipino caregivers as a legitimate yet conditional solution to the country’s care crisis. Moving beyond approaches that treat media coverage as a neutral reflection of policy debate, it analyzes news discourse as part of the broader politics of immigrant integration, showing how narratives of care, foreignness, affordability, and utility helped define the terms under which migrant caregivers could be welcomed. Drawing on a qualitative discourse analysis of English- and Korean-language newspaper coverage, the article traces how Filipino caregivers were alternately represented as desirable care providers, disciplined service workers, classed household resources, and ultimately precarious migrants whose social legitimacy remained revocable. The findings show that media and policy languages worked together to normalize a form of conditional belonging in which migrant caregivers were incorporated as useful labor but not recognized as fully deserving social subjects. Across the coverage, affordability emerged as a key discursive filter through which rights, value, and inclusion were negotiated, while competing narratives pushed the care regime toward more selective, informalized, and stratified forms. The article argues that secondary citizenship in this case was not only a legal or labor-market condition but also a discursive accomplishment produced through the intertwined narration of care needs, migrant labor, and unequal integration. Full article

The rapid proliferation of misinformation and pseudo-facts on social media platforms has raised significant concerns regarding their impact on public opinion, institutional trust, and decision-making processes. This study investigates the effectiveness of artificial intelligence in detecting pseudo-facts by distinguishing between emotional and rational discourse in social media content. Drawing on a dataset of 26,322 Arabic tweets related to a controversial judicial event in Lebanon, the research employs machine learning techniques, including K-Nearest Neighbors, Naïve Bayes, and Logistic Regression, to classify content based on emotional intensity. A manually labeled subset of 600 tweets was used to train and evaluate the models, with Logistic Regression achieving the highest performance across multiple evaluation metrics. The findings reveal that emotional discourse overwhelmingly dominates the dataset, accounting for more than 89% of the analyzed content, consistent with prior evidence of an association between emotional expression and the dissemination of pseudo-facts, while noting that the study classifies discourse as emotional or rational rather than verifying the factual accuracy of individual claims. The study further demonstrates that high classification accuracy can be achieved using relatively small, context-specific datasets, particularly within non-Western linguistic environments. Beyond its methodological contribution, this research offers a proof-of-concept for using artificial intelligence as an analytical aid for organizations, supporting information risk assessment and a clearer understanding of digital communication dynamics. By integrating sentiment analysis with socio-political context, the study advances current knowledge on misinformation detection and highlights the importance of emotion-driven narratives in shaping digital discourse. Full article

This study investigates digital leadership as a networked social process by analyzing how influential actors operating across professional and institutional domains construct leadership discourse and draw on transformational leadership (TFL) principles within Twitter (X) networks, with particular attention to the skill-transfer gaps that persist between formal academic preparation and workforce demands. Social Network Analysis (SNA) using the NodeXL program was used to examine the relational structure of that discourse across a dataset of 1186 Twitter accounts and 1362 relational ties. The analysis identified 27 prominent actors operating within a distinct community cluster whose discourse spanned politics, health, technology, media, and education, with thematically diverse but uneven engagement with leadership topics. Combining semantic cluster analyses, inductive thematic mapping, and a supplementary exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the study finds that the four TFL principles (individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence) are unevenly represented in this discourse. The EFA condensed the co-occurrence structure into three platform-shaped factors, with the strongest support for individualized consideration and no coherent factor for idealized influence, indicating partial rather than comprehensive alignment with the four-dimensional TFL model. The findings position digital leadership as a relational and iterative social process, sustained through repeated interactions, endorsements, and positional recognition within platform-based publics that extend across academic, industry, and socio-political boundaries. The study highlights social media as a networked yet uneven environment for leadership development and the broader social negotiation of skill-transfer challenges across digital professional contexts. Full article

In an era where entertainment media increasingly functions as public pedagogy, higher education instructors must navigate how these platforms shape students’ perceptions of social and political issues. This study explores the possibilities of integrating the sitcom Abbott Elementary into an undergraduate interdisciplinary Honors seminar to challenge deficit-based perspectives on urban education and shift student focus toward systemic policy analysis. Using a qualitative exploratory design, this localized course design inquiry analyzed Initial and Final Reflections from 24 students with diverse academic backgrounds. The curriculum employed a multiperspectival analysis, pairing television episodes with scholarly research and authentic community voices. Findings reveal a qualitative thematic shift in student discourse: participants moved from articulating hegemonic, deficit-oriented views toward more humanizing and complex conceptualizations of critical issues shaping urban education. Students increasingly identified policy-driven factors over individual community “failures”. These results suggest that leveraging contemporary popular culture as a primary academic text provides a useful framework for fostering critical thinking and policy literacy. Consequently, interdisciplinary media-based pedagogy serves as an engaging tool for involving diverse student populations in educational equity discourse. Full article

This study investigates the linguistic mechanisms of politeness and conversational implicature in digital classroom interactions at “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia (UAB), Romania. Rather the research adopts a corpus-based approach to analyze five authentic communicative situations extracted from institutional digital platforms (Moodle (version 4.3.2; R Core Team, 2023), Microsoft Teams, and institutional email exchanges) between academic staff and students during 2022–2024. The corpus comprises 247 naturally occurring discourse units. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study identifies recurrent patterns of face-threatening acts (FTAs), mitigation strategies, and implicature generation in asynchronous and synchronous digital contexts. The findings reveal that digital mediation creates a distinctive pragmatic register in which participants use compressed politeness strategies, exploit contextual ambiguity, and rely on shared institutional knowledge to convey and decode implicature. Crucially, the study situates its results within the broader framework of the Romanian higher education system, reflecting ongoing tensions between hierarchical academic culture and digitalization imperatives introduced in the post-pandemic educational environment. Recommendations for digital communication literacy training at an institutional level are provided. Full article

Political violence poses a significant challenge to global stability, underscoring the need for comparative analytical models that support analytical interpretation of structured conflict data. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of 12 machine learning approaches, including traditional supervised models, deep learning architectures, and zero-shot large language models, for the classification of political violence events using the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) dataset (2010–2020, over 40,000 events). The results demonstrate that, on short structured event text represented via TF-IDF, fine-tuned traditional machine learning models achieve stronger performance than zero-shot LLM approaches and deep learning models on structured event data. We further introduce a multilingual classification framework for English and Urdu news content, illustrating cross-lingual transfer robustness using machine-translated Urdu data; results reflect translation-based evaluation conditions and should not be interpreted as performance on naturally occurring low-resource Urdu political-event text. As an exploratory extension, the framework is applied to 57,700 tweets related to the Article 370 crisis in Kashmir to illustrate applicability to unstructured social media text; given that the best Twitter model (55% accuracy) falls below the 69% majority-class baseline, these results should be interpreted solely as coarse discourse indicators and not as a validated classification component. Unlike prior work, this study systematically combines multilingual evaluation with zero-shot LLM analysis for political event classification. Geographic out-of-sample validation (leave-one-country-out or leave-one-region-out) was not conducted; the reported performance should therefore not be interpreted as evidence of cross-regional generalizability without further experimentation. The findings highlight practical considerations for designing data-driven analytical frameworks for conflict monitoring and analytical decision support. Full article

Background/Objectives: Vaccine attitudes are an individual’s beliefs, feelings, and evaluations regarding vaccines. Limited research has examined how students in faith-based university settings organize these attitudes. This study looked at vaccination attitudes among students at a religious university where faith, science, family, and politics often influence how students think and make decisions. Methods: This study used Q-methodology to examine shared viewpoints about vaccination. A concourse of 240 statements was developed from published literature, public discourse, and student interviews, then reduced to a 37-statement-Q-set. Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory nonmajors biology course completed digital Q-sorts. We analyzed the data using by-person factor analysis, along with principal components analysis and Varimax rotation. Follow-up interviews helped us interpret the factors. Results: Three viewpoints explained 59% of the study variance. The first viewpoint, Faith-Integrated Institutional Trust, showed strong trust in science, public health agencies, and religious leaders. People in this group saw vaccination as both a moral duty and a way to protect others. The second viewpoint, Skeptical Autonomy and Institutional Distrust, emphasized personal choice, family influence, and distrust of government and official vaccine information. The third viewpoint, Pragmatic Autonomy and Science Confidence, endorsed vaccines and scientific evidence while also prioritizing individual decision-making over mandates. Conclusions: Science alone does not explain vaccination attitudes among college students. Trust, identity, and personal autonomy also play an important role. Vaccine communication should therefore connect scientific evidence with students’ moral commitments, trusted relationships, and concerns about freedom, especially in settings where faith influences health decision-making. Full article

This study examines punctuation as a paralinguistic resource in digital political discourse, focusing on its role in encoding stance in a corpus of tweets produced by Donald Trump. Drawing on a dataset of 1000 tweets, the analysis combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify patterns in the use of exclamatory, interrogative, and mixed punctuation forms. The findings suggest that punctuation functions systematically as a mechanism of textual amplification, shaping the expression of evaluation, emotional intensity, and interactional meaning. Repeated exclamation marks are closely associated with heightened stance and emphasis, while interrogative forms frequently function rhetorically to signal doubt and challenge rather than to request information. Mixed forms further demonstrate the flexibility of punctuation in encoding multiple layers of meaning within a single utterance. The analysis also shows that punctuation operates in close interaction with lexical intensifiers and capitalization, forming clusters of meaning that reinforce communicative force. By foregrounding punctuation as a meaningful semiotic resource, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how written discourse adapts to the constraints of digitally mediated communication. It argues that punctuation should be treated as an integral component of pragmatic and discourse-analytic inquiry and highlights its role in the construction of stance in contemporary digital political discourse. Full article

This article analyzes how martyrdom progressively diverged from heroism to become an autonomous category of political discourse in nineteenth-century southern European Catholic societies. It argues that the secularization and politicization of Catholic asceticism played a central role in this process, which culminated in the martyr’s moment of agony and raised the question of the voluntary dimension of martyrdom. The analysis draws on a wide range of political martyrologies, funeral orations, and press reports, and focuses mostly on the Spanish and Italian cases, where martyrdom gained greatest prominence in the political sphere and gave rise to the most explicit theoretical expositions. It highlights the extent to which martyrdom was transformed into a powerful tool of legitimization and mobilization centered on willing self-denial and self-sacrifice for a cause or community. By reassessing secular martyrdom in relation to its religious substrate, this article seeks to reconsider sacrifice, holiness, and memory within Southern European Romanticism, shedding new light on the dynamics of secularization in post-revolutionary Europe. Full article