Search Results (26)

Language embodies traditions, values, and collective identity, bridging gaps between generations and geographies. Maintaining consistent language policies at home and in communities remains challenging, with research showing that only a few families have explicit rules about language use and few enforce them regularly. The study explores strategies for heritage language maintenance (HLM) to mitigate language attrition among Anaañ bilinguals residing in the Akpabuyo and Calabar South Local Government Areas of Cross River State, Nigeria. The study draws on social identity theory, which links language use to identity, motivation, and group affiliation, thereby influencing language maintenance. Using a qualitative approach, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 40 participants, selected purposively from Anaañ speakers in the study areas. Thematic analysis is employed to identify patterns and themes, revealing approaches for heritage language maintenance to curb language attrition. Findings reveal that despite some Anaañ speakers’ negative attitude towards their HL, others value it, keep it alive, and are ready to pass it to the future generations. This will preserve cultural identity and foster a sense of pride, belonging and shared values among Anaañ people, especially those residing in Southern Cross River State. Full article

Concern about the sustainability of traditional single-use plastic pots is growing as the adverse environmental effects of plastic use become increasingly apparent worldwide. Research shows economic and eco-friendly alternatives to replace plastics across multiple industries are needed. Consumers have a choice when selecting products made with plastic versus alternatives. Research indicates consumers’ choices are often influenced by core values, but the extent to which these values shape the purchase of horticultural products is limited and warrants further study. The purpose of this research was to determine how consumers’ environmental self-identity, self-awareness, and demographic characteristics predicted their emotional reactions, particularly guilt and pride, when purchasing plants grown in plastic pots compared to alternative pots. Data were collected from 1235 United States residents aged 18 and older using an online survey via non-probability opt-in sampling. Environmental self-identity significantly predicted emotional reactions. A stronger environmental self-identity predicted higher levels of guilt when purchasing plants grown in plastic pots and increased pride when purchasing plants grown in plastic-alternative pots. A paired-sample t-test indicated significantly more positive emotional reactions when purchasing plants grown in plastic-alternative pots than those grown in plastic pots. Furthermore, age, sex, income, self-awareness, and political ideology were associated with differences in emotional reactions to pot-type purchases. The findings imply emotion and value-based factors influence sustainable purchasing decisions. Given this, companies should tailor their marketing and communication strategies to align with consumers’ environmental self-identity, thereby encouraging the adoption of sustainable alternatives and supporting a shift away from plastic use in the horticulture industry. Full article

This research examines how community support for sustainable tourism development is influenced by sustainable hospitality in protected park areas. This relationship focuses primarily on the effect of perceived eco-social performance (ESP) as an enhancement of the community’s perceived location-specific environmental attachment (CEA), leading to increased pro-sustainable tourism intentions through CEA. Despite the growing focus on sustainability within hospitality industries, there remains very little scholarly research that explores how local communities perceive sustainable hospitality practices and how these perceptions then manifest as emotional attachment, followed by behavioural support. To achieve the stated goal, researchers employed an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to collect quantitative survey data from residents living in close proximity to a protected area destination, and the quantitative data were used separately to develop qualitative insights into residents’ support for sustainable tourism initiatives. Findings of this study reveal that perceived ESP significantly enhances CEA, providing an impetus for increased PSTI (via direct and indirect pathways) for communities in close proximity to a protected area destination. CEA further enhances PSTI significantly and acts as a significant mediator in the relationship between perception and behavioural support for sustainable tourism. Qualitative findings further indicate that eco-social hospitality practices fulfil the following: develop community pride; increase the sense of environmental responsibility among the community; and create opportunities for actively supporting sustainable tourism. These findings demonstrate that, while sustainable hospitality practices generate observable actions, they also create deeper psychological connections between communities and their environment. The cumulative findings from this study contribute to a greater understanding of how ESP can strategically contribute to growing the number of communities supporting sustainable tourism through the creation of CEA, thereby expanding the overall community’s intention to support sustainable tourism development. Full article

Mpox is a rare but potentially serious vaccine-preventable disease. The 2022 United States outbreak disproportionately impacted gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, people living with HIV, and people of transgender experience. Early vaccination efforts revealed substantial racial and geographic inequities, with lower uptake among Black and Hispanic cisgender men, transgender women, and residents of rural areas. To address these challenges, Fairview’s Minnesota Immunization Networking Initiative (MINI), a 20-year-old mobile health collaborative, partnered with state and local public health agencies and community-based organizations to expand mpox vaccine access. With support from governmental outbreak response funding and stockpiled vaccine, mobile clinics were deployed in trusted community settings, including Pride events and recurring community sites. Targeted outreach, education, and coordination with local providers supported stigma reduction and second-dose series completion. Program data were collected from October 2022 through December 2024. MINI hosted 125 community-based mpox vaccination events, administered 2259 doses to individuals from 220 cities across the United States, including 195 cities in the Midwest. Pride events were key entry points for first-dose vaccination, particularly in rural areas; urban non-Pride clinics played a complementary role in facilitating second-dose completion. Program-level vaccination-to-case ratios were highest among populations experiencing disproportionate mpox burden, including Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native male participants, suggesting alignment of preventive resources with community need. MINI’s mobile, partnership-driven approach demonstrates the value of pairing large-scale community events with recurring clinics to address barriers to both vaccine access and series completion. These findings underscore the importance of flexible, community-centered infrastructure in advancing health equity and strengthening outbreak preparedness. Full article

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PESs) have become a central instrument in global biodiversity finance, yet endangered species-specific PESs remain rare and poorly understood in implementation terms. Taiwan provides a revealing case: a three-year program paying farmers to conserve four threatened species—Prionailurus bengalensis, Lutra lutra, Tyto longimembris, and Hydrophasianus chirurgus—in working farmland across Taiwan and Kinmen island. Through semi-structured interviews with farmers, residents, and local conservation actors, we examine how payments are interpreted, rationalized, enacted, and emotionally experienced at the ground level. This study adopts Colaizzi’s data analysis method, the primary advantage of which lies in its ability to systematically transform fragmented and emotive interview narratives into a logically structured essential description. This is achieved through the rigorous extraction of significant statements and the subsequent synthesis of thematic clusters. Participants reported willingness to continue not only because subsidies offset losses, but because rarity, community pride, and the visible arc of “we helped this creature survive” became internalized rewards. NGOs amplified this shift by translating science into farm practice and “normalizing” coexistence. In practice, conservation work became a social project—identifying threats, altering routines, and defending habitat as a shared civic act. This study does not estimate treatment-effect size; instead, it delivers mechanistic insight at a live policy moment, as Taiwan expands PESs and the OECD pushes incentive reform. The finding is simple and strategically important: endangered-species PESs work best where payments trigger meaning—not where payments replace it. Full article

Heritage tourism is increasingly positioned as a strategy for revitalising rural communities, particularly in areas where structural transformations have changed traditional ways of life. However, its outcomes reveal a paradox. The same processes that preserve cultural landscapes often commodify them, converting living traditions into marketable symbols. This paper investigates this heritage paradox through a complex study of Viscri, a UNESCO-listed village in Transylvania, Romania. Combining demographic and occupational data (2002–2022) with 51 questionnaires, 7 semi-structured interviews, field observations, and local records, the study examines how tourism-driven heritage valorisation reshapes socio-economic structures and identity narratives. The results show a profound restructuring of livelihoods, with a marked decline in subsistence agriculture and the emergence of micro-entrepreneurial activities related to accommodation, crafts, and gastronomy. These changes, while improving local incomes and infrastructures, have also increased external ownership and redefined authenticity as a performative resource negotiated among residents, entrepreneurs, and visitors. Local voices oscillate between pride and fatigue, between preservation and loss. By conceptualising the heritage paradox as a dynamic interplay between conservation and commodification, this study contributes to global debates on authenticity, sustainable rural transformation, and community resilience, offering an empirically grounded model of heritage tourism’s ambivalent consequences through an original analytical lens for post-socialist rural contexts. Full article

Al-Madafah (the guesthouse) is a cornerstone of the cultural and social fabric of Sweida Province in southern Syria. Rooted in the Druze community’s history following their settlement in Jabal al-Arab in the 17th century, these structures have served as spaces for hospitality, cultural exchange, political resistance, and community cohesion. Despite their significance, scholarly research on Madafahs in Sweida remains limited. This article examines their architectural design, socio-cultural roles, and historical evolution to uncover this understudied tradition and advance conservation efforts for this heritage. Combining archival research, case studies, and oral histories from residents and experts, this study employs narrative analysis to decode the cultural meanings embedded in these spaces. Findings reveal that Madafahs are more than architectural landmarks; they serve as living embodiments of resilience, cultural pride, and communal identity, fostering social cohesion, while their basalt stone construction reflects Jabal al-Arab’s vernacular heritage. Historically, they hosted revolutionary activities against colonial rule. Today, urbanisation and economic pressures threaten their traditional role, yet they endure as symbols of continuity. This study highlights Madafahs as valuable heritage sites and cradles for narratives of magnanimity and defiance. Collaborative efforts between stakeholders and policymakers could revitalise these spaces, ensuring that their legacy persists amid modern challenges. Full article

Recent scholarship highlights growing interest in the relationship between cultural heritage and sustainable development. However, existing research predominantly focuses on pluralistic governance systems in the West, which limits applicability in authoritarian contexts and leaves evaluation mechanisms underdeveloped. Addressing this gap, this paper proposes the Evidence-Based Disciplinary Assessment (EBDA) approach, a guiding framework that integrates research evidence, historical narratives, and legacies to broaden heritage recognition across five dimensions: cultural, social, environmental, economic, and institutional-governance. The framework demonstrates how disciplinary knowledge valuation can contribute to sustainable heritage in historic art districts. We digitally map spatial clusters of 1347 artists’ residences and identify neighborhoods central to Shanghai’s Republican-period art scene. Through case studies of two existing neighborhoods and qualitative interviews with local officials, we show how evidence-based disciplinary narratives foster neighborhood pride, support adaptive reuse, attract cultural tourism, and align with governance frameworks to promote long-term preservation. Nonetheless, EBDA has limited relevance for social sustainability, particularly in enabling community-led conservation and supporting emerging artists. This hybrid model contributes to both theoretical debates and practical strategies for historic district development. Full article

The Royal Hospital Chelsea has been home to veterans of the British Army since 1692. Opportunities to remain physically active throughout the life course of its residents include participation in numerous hobbies within the quasi-military environment, and in the civic engagement representational role of the Chelsea Pensioner. This study examines the influence the Royal Hospital Chelsea culture has on resident opportunities to remain active. A non-traditional mixed-methods convergent design was used across three participant groups. Staff and established residents engaged in semi-structured qualitative interviews, with established residents and a cohort of new residents completing Quality of Life questionnaires. The findings indicate established Chelsea Pensioners experienced a sense of pride and purpose, elevated social status, and increased life satisfaction as a result of engaging in multiple activities. New Chelsea Pensioners demonstrated a trend towards increased quality of life after six months’ residence at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Further research is required to explore the transferability of similar interventions into other residential establishments. Full article

In north-western Poland, cultural and historical structures were erected using erratic boulders of Scandinavian origin. These structures have yet to be subjected to detailed analysis with the aim of determining their origin, type of erratic boulders and rock abundance of a given petrographic type. This topic has not been addressed by art historians in previous studies of similar structures. The objective of this paper is to present five illustrative examples of stone structures that are closely related to cultural heritage in north-western Poland. A comprehensive inventory of the stone material is presented, categorised according to petrographic types. This is accompanied by a guide to the erratics. Furthermore, this article addresses the principles of geoethics and the concept of sense of place, with the objective of fostering a sense of pride in cultural heritage among residents and viewers. The objective was to identify the current and potential future geosystem services that erratic boulders can provide at the aforementioned locations. The survey methods were non-intrusive and included a comprehensive analysis of the stone material at eye level. Furthermore, in addition to graphic and photographic archiving, the petrographic type of rock and the type of indicative erratics were identified in carefully designed test fields. The results were subjected to basic statistical calculations. The results obtained represent a new corpus of knowledge that can be employed in the sustainable development of the five regions through the utilisation of a tool such as geotourism. It is anticipated that the implementation of innovative initiatives aimed at fostering geoenvironmental awareness and providing educational benefits, such as disseminating knowledge about the petrography and history of the sites (including the evolution of stone workshops and techniques), the role of historic buildings in strengthening attachment to roots, and their promotion in the media and on the internet, will result in the attraction of a more diverse group of tourists with interests beyond the current tourist and recreational offerings. Full article

Despite the lengthy history of the research on destination image from various perspectives, how pro-environmental destination image promotes resident environmental citizenship behavior remains underexplored. Grounded in the cognition–affect–behavior (CAB) model, this research investigated the translation of pro-environmental destination image into resident environmental citizenship behavior via satisfaction and pride. Data were collected using an intercept survey approach from a tourism village recognized as one of the best in the world by UNWTO. The results indicated that a pro-environmental destination image has a positive impact on resident environmental citizenship behavior in the private and public domains. Furthermore, resident satisfaction and pride serve as mediators between pro-environmental destination image and resident environmental citizenship behavior. This research contributes to the literature on resident environmental citizenship behavior by considering the role of pro-environmental destination image. The findings provide practical implications for fostering environmental citizenship behavior through the presentation of pro-environmental images to residents and eliciting their positive emotions. Full article

Eviction could hold a different meaning if a home’s immediate surroundings contribute to its residents’ livelihood, especially for informal laborers. This paper explores the notion of the fragility of a home within an expanded space—the space on which a home stands and its surroundings when turned into a contested area. It specifically looks at the slum of Yamuna Pushta in Delhi, which was demolished in 2004. The act uprooted thousands of low-income families who were blamed for polluting the river. The demolition was fueled by new urban visions and planning strategies, political and capitalist ambitions, projections of national pride, and an event-driven approach camouflaged under an environmentalist concern attempting to “clean” the river. Using the photographic works of artist, curator, and activist Ravi Agarwal as a case study, this paper argues the presence of a counternarrative in the works, challenging the projected environmentalist discourse around the river, the slum dwellers. This study further states the dual marginalization of the Pushta residents and the Yamuna by critiquing the economic format of majoritarianism through the growing normalcy and agreeability of the slum demolitions by the urban non-poor disguised as the “greater good”. Full article

The 2020 census reports that 61.2 million Latinxs live in the US, totaling around 19% of all residents, forming the country’s largest minority population. With the growing number of Latinxs, there has been a higher level of contact between Spanish and English leading to language mixing or code-switching (CS) in mainstream American culture. This paper examines the Spanish/English CS in radio advertisements on Los Angeles’s 96.3 La Mega, a bilingual radio station geared towards today’s youth. Using Derrick’ 2015 sentential framework for the linguistic analysis of multilingual sentences, I carry out a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the linguistic nature of the on-air bilingual advertisements. I explore both national advertisements, as well as DJ-endorsed advertisements, to discern whether they follow the patterns previously pointed out in the literature for positive consumer evaluations of Spanish/English bilingual advertisements. Furthermore, I am interested in if these advertisements are in line with the ethos of 96.3 La Mega, which prides itself on being fully bilingual. This research will shed light on the linguistic nature of contemporary strategies being used in bilingual advertisements for the US Latinx community and marketing tactics designed to encourage their consumerism. Full article

The impact of regional architecture on residents’ identities varies, involving complex emotional aspects. We conducted an in-depth study of the deep connection between regional architecture and identity in China’s Huizhou and Minnan regions, highlighting its key role in stimulating authentic pride. Initially, we carried out a survey among 433 residents from both regions using questionnaires to obtain quantitative data, revealing the mediating role of authentic pride. Subsequently, we conducted in-depth interviews with 20 residents from 4 villages of the 2 regions, and the coding results explained the multidimensional reasons behind the quantitative analysis outcomes. This research not only deepened the understanding of how regional architecture impacts identity recognition but also highlighted the urgency of preserving regional culture under the pressures of globalization and modernization. Moreover, this study provided strong reasons for the preservation of architectural heritage, emphasizing its importance as a cornerstone of identity and a means to enhance community cohesion. Full article

Frequent torrential rainfall disasters have occurred worldwide in recent years. In Japan, the Northern Kyushu Torrential Rainfall disaster in July 2017 caused extensive damage to Fukuoka and Oita prefectures and significantly impacted local landscapes, from which residents derive pride and identity and, hence, are of the utmost importance. Local communities in Japan are also at risk of extinction due to progressive depopulation. This study discusses community revitalization through landscape creation and related challenges based on the case of the Hiraenoki Community affected by the Northern Kyushu Torrential Rainfall disaster. We conducted long-term participant observations over two years and semi-structured interviews with all households in the community. We found that the landscape project revitalized local pride and involved numerous people outside the community, including the prefectural extension center, university, and Non-Profit Organization (NPO), and provided them with an opportunity to connect. On the other hand, our investigation also revealed the danger of obscuring the original purpose of reconstruction activities because of collaboration with outsiders. This case study elucidates the possibilities and challenges of resident-led reconstruction activities in communities that are facing depopulation and aging problems and are working with organizations within and outside the community. Full article