Hasil untuk "Social sciences and state - Asia (Asian studies only)"

Fumiaki Inagaki

This special issue examines how the regional order in Central Asia is being reshaped amid major geopolitical transformations, particularly following the Russia – Ukraine war. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region has faced persistent instability rooted in Soviet legacies, uneven resource distribution, and increasing external engagement by major powers. The war has intensified geopolitical competition and reshaped debates over regional order and the role of external actors. This volume brings nine articles that analyze these dynamics through three analytical layers. The first layer focuses on intra-regional relations among the five Central Asian states, including economic and logistical linkages as well as environmental challenges such as climate change and water resources. The second layer examines interactions with neighboring powers, especially China and Russia, highlighting economic integration, security cooperation, and digital governance. The third layer addresses broader geopolitical relations, particularly the evolving Sino-Russian partnership. These studies demonstrate that Central Asia cannot be understood solely as a site of great-power competition. Regional transformations predate the Russia – Ukraine war, while developments such as the Taliban’s return to power remain equally significant. Overall, Central Asia emerges as a complex and dynamic space shaped by global pressures and overlapping forms of cooperation.

WISNU SETIADI NUGROHO, ANITA ALVES PENA

Using the Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards, we show that the household education spending on girls was higher than for boys in the period following independence. This pattern contrasts with that in the neighboring and politically interrelated country of Indonesia. We explore how religious differences and supply and demand features of private (relatively costly) Catholic schools across these countries relate to the dynamics of these policy-relevant educational gaps during the course of development in Timor-Leste.

Zexu Li, M. Amin Rahimian, Lei Fang

Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes group-level outcomes remains unclear. Here, we develop a minimal collective foraging model in which individuals combine independent exploration, local exploitation, and socially guided movement. We show that foraging efficiency is maximized at an intermediate social learning range, where groups exploit discovered resources without suppressing independent discovery. This optimal regime also minimizes temporal burstiness in resource intake, reducing starvation risk. Increasing social learning range further improves equity among individuals but degrades efficiency through redundant exploitation. Introducing risky (negative) targets shifts the optimal range upward; in contrast, when penalties are ignored, randomly distributed negative cues can further enhance efficiency by constraining unproductive exploration. Together, these results reveal how local information rules regulate a fundamental trade-off between efficiency, stability, and equity, providing design principles for biological foraging systems and engineered collectives.

Zhuochao Peng, Jiaxin Xu, Jun Hu et al.

While recent research highlights the potential of social robots to support mood regulation, little is known about how prospective users view their integration into everyday life. To explore this, we conducted an exploratory case study that used a speculative robot concept "Mora" to provoke reflection and facilitate meaningful discussion about using social robots to manage subtle, day-to-day emotional experiences. We focused on the "Sunday Blues," a common dip in mood that occurs at the end of the weekend, as a relatable context in which to explore individuals' insights. Using a video prototype and a co-constructing stories method, we engaged 15 participants in imagining interactions with Mora and discussing their expectations, doubts, and concerns. The study surfaced a range of nuanced reflections around the attributes of social robots like empathy, intervention effectiveness, and ethical boundaries, which we translated into design considerations for future research and development in human-robot interaction.

Nimra Noor, Amna Arshad

In this digital age, where social media has become the major communication platform, memes are a powerful medium to reflect and shape societal narratives. This study aims to analyze the role of these digital artifacts as a means of social commentary in Pakistan. This study analyzes the multimodality of memes acting as political satire, cultural identity, economic crisis, and the community’s social practices and preferences through Van Leeuwen’s Social Semiotic model. The data collected for this study is 80 memes created and circulated in 2024, classified into various dimensions of Pakistani society, such as political, sociocultural, economic, religious, educational, etc. The qualitative analysis reveals how memes reflect, critique, and challenge the power dynamics within society. The findings reveal that memes are not only a source of entertainment but also address society’s serious and worth-noticing problems under the mask of humour. Furthermore, the significance of this study lies in its critical contribution to understanding digital communication. The research calls for attention to the harsh realities of society and suggests that a positive change in society would help to better portray the Pakistani community around the globe. References: Abbas, Z., Sheikh, M. A., Mir, B., & Farrukh, M. (2024). A Comparative Analysis of Pakistani and Indian Social Media Memes: Cultural Narratives and Social Understandings. Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 12(2), 1863-1873. https://doi.org/10.52131/pjhss.2024.v12i2.2299 Adebomi, Oluwayemisi Olusola. 2020. “A multimodal analysis of memetic representation of individuals and institutions in Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari administration.” Language. Text. Society 7 (1). https://ltsj.online/2020-07-1-adebomi. Ahmad, M., Aslam, A., Siddiqui, A., & Fazal, N. (2024). Decoding Digital Content: A Social Semiotic Perspective on Pakistani Social Media Trends. 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Javed, M. (2022). Meme as a social and political commentary tool: discourse analysis of meme in Pakistani social media. Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 5(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.37605/pjhssr.v5i2.321 Khan, M. (2024). Political Memes and Affective Polarization: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Political Memes. Pakistan Review of Social Sciences (PRSS), 5(1), 71–84. https://www.pakistanreview.com/index.php/PRSS/article/view/248 Kress, G., & Van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London, UK: Routledge. Laineste, L., & Voolaid, P. (2016). Laughing across borders: Intertextuality of internet memes. The European Journal of Humour Research, 4(4), 26-49. Leeuwen, T. V. (2005). Introducing Social Semiotics. London: Routledge. Milner, R. (2012). The world-made meme: Discourse and identity in participatory media, PhD Thesis (University of Kansas). Moaswes, A. S. (2019). Humor, Virality and the Politics of Internet Memes. Journal of Content, Community & Communication, 9 (5). DOI: 10.31620/JCCC.06.19/06 Moussa, M. B., Benmessaoud, S., & Douai, A. (2020). Internet memes as “tactical” social action: A multimodal critical discourse analysis approach. International Journal of Communication, 14, 21. Mubarak, A. S., & Aayid, D. (2022). A Semiotic Approach to Some Internet Political Comic Memes. Journal of Positive School Psychology, 9192-9198. Nita, F. R., Setiawan, S., & Lestari, L. A. (2021). Meaning-making of internet memes to create humorous sense: Functions as Speech Acts. Language Literacy: Journal of Linguistics, Literature, and Language Teaching, 5(2), 465-479. http://dx.doi.org/10.30743/ll.v5i2.4445 Ostanina-Olszewska, J., & Majdzińska-Koczorowicz, A. (2019). A Cognitive Linguistics approach to internet memes on selected Polish internet sites. Cognitive Studies, (19). https://doi.org/10.11649/cs.1939 Paul, T. (2024). Lockdown Humour and Gender Ideologies: A Critical Analysis of Social Media Memes. Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle Putra, R. A., & Triyono, S. (2018). The diversity of internet memes interpretations: A discourse analysis of incongruity of popular memes made by Indonesian netizens. PAROLE: Journal of Linguistics and Education, 6(2), 49-61. http://ejournal.undip.ac.id/index.php/parole. Qureshi, F., Iqbal, L., Kamran, W., Aamir, M., & Amin, S. (2023). Sociological Features Of Urdu And English Memes: An Analysis. Journal of Namibian Studies: History Politics Culture, 33, 5946-5960. https://doi.org/10.59670/jns.v33i.3353 Rathi, N., & Jain, P. (2023). SPREADING RELIGION AND CULTURE THROUGH INTERNET MEMES. Journal of Dharma, 48(4), 531–548. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379992756_SPREADING_RELIGION_AND_CULTURE_THROUGH_INTERNET_MEMES Raza, J., Sagheer, I., Sarwer, S., & Rasool, S. A. (2023). Dark Side of Pakistan Showcasing Economic Crisis Through Memes. 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Mark Pfeifer

This article provides an analysis of Hmong American population trends in the 2020 decennial census. Geographic units included in the analysis are the United States, the major U.S. regions, states, cities and places, counties and at the more micro-level, census tracts.

Katja Levy

This article contributes to the emerging field of research on collaborative governance in crises. It asks how social organisations see their contribution of skills and expertise to tackling a wicked problem such as the Covid-19 pandemic. For this purpose, I interviewed representatives of ethnic Chinese organisations about their work and relationships with the local government in Manchester in 2020 and 2021. Ethnic Chinese organisations are an interesting group because they had early access to knowledge about the spread of the virus and its harmfulness. Collaboration with them could potentially have helped to contain the pandemic in the ethnic Chinese community in the city and beyond. Based on semi-structured interviews with representatives of ethnic Chinese organisations and applying the combined theoretical frameworks of social capital and collaborative governance theories, the study identifies five organisational types in terms of their involvement in collaborative governance efforts.

Luca Luceri, Jinyi Ye, Julie Jiang et al.

Understanding susceptibility to online influence is crucial for mitigating the spread of misinformation and protecting vulnerable audiences. This paper investigates susceptibility to influence within social networks, focusing on the differential effects of influence-driven versus spontaneous behaviors on user content adoption. Our analysis reveals that influence-driven adoption exhibits high homophily, indicating that individuals prone to influence often connect with similarly susceptible peers, thereby reinforcing peer influence dynamics, whereas spontaneous adoption shows significant but lower homophily. Additionally, we extend the Generalized Friendship Paradox to influence-driven behaviors, demonstrating that users' friends are generally more susceptible to influence than the users themselves, de facto establishing the notion of Susceptibility Paradox in online social influence. This pattern does not hold for spontaneous behaviors, where friends exhibit fewer spontaneous adoptions. We find that susceptibility to influence can be predicted using friends' susceptibility alone, while predicting spontaneous adoption requires additional features, such as user metadata. These findings highlight the complex interplay between user engagement and characteristics in spontaneous content adoption. Our results provide new insights into social influence mechanisms and offer implications for designing more effective moderation strategies to protect vulnerable audiences.

Keenan Jones, Fatima Zahrah, Jason R. C. Nurse

Privacy is a human right. It ensures that individuals are free to engage in discussions, participate in groups, and form relationships online or offline without fear of their data being inappropriately harvested, analyzed, or otherwise used to harm them. Preserving privacy has emerged as a critical factor in research, particularly in the computational social science (CSS), artificial intelligence (AI) and data science domains, given their reliance on individuals' data for novel insights. The increasing use of advanced computational models stands to exacerbate privacy concerns because, if inappropriately used, they can quickly infringe privacy rights and lead to adverse effects for individuals -- especially vulnerable groups -- and society. We have already witnessed a host of privacy issues emerge with the advent of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, which further demonstrate the importance of embedding privacy from the start. This article contributes to the field by discussing the role of privacy and the issues that researchers working in CSS, AI, data science and related domains are likely to face. It then presents several key considerations for researchers to ensure participant privacy is best preserved in their research design, data collection and use, analysis, and dissemination of research results.

Jiarui Wu

Previous studies regarding the emergence and development of social systems have often been based on the study of European nations, which largely ignores the fact that other nations also underwent the process in patterns that are either similar or strikingly different from the European one. Contemporary researchers have identified this flaw and thus sought to address it by studying the emergence and development of social systems in non-European nations rather than assuming that the European model is the standard. It is in line with this new school of thought that Bin Wong and Masayuki Tanimoto explore social development in Japan and compare it with Europe. In their book Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe, the authors provide readers with a general overview of the systems for public goods provision in early modern Japan, while also offering comparison examples from Europe, primarily from Prussia.

Kuan-hsing Chen, B. Chua

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, also known as theMovements project (IACSM), has been a transborder collective undertaking to confront Inter-Asia cultural politics since its inauguration in 2000. At that time, a pervasive rhetoric of the “rise of Asia” has come to mean more than the concentrated flow of capital into and out of the region. It has come to constitute a structure of feeling that is ubiquitous yet ambiguously felt throughout Asia. Historically, this feeling of the “rise of Asia” is complicated by the region’s colonial past. While Asia’s position in the global system has and will continue to fluctuate, there is a need to question and critique the rhetorical unities of both the “rise” and of “Asia.”Wealth and resources are unevenly distributed and there is no cultural or linguistic unity in this imaginary space called Asia. No matter whether there are common experiences shared by sub-regional histories, there has been an urgent need for forging links across these sub-regions. Hence, “Inter-Asia” cultural studies movements. In the past 22 years, in addition to journal publication, IACSM has built a Society to run bi-annual conferences, and a Consortium of Institutions to organize summer school and publish Readers. The politico-economic transformations across the region in the Post/Cold War era have engendered both new social movements and critical cultural studies as forces of decolonization. These forces have given rise to alternative modes of thought and knowledge production, and we have also become part of these intellectual movement networks for regional interactions and beyond. Covid-19 is now one of the symptoms for the radical transformation of the world. It is at such a critical conjuncture that IACSM will publish 6 issues a year in response to the increasing demands. The aim has been to shift existing sites of identification and multiply alternative frames of reference: it is committed to publishing work not only out of “Asia” but also other coordinates such as the “third world” and beyond. To continue this line of work, we form an action team (see http://www.inter-asia.org/), and the agenda is to further the links or even to create institutions and groups inside and outside universities to supports projects such as grounded global studies, action research, and to discover new mode of thought to move across state/national/sub-regional divisions, scholarship and activism, modes/forms of thought, and rigid identity politics of any form. Perhaps, by doing so, the world can be more properly explained and re-build anew.

Noor Raouf Al-Hasani, Dheyaa JabbarKadhim, Ali Azeez Al-Jumaili

This study aimed to evaluate the preparedness and adherence of community pharmacists to the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) Health Advisory COVID-19 guidelines for pharmacists (July 2020) during COVID-19 pandemic. This was a cross-sectional study based on electronic survey using google form, which was distributed from November 19, 2020 to January 1, 2021 using social media platforms. The survey measured 21 pharmacy preventive measures (PM). A multivariate regression analysis was used to identify factors influencing pharmacy implementing of PM. Hand disinfection after serving patients represented the main adopted measure (89.3%). Surprisingly, only 35.4% of participants implemented the proper ways of hand disinfection during face mask handling and 35.4% could not recognize the purpose behind medical mask uses. Significant (p-value<0.05) positive association with pharmacy adoption of PM during COVID-19 was recorded for high influx of patients into pharmacy and working for extended hours, while inadequate information of pharmacists about COVID-19 (which represented the main difficulty that down regulated the adoption of PM in pharmacies) had significant negative association. This study revealed suboptimal implementation of the PM in community pharmacies, and a gap in the pharmacists’ knowledge about safety protocols to limit COVID-19 transmissions in the pharmacies. Official health organizations might need to develop a national guideline for community pharmacies to enhance the pharmacists’ and patient safety during COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022. Pharmaceutical Sciences Asia. All rights reserved.

Mehmood Hussain

The 9/11 attacks triggereda paradigm shift in the United States security policy, prioritizing to ensure homeland security and to fight against the terrorism in the new American strategy.The United States invasion of Afghanistan further ravaged the existing fragile state damaging the already crumbling socio-economic and human infrastructure. In addition, the spillover of war into Pakistan started a new era of instability and misery further complicating the socio-economic fabric of the country making it the most vulnerable to terrorism related incidents. The two decades prolonged conflict not only destroyed the economic, social, and political infrastructure in both states, meanwhile mass human rights violations have been committed by the coalition forces under the leadership ofthe United States. In this context, the present paper investigates human rights abuses through the prism of international human rights law. The study addresses the following questions. (a) To what extent the United States war against terror violates the international law of human rights, and how it helpsWashington to reconsolidate the regional hegemony. (b) Whetherthe war on terror improve the situation of human rights or further aggravate the conditions of civilians in targeted states. The studyunderlinesthat the war on terror failed to meet the merit of the right to intervene for self-defense, yet the coalition forces deliberately assimilatethe innocent civilians underthe vagueanti-terror war rhetoric. In addition, the war serves the United States hegemonic interests in South Asia, as the American presence in Afghanistan and the Indo-United States strategic partnership brought serious geopolitical implications for China and Pakistan.

Sören Pirk, Edward Lee, Xuesu Xiao et al.

Enabling socially acceptable behavior for situated agents is a major goal of recent robotics research. Robots should not only operate safely around humans, but also abide by complex social norms. A key challenge for developing socially-compliant policies is measuring the quality of their behavior. Social behavior is enormously complex, making it difficult to create reliable metrics to gauge the performance of algorithms. In this paper, we propose a protocol for social navigation benchmarking that defines a set of canonical social navigation scenarios and an in-situ metric for evaluating performance on these scenarios using questionnaires. Our experiments show this protocol is realistic, scalable, and repeatable across runs and physical spaces. Our protocol can be replicated verbatim or it can be used to define a social navigation benchmark for novel scenarios. Our goal is to introduce a protocol for benchmarking social scenarios that is homogeneous and comparable.

Meng Liang

Abstract This article presents an empirical study of the labor process of internet virtual teams. It argues that organizations with a “horizontally virtual and vertically real” structure face a dilemma in the virtual team labor process. While a culture of engineers, which embodies equality, liberty, and cooperation, is the cultural basis of the virtual team, management is bureaucratic, emphasizing individual interests and hierarchical features. The coexistence of the two leads to cooperation and division of labor in virtual teams. Essentially, this is a compromising institutional arrangement adopted by corporations to triangulate technology culture and managerial control to obtain surplus value. Based on the preceding discussion, this paper ends by proposing a new theoretical framework for studying the labor process under the technological conditions of the internet.

Qingtian Cui

During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the progressive intellectuals, who were confronted with the all-embracing crisis of Chinese society, yearned to find the new truth within the Western ideas on the one hand, and the works of the classical Chinese philosophy of the pre-Qin era on the other. These social and historical circumstances started the research into the history of Chinese logic. In the process of these investigations, it soon became clear that more appropriate methodologies were needed to explore Chinese logic, as those used for researching Western logic were not suitable for the task. The revival and modernization of such methods took place in the latter half of the 20th century, and one of the most important figures in these processes was Professor Wen Gongyi, who was hence one of the pioneers of modern research into the history of Chinese logic. Therefore, the present article also offers a short presentation of his biography and his contributions to the development of the research into traditional Chinese logic.

Mustafa Toprak, Chiara Boldrini, Andrea Passarella et al.

Being able to recommend links between users in online social networks is important for users to connect with like-minded individuals as well as for the platforms themselves and third parties leveraging social media information to grow their business. Predictions are typically based on unsupervised or supervised learning, often leveraging simple yet effective graph topological information, such as the number of common neighbors. However, we argue that richer information about personal social structure of individuals might lead to better predictions. In this paper, we propose to leverage well-established social cognitive theories to improve link prediction performance. According to these theories, individuals arrange their social relationships along, on average, five concentric circles of decreasing intimacy. We postulate that relationships in different circles have different importance in predicting new links. In order to validate this claim, we focus on popular feature-extraction prediction algorithms (both unsupervised and supervised) and we extend them to include social-circles awareness. We validate the prediction performance of these circle-aware algorithms against several benchmarks (including their baseline versions as well as node-embedding- and GNN-based link prediction), leveraging two Twitter datasets comprising a community of video gamers and generic users. We show that social-awareness generally provides significant improvements in the prediction performance, beating also state-of-the-art solutions like node2vec and SEAL, and without increasing the computational complexity. Finally, we show that social-awareness can be used in place of using a classifier (which may be costly or impractical) for targeting a specific category of users.

Jesse Cui, Tingdan Zhang, Kokil Jaidka et al.

Modeling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two decades. This paper studies linguistic differences in the experiences and expressions of stress in urban-rural China from Weibo posts from over 65,000 users across 329 counties using hierarchical mixed-effects models. We analyzed phrases, topical themes, and psycho-linguistic word choices in Weibo posts mentioning stress to better understand appraisal differences surrounding psychological stress in urban and rural communities in China; we then compared them with large-scale polls from Gallup. After controlling for socioeconomic and gender differences, we found that rural communities tend to express stress in emotional and personal themes such as relationships, health, and opportunity while users in urban areas express stress using relative, temporal, and external themes such as work, politics, and economics. These differences exist beyond controlling for GDP and urbanization, indicating a fundamentally different lifestyle between rural and urban residents in very specific environments, arguably having different sources of stress. We found corroborative trends in physical, financial, and social wellness with urbanization in Gallup polls.

Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Becky Pham, Emilio Ferrara

We examine an unexpected but significant source of positive public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic -- K-pop fandoms. Leveraging more than 7 million tweets related to mask-wearing and K-pop between March 2020 and December 2021, we analyzed the online spread of the hashtag \#WearAMask and vaccine-related tweets amid anti-mask sentiments and public health misinformation. Analyses reveal the South Korean boyband BTS as one of the most significant driver of health discourse. Tweets from health agencies and prominent figures that mentioned K-pop generate 111 times more online responses compared to tweets that did not. These tweets also elicited strong responses from South America, Southeast Asia, and rural States -- areas often neglected in Twitter-based messaging by mainstream social media campaigns. Network and temporal analysis show increased use from right-leaning elites over time. Mechanistically, strong-levels of parasocial engagement and connectedness allow sustained activism in the community. Our results suggest that public health institutions may leverage pre-existing audience markets to synergistically diffuse and target under-served communities both domestically and globally, especially during health crises such as COVID-19.

Ravi Gupta, V. Kumar, M. Tripathi et al.

Background Sleep services are assigned a non-essential status during COVID-19. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine strongly urges sleep clinicians to continue postponing non-urgent care until a later date, if such a recommendation is made by state officials due to local conditions. At the same time, one cannot ignore the fact that sleep is important for people’s health and wellbeing. Therefore, to protect the health of the population, it is essential to find ways and means to continue the practice of sleep medicine even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method Social environment and work ethics in sleep clinics and sleep laboratories in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are different from those in the US. Under these circumstances, the Indian Society for Sleep Research (ISSR) created a task force to develop guidelines for the practice of sleep medicine, not only for the Indian environment but also for other countries that are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The task force examined documents regarding practice of sleep medicine and associated specialities  during COVID-19 by various professional organizations and governmental authorities. The recommendations were examined for their applicability. Wherever gaps were identified, consensus was reached keeping in view the available evidences. Outcome and Recommendations The emphasis of the guidelines is on avoiding doctor to patient contact during the pandemic. Teleconsultation and other modes of audio-visuals can be used as modes for medical practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in addition to the patient, the presence of a family member, or a reliable informant is recommended. Patients of most sleep disorders can be provided tele-aftercare service. ISSR guidelines also give a list of medications allowed to be prescribed during the first and the follow-up teleconsultation. Hospitals and clinics are slowly opening in India and many other countries. As sleep services resume operations, there is a need to find innovative ways to reduce contact with COVID-19 patients, follow personal protection guidelines, as well as social distancing. This article does discuss strategies for the safe conduct of Level 1 sleep studies. Home sleep testing, which had greater acceptance during the last few years, should be given more attention during the COVID-19 period. Once the decision to reopen the sleep laboratory and resume operations is made, the safety of the patients and office staff should become the major priority. The ISSR recommendation is to postpone and reschedule in-laboratory positive pressure therapy, but it mentions the considerations to be followed in emergency situations. At the same time, high clinical risk patients may be diagnosed on the basis of clinical findings, and without performing polysomnography or home sleep testing. However, at some point, there is a need to reinitiate the in-lab testing. In addition, daily assessment of the COVID-19 situation in the community, along with a review of the situation with local public health and the state health department is advised.