Search

The island of Lesvos serves as a symbol of migration in the Mediterranean. From 2015 onwards, a steady stream of volunteer tourists began working on the island. Between 2019 and 2022 various 'crises' such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the fire at the Moria camp, and the rise of the far right in Greece significantly altered living conditions for both refugees and volunteer workers on the island. The authors employ a comparative patchwork autoethnography to rethink participant observation to fit the pandemic era. Through a situated, relational, and more-than-representational analysis of autoethnographic material and the confrontation between the authors' experiences, the aim of this paper is to investigate how migrant support volunteer tourism interacts with various simultaneous 'crises' ongoing on Lesvos. This led to a reimagining of the way we understand volunteer tourism over its 'pro vulnerable' approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined through ideological discourse analysis (IDA) 38 widely spread disinformation-laced news stories (or "fake news") regarding the Macedonian Name Dispute (MND) and the "Prespes Agreement" in the years 2018 and 2019. The paper explores the ideological narratives and constructions disseminated through the disinformation-laced news stories during these 2 years. Therefore, the study expands the relevant literature regarding democracy, disinformation, and hate campaigns by examining the ideological narratives and constructions disseminated through the disinformation-laced news stories during that two-years-period. The findings showed that those news stories were successfully weaponized and resulted in empowering identity characteristics and ideological narratives through the distancing method (us vs them), the alienation with elements of dramatization (e.g. territorial loss of the Greek Macedonia due to the "Prespes Agreement"), and the sense of victimization and dehumanization that demanded emergency actions to protect the ingroup (Greece) from the outgroup (North Macedonia and its Greek assistants). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper fills a gap in the literature of platform economy in relation to consumers' perceptions and actions regarding labour justice. It coins the term 'platformised consumer activism' and explores #cancel_efood to appraise how consumer activism is expressed through and against platforms. In September 2021, one of the most popular delivery service apps in Greece suddenly requested its workers who were on short-term expiring contracts to switch to freelance contracts. The instant uproar that followed included nation-wide mass mobilisations, as well as a trending topic on Greek Twitter #cancel_efood inviting consumers to uninstall the app and give it the lowest possible rating. Drawing on nascent literature regarding worker resistance in the platform economy, as well as digital consumer activism, we locate a gap in consumers' perceptions and solidarities. We question power and resistance in the platform economy and argue that the tendency to celebrate digital media and consumer activism persists, despite evidence of growing awareness of the limitations of both in the platform economy. We showcase how the success of #cancel_efood cannot suggest that consumers are the new warriors of labour justice in the platform economy, but that their practices, enabled by connectivity and solidarity, can increase the visibility of workers' struggles, and put pressure on specific platform players when they are about to violate workers' rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study contributes to the development of effective measures to evaluate classroom climate, especially in elementary education where these remain limited. In addition, it addresses a typical "flaw" of several studies by approaching classroom climate as a group-level construct rather than an individual characteristic. Following a multilevel approach, we attempted to establish validity evidence for an adapted version of the Classroom Behavioral Climate (CBC) questionnaire and examine its equivalence across two contexts. The participants included 2963 students from 176 fourth and fifth grade classes. Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analyses resulted in a shorter version of the CBC with three correlated factors in both countries. Two-level models performed better than the single-level models. Configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance was also achieved. The study highlights the need for researchers and practitioners to use appropriate methods and instruments to evaluate the classroom environment based on their research aims and intended use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit and debt are more than just material exchanges within a market economy, they are also social constructs embedded in moral judgments about the character of the agents involved. During the recent European Sovereign Bond crisis, some commentators noted how a similarly loaded moral media discourse juxtaposed "virtuous" Northern European countries on the one side, and "spendthrift, lazy" Southern European ones on the other side. In this article, I provide a quantitative large-N empirical assessment of this phenomenon. I employ a dictionary-based approach inspired by research in social psychology to measure moral content. Upon analyzing more than 14,000 articles published in the Anglo-American and German financial press between 2004 and 2019, I show the extent to which Greece was described in negative moral language. After the initial "shock" in the fall of 2009, the average moral tone turns negative, and more so in the German financial press relative to its Anglo-American counterpart. Moreover, by most measures, it never completely reverts to pre-crisis levels, thus suggesting how "sticky" economic narratives can become. Against the original expectations, though, there is no evidence that the financial press framed the last and most acute phase of the Greek crisis in 2015 in increasingly moral terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the principle of fairness as equity, defined by Adams, is applied during the selection of school principals. Our focus was on a secondary education directorate drawing data in two ways. Firstly, a questionnaire was given to candidates who participated in the selection process, in order to investigate to which extent fairness as equity is included both in the process and the selection criteria. Secondly, we examined whether the selection board through the oral interview moved with the respective conditions of fairness as equity through the candidates' scoring. It seemed that the majority of participants have formed their opinion on fairness as equity based on their 'incoming capital' depending on their score, while they consider that the selection board was rather biased in rating their fellow candidates. This is due to previous official or personal relationships with the members of the selection board and party involvement. For the Greek context, the selection of school principals can be characterised as a process that allows the influence of factors clearly non-relating to the principle of fairness as equity. Proposals at the level of educational policy are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares the editorial coverage of the 2015 migration crisis in major centre-left and centre-right newspapers in three European countries affected (the UK, Germany and Greece). We test the empirical validity of the 'national media-system' hypothesis, and in particular the hypothesised characteristics of the different media systems these countries represent through a systematic content analysis of all editorials referring to the issue of migration/asylum for the period 2015–2016. For the purposes of data collection, we develop an original coding scheme that combines concepts and categories from the extant literature on media systems, as well as the literature on migration-related news frames. Our findings largely confirm the relevance of media-system characteristics in the coverage of the crisis, although UK editorials are markedly more polarised than expected. We also find that there was no consensus-based editorial coverage in the initial phase of the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism and nationalism are often grouped together as phenomena challenging international cooperation. This article argues that, despite these similarities, international relations and foreign policy scholarship can and should distinguish analytically between them. Populism and nationalism differ in how they visualise and articulate the boundaries of the political community and its relationship with political authority. Also, populism can be distinguished from nationalism in that the political community it discursively constructs and mobilises is temporally and territorially particularistic, holding different interests from those of the historically universal nation. These differences imply that populism and nationalism express themselves in distinct, although often overlapping, discourses in foreign policy. The article develops a typology of foreign policy discourses created by the intertwining of populism and nationalism and applies it to an analysis of Greek foreign policy during the decade of the Eurozone crisis (2010–19). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic research with children in Athens, the authors examine sensual, performative and embodied aspects of children's photographic representations of a monument that is central in the Greek national, cultural and historical discourse, the Acropolis. Moving away from the hermeneutics of cultural domination, the focus of this article is on how the pictures depicted the monument and how they were used by the children. Assuming an analytical framework which incorporates aspects of sensual experience in the analysis of the photography, the authors discuss how the children's pictures of the Acropolis not only make visual records of the monument, and thus are not simply visual evidence of the centrality of the mainstream Greek national and historical discourse, but also how they entail the children's embodied relation to it, and what this relation might tell us about childhood expressions of heritage and belonging, and by extension about politics in childhood. The analytical focus on embodied aspects of children's photography illuminates complexities of cultural representation and their gestural, discursive and political significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined gender and immigrant status differences in stability and change in the Big Five traits in a sample of early adolescents in Greece from economically disadvantaged schools with a high immigrant composition (65% first- or second-generation immigrants). Youth in the sample (N = 1252, 46% female, ages 12–13 at time 1) self-reported Big Five traits annually for 3 years. Mean-level and rank-order stability were examined separately by gender and immigration history. Growth modeling of mean-level scores showed declines in all five personality traits for both genders between ages 12 and 14, followed by increases in conscientiousness for girls and boys, and increases in agreeableness and openness to experience for boys only. In sensitivity analyses, boys showed disruption at all levels of perceived economic stress, but only girls with high levels of perceived economic stress showed disruption. Trajectories were similar for immigrant and non-immigrant youth, suggesting that immigrant youth did not show greater mean-level disruption. However, immigrant youth reported lower means on all traits except emotional stability. Rank-order stability was moderately strong over 3 years and comparable across both genders and immigration histories. Results in this high-risk sample supported the disruption hypothesis and suggest that immigration experiences are associated with personality development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]