http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56686 Sat, 18 Apr 2026 03:41:11 GMT 2026-04-18T03:41:11Z https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl:443/bitstream/id/dc97e27e-d0d7-49e8-8b2f-0bc54583876e/ http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56686 http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56690 COVID-19 as a Family Stressor: A Life Course Exploration of Family Stress Among Rural Grandparents and Their Adult Children in Upstate New York Obernesser, Laura COVID-19 has brought about many changes for rural families, affecting their family roles, childcare responsibilities, financial status, and experiences of family stress. In this study, I examine (1) how rural grandparents and their adult children perceive family stress related to their family roles and responsibilities during COVID-19 and (2) how rural grandparents and their adult children have coped with the stress of family roles and responsibilities during COVID-19. Data comes from 44 in-depth interviews. The findings of this study suggest that COVID-19, a family stressor, has been the source of stress among rural grandparents and their adult children. The findings suggest that families adapted through a range of improvised strategies such as relocating, abstaining from employment, taking on additional childcare, and adjusting personal identities to maintain stability during uncertainty. These adaptations were not merely practical but often guided by moral and faith-based reasoning, allowing participants to maintain agency despite constraints.Before the COVID-19 pandemic, grandparents played a significant role in childcare, sometimes to the point of being the primary childcare providers (Harrington Meyer 2014). COVID-19 has further complicated the roles and responsibilities of rural grandparents and their adult children. COVID-19 brought changes to rural families, particularly in the areas of their employment, family roles and relationships, childcare responsibilities, and sense of hope. Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56690 2025-10-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56689 The Experience of Everyday Life Alongside Virtual Companions. A Case Study of Human-Chatbot Encounters Wygnańska, Joanna This article a nalyses i nteractions between a human and a virtual entity, namely, a chatbot. These encounters are considered in the context of cyberspace, understood as a specific social interactional space. They are also examined in the context of an individual’s experiences, which are intertwined with ongoing social and cultural changes. This text engages with research on chatbots, complementing their findings with an in-depth study of the user perspective. The analysis is based on data from an in-depth interview with Laura, conducted as part of a research project on human interactions and relationships with chatbots. The case study of Laura’s experiences explores her perception of interacting with a chatbot, focusing on the meanings humans assign to such interactions, concerning the interviewee’s emic perspective. The article examines how a human interlocutor perceives chatbots and the role they can play in an individual’s life. In addition, the reflection in the text touches on the theme of humans seeing themselves in the responses of a chatbot, which lacks self-awareness and cannot understand the content it produces in the same way a human can. The article deepens understanding of chatbots as everyday companions, virtual friends, and social actors, encounters with whom are part of today’s reality. Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56689 2025-10-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56688 Is There a Sociologist in the Room? Raising the Sociological Voice in Educational Spaces Alfi-Nissan, Sari R. Educational spaces are both material and human sites. While people design and build the physical space of educational institutions, these spaces also shape human behavior, interaction, and thought, playing a crucial role in the articulation of discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in educational research tends to rely primarily on document and text analysis, often overlooking the spatial dimensions of discourse and how social actors interpret the spaces they inhabit. This article presents the use of semiotic codes analysis of educational spaces as a methodological tool for studying discourse in institutions where ethnographic access is limited. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted in twelve Israeli state schools, this article examines how global discourses of entrepreneurialism and aspiration, which promote an ideal of a future-oriented and self-managing individual, are expressed and interpreted in everyday school settings. Through observations, walking interviews, and semiotic analysis, the study demonstrates how spatial articulations, wall texts, and visual displays work together with educators’ interpretations to shape and sometimes contest dominant ideals. The analysis merges critical spatial semiotics with a pragmatic approach to everyday meaning-making, offering a methodologically innovative and reflexive approach to discourse analysis in education. Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56688 2025-10-31T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56687 Selling Sleep: A Qualitative Study of Infant Sleep Coaching in Western Canada Heyes, Cressida J.; Tucker, Jeanique This article theorizes the experience of using a coach to assist with a baby or young child’s sleep “training” as occurring at the intersection of three broader phenomena: the increasing use of paid experts to advise on intimate life; the porosity of the domestic sphere; and ideologies of mothering that impact sleep. It draws on the vernacular of a growing critical literature on children’s sleep, which understands its practice and representation as symptomatic of culturally and historically specific demands on the organization of space and time, as well as understandings of the child as a site of future potential and human capital. To do so, it draws on a qualitative study of sleep coaches and the mothers who hire them. The authors conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty women in Western Canada. The interview data revealed that the sleep deprivation entailed in having a new baby is both a dramatic (and often under-estimated) feature of human facticity and a socially mediated crisis. Paradoxically, the overabundance of expert advice on children’s sleep made mothers more likely to recruit a coach for customized support. The advice coaches provided, and how mothers interpreted it, balanced the pragmatic and the ideological, among other things, revealing poorly evidenced but pervasive anxieties about attachment, independence, mental health, and future well-being. Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/56687 2025-10-31T00:00:00Z