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Japan, the world’s “oldest” society, has adopted intergenerational care programmes as one solution to the challenges of caring for its growing population of people living with dementia. Many countries are drawing inspiration from these intergenerational programmes, but research exploring factors influencing intergenerational care practice and how far these programmes can be translated in other countries is more limited. This paper aims to explore how environmental design features are used to support intergenerational initiatives in Japan. By examining four case studies, the paper illustrates how intergenerational engagement can be enabled and supported through environmental design.

The research adopts a qualitative methodology, using observations, workshops and photographic elicitations within four case study sites: two residential care facilities, a community centre and supported housing scheme and a restaurant staffed by people with dementia.

Two key themes emerge: encouraging community engagement through intergenerational shared spaces, and the role of intergenerationality in supporting social and economic participation. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the key principles through which other countries can translate lessons gained from the Japanese experience of intergenerational programmes into their own health and social care systems.

This paper provides international evidence of the role environmental design plays in supporting the development of intergenerational relationships among people with dementia and the wider community. Intergenerational engagement is community engagement; therefore, promoting community engagement is essential to promoting intergenerational care practice. Environmental design can play a key role in providing affordances through which such relationships can develop.

The independence and well-being of people with dementia can be significantly influenced by the design of the physical environments around them. Several assessment tools exist to evaluate the dementia design quality of existing residential aged care facilities but, to date, none have been formally identified as suitable for use during the design process. This paper aims to examine the feasibility of re-purposing existing post-occupancy tools for use during the design process, while mapping the influence of design stages on resulting dementia design quality.

Literature searches identified audit tools for residential aged care settings. After reliability screening, three tools were analysed in-depth, mapping their suitability for use during the design process.

The study confirmed that existing tools can be re-purposed for design stage use and identified that early design stages have a larger influence on overall dementia design quality than previously thought.

Non-English language publications were not reviewed. Searches may not have identified other existing audit tools for residential care environments.

The ability to assess proposals at key stages of design may help improve the dementia design quality of future residential aged care environments – potentially enhancing the lives of ever-larger numbers of people with dementia.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known paper to consider formal design-stage evaluation of dementia design quality and the first to identify the relative influence of key stages of design on the resulting dementia design quality.

Research on communication in organisations has enabled us to develop a body of knowledge about recognising and overcoming barriers to effective communication. In contrast to the tenet in the communication literature that communication barriers require minimisation, the leadership literature provides a basis for a re‐conceptualisation of the “problems” into opportunities. This article offers a theoretical synthesis of the communication and leadership literatures to extend our knowledge of improving communication in organisations.

In the last two decades, there has been much research and attention on information and communications technologies (ICTs) as tools that can contribute to the economic and social lives of persons with disabilities (PWDs). However, few studies have sought to explore and document the experiences of PWDs who use these technologies to access the democratic space. Using Democratic Governance as a conceptual framework, this qualitative study seeks to address this gap in the literature by exploring the experiences of several visually impaired Caribbean youth with the use of ICTs to access the democratic space.

This study uses the qualitative research design and is guided by Husserl’s Descriptive phenomenology. The study sought to explore common patterns elicited from the specific experiences of 14 visually impaired citizens in Jamaica and 9 in Barbados through the use of semi-structured interviews.

The findings suggest that ICTs have in some ways contributed to the lives of these visually disabled youth, specifically as it relates to improving their ‘political knowledge’ and encouraging ‘political talk’. In other words, ICTs have played a contributive role in terms of including visually impaired Caribbean youth in the democratic space.

This study contributes to improving our understanding of how and in what ways ICTs can promote the inclusion of visually impaired persons in the democratic space.

WITH, several days later, some residue yet of disbelief, allow me to tell you that at the end of October L actually went dancing. After an interval of 15 years since I last electrified my system in similar fashion, I may further tell you that dancing is no longer what it was.

CLEARLY, I should have kept my trap shut last December, instead of expressing a hope for some snow over the Christmas holidays—in the month since then there has been little else descend from the skies, and my dear wife is already querying why we should spend vast sums of money on travelling to Austria in February for conditions readily available, as I write, on Hampstead Heath.

This paper discusses an original theory of information exclusion and information inclusion, which explains how information interactions can be structured in ways that either exclude or include people seeking asylum.

This theory was developed through an ethnographic study of the information experience of people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. Fieldwork involved participant observations, participatory research workshops and semi-structured interviews, analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach.

People seeking asylum are confronted with two main information environments: the asylum system and the local third sector. Each environment frames contrasting information access, sharing and literacy practice modalities: the former produces information deprivation, information sharing agency denial and a fracturing information literacy practice; the latter facilitates multiple information affordances, information sharing agency promotion, and both local and heritage information literacy practice promotion. Our theory of information exclusion and information inclusion describes how through these modalities, an information environment can either promote or preclude inclusion.

Previous information studies of migration tend to conceptualise social ex/inclusion as a linear journey. Our theory originally frames this as a non-straightforward and conflicting process, allowing to better understand the experience of people who are not simply either socially excluded or included, but may experience both states depending on context. It also shows that exclusion is not a matter of fact and is not fundamental to asylum systems: it is produced by specific policies and procedures and can therefore be changed. Thus, this theory provides conceptual tools for researchers to investigate the information experience of individuals moving between conflicting information practices, and for civil society actors and policymakers to document exclusionary information practices and design inclusive ones.

One of the consequences of the democratization of higher education in the United States is the explosion of institutions that have arisen to meet mass demand, and the stratification of those institutions based on the populations they serve. The Ivy League, the “public ivy” flagship state universities, and a cadre of elite small private liberal arts colleges are the basis for the institutionalized myths that inform public perception of what colleges or universities are, even though these schools account for an ever-shrinking fraction of American higher education experiences. The growth in schools serving primarily “nontraditional” students – that is, anything except in-person residential undergraduate liberal arts for at-least-middle-class white eighteen-year-olds with certain test scores coming directly from a college-preparatory high school program – has created a legitimacy paradox within the higher education sector. Democratization has created a need for different types of institutions, but the quest for legitimacy within the higher education sector drives isomorphic change and fuels mission creep, pulling schools away from their original nontraditional constituencies. In order to effectively serve nontraditional students, schools must explore other sectors outside of higher education where there is potential for creating programmatic and/or institutional legitimacy, including the business sector, specific professional sectors, and social/cultural milieu. The intentional development of multiliminality, where institutions draw legitimacy from multiple overlapping environmental sectors simultaneously, offers one response which helps anchor colleges and universities in their missions and helps maintain the access promised by the democratization of higher education.