Negotiating power relations, gender equality, and collective agency: are village health committees transformative social spaces in northern India?

BACKGROUND: Participatory health initiatives ideally support progressive social change and stronger collective agency for marginalized groups. However, this empowering potential is often limited by inequalities within communities and between communities and outside actors (i.e. government officials, policymakers). We examined how the participatory initiative of Village Health, Sanitation, and Nutrition Committees (VHSNCs) can enable and hinder the renegotiation of power in rural north India. METHODS: Over 18 months, we conducted 74 interviews and 18 focus groups with VHSNC members (including female community health workers and local government officials), non-VHSNC community members, NGO staff, and higher-level functionaries. We observed 54 VHSNC-related events (such as trainings and meetings). Initial thematic network analysis supported further examination of power relations, gendered "social spaces," and the "discourses of responsibility" that affected collective agency. RESULTS: VHSNCs supported some re-negotiation of intra-community inequalities, for example by enabling some women to speak in front of men and perform assertive public roles. However, the extent to which these new gender dynamics transformed relations beyond the VHSNC was limited. Furthermore, inequalities between the community and outside stakeholders were re-entrenched through a "discourse of responsibility": The comparatively powerful outside stakeholders emphasized community responsibility for improving health without acknowledging or correcting barriers to effective VHSNC action. In response, some community members blamed peers for not taking up this responsibility, reinforcing a negative collective identity where participation was futile because no one would work for the greater good. Others resisted this discourse, arguing that the VHSNC alone was not responsible for taking action: Government must also intervene. This counter-narrative also positioned VHSNC participation as futile. CONCLUSIONS: Interventions to strengthen participation in health systems can engender social transformation. However they must consider how changing power relations can be sustained outside participatory spaces, and how discourse frames the rationale for community participation.

Sound masking by a low-pitch speech-shaped noise improves a social robot's talk in noisy environments.

Introduction: There has been a surge in the use of social robots for providing information, persuasion, and entertainment in noisy public spaces in recent years. Considering the well-documented negative effect of noise on human cognition, masking sounds have been introduced. Masking sounds work, in principle, by making the intrusive background speeches less intelligible, and hence, less distracting. However, this reduced distraction comes with the cost of increasing annoyance and reduced cognitive performance in the users of masking sounds. Methods: In a previous study, it was shown that reducing the fundamental frequency of the speech-shaped noise as a masking sound significantly contributes to its being less annoying and more efficient. In this study, the effectiveness of the proposed masking sound was tested on the performance of subjects listening to a lecture given by a social robot in a noisy cocktail party environment. Results: The results indicate that the presence of the masking sound significantly increased speech comprehension, perceived understandability, acoustic satisfaction, and sound privacy of the individuals listening to the robot in an adverse listening condition. Discussion: To the knowledge of the authors, no previous work has investigated the application of sound masking technology in human-robot interaction designs. The future directions of this trend are discussed.

Organized violence as a never-ending story? Reflections in light of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.

During the last decade, especially with the Russian aggression against Ukraine, armed conflicts and other forms of organized violence increased in volume and public discourse. In Sociology, violence and, particularly organized violence were marginalized topics for a long time, not least because many sociologists considered violence as a relic of traditional societies. Based on an analysis of major sociological studies and an empirical analysis of violence-related mass data, we argue that (1) violence and organized violence are not vanishing, but are genuine components of human coexistence, (2) especially in Europe, we experienced (or at least perceived) some seven decades of living in social spaces without high levels of violence, (3) other world regions are violence-intensive social spaces for generations, and (4) in light of the aggression of Russian troops against Ukraine and further challenges to come, Sociology should intensify theoretical and empirical efforts in this field of research. We first sketch out some recent trends of organized violence and related social science debates, then summarize important sociological concepts of violence and organized violence, propose to differentiate between not violence-intensive social spaces (NoViSS) and violence-intensive social spaces (ViSS) and exemplify this distinction by some global data, and finally draw some conclusions for further research on organized violence in selected fields like forced migration.