Background: Insufficient knowledge of reproductive health care increases the risk of reproductive health issues among ethnic minority adolescents in Vietnam.

Object: This study aimed to evaluate the level of knowledge of reproductive health care among ethnic minority adolescents and the effect of intrapersonal and interpersonal factors.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 305 ethnic minority adolescents who were Tay and Dao aged 15-19 living in the mountainous regions of Northern Vietnam. Descriptive and bivariate correlation techniques were used to describe the respondents’ knowledge of reproductive health care and determine the gaps in this regard. The qualitative data consisted of 22 in-depth interviews and focus group discussions.

Results: There were statistically significant differences in adolescents' knowledge of pregnancy according to gender and mother–child communication about reproductive health issues. Specifically, the percentage of girls who knew about the signs of pregnancy was nearly twice as high as that of male adolescents (72.1% and 37.1%, respectively ), and the proportion who openly conversed with their mothers knew more about the signs of pregnancy and how to take care of the fetus.

The percentage of adolescents who answered the questions assessing knowledge of contraception at good and very good levels was only 39.3%. The adolescent girls who were Tay and those who had good communication with their mothers also had better knowledge of contraception.

Furthermore, research showed a strong correlation between knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases and adolescents’ educational level, as well as the use of social media to access information about reproductive health. Accordingly, adolescents with higher educational attainment (college/university) and aged 18-19 had more comprehensive knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases and their prevention. Similarly, adolescents who received reproductive health care information from social media had a rate of knowing at least two sexually transmitted diseases that was 1.3 times higher than those who did not use social media to obtain reproductive health care information.

Conclusions: Our findings revealed a relatively good level of knowledge of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among ethnic minority adolescents; however, there were gaps in contraceptive knowledge. Thus, it is necessary to enhance the dissemination of information about reproductive health care for boys, the Dao, and adolescents under 18 years, and to develop a culture of communication between parents and children on this topic.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming and reshaping social institutions, work patterns, and day-to-day life. Although previous research has largely focused on the economic efficiency and technological benefits of AI-enabled transformation, its implications for social responsibility remain underexplored and under-theorised. This conceptual paper investigates how AI transformation influences social sustainability across different social domains, including work settings, education, governance, and social inclusion. By applying social sustainability and socio-technical systems theories, this paper identifies key ethical mechanisms through which AI-enabled digital transformation affects social sustainability outcomes. This paper also presents an integrated conceptual model that illustrates the relationships between AI-driven transformation and social sustainability outcomes, through some mediating mechanisms such as algorithmic fairness, transparency, accountability, workforce well-being, and the distribution of social benefits and risks associated with AI adoption. This review further highlights how uneven AI access to AI and digital infrastructure is, particularly in global south contexts, which vary significantly. This paper contributes to social science scholarship by advancing a theory-informed conceptualisation of social sustainability of AI-enabled digital transformation. It further highlights the need for comparative and global south-focused studies to capture the uneven social consequences of AI adoption in institutional contexts. This study also offers practical implications for organisations and policymakers to adopt ethical responsibility and social sustainability in AI-driven digital transformation.

Generative AI adoption in Poland remains below the EU average, with particularly low use among older adults (a few per cent in Poland according to OECD), which may deepen digital inequalities. This paper explores how future educators conceptualize the opportunities and risks of introducing AI literacy to older adults within an intergenerational geragogical framework. Particular attention is given to the ways in which AI literacy can support older adults’ everyday functioning, social participation, autonomy, and access to information, while also raising concerns related to exclusion, dependency, misinformation, and ethical use. To analyze these issues, this study draws on the relational model of digital competence, linking seniors’ life needs with the digital competences required to respond to them.

This study used an exploratory qualitative design. Written statements from pedagogy students to pre-service teachers (phase I of the PRODIGI project; January 2026) were analyzed using thematic analysis. In the analysis of qualitative data, categories were identified in accordance with the thematic analysis approach proposed by Braun and Clarke. The process involved identifying recurring themes in the participants’ statements, coding the material, and gradually grouping the codes into broader thematic categories. The analytical framework organized meaning into two overarching areas: opportunities and risks while preserving methodological transparency and an inclusive, non-stereotyping perspective on later-life learning.

Students consistently framed AI education for older adults as a pathway to digital inclusion: reducing technological barriers, increasing autonomy in everyday online activities, improving access to information, supporting communication, and offering cognitive stimulation. Simultaneously, they highlighted key risks: technostress and cognitive overload, vulnerability to misinformation and “hallucinated” content, excessive trust/anthropomorphization of AI, privacy and data-security threats, and the potential for problematic overuse. Importantly, respondents emphasized that effective courses should go beyond tool operation and integrate content verification, critical thinking, and digital hygiene, with teaching paced and contextualized to older adults’ lived experiences.

Findings suggest that AI literacy interventions for older adults should be designed as technologically responsible education combining operational skills with epistemic and protective competences. The results also underline the strategic role of younger adults (future educators) in intergenerational support models aimed at reducing the emerging AI-related digital divide. The presentation also showcased the effects of intergenerational training conducted by education students among older adults.

Generation Z has grown up with artificial intelligence as a daily companion, yet anthropomorphism (attributing human characteristics to non-human entities) shapes how they perceive and interact with AI systems. While anthropomorphic perceptions can enhance engagement, they create a vulnerability: when adolescents perceive AI as having intentions, emotions, or moral agency, they become susceptible to manipulation through emotionally persuasive or deceptive AI design. This study explores how adolescents anthropomorphize AI across four dimensions: cognitive (agency, intelligence), emotional (empathy, social connection), moral (responsibility, threat perception), and technological/instrumental (tool-like attributes); with particular attention to how these perceptions relate to manipulation awareness.

Using a two-phase mixed-method design, Generation Z participants (n=125) completed free association tasks, spontaneously responding to "artificial intelligence." Analysis of these responses informed the design of our second phase: four focus groups (11-15 participants each) where adolescents engaged in discussions, brainstorming exercises, and card-sorting activities according to how well given attributes fit with AI. Qualitative coding followed established theoretical frameworks on multidimensional anthropomorphism.

All four anthropomorphism dimensions emerged across both phases. Participants frequently attributed intentionality and deceptive capabilities to AI, viewing it as potentially manipulative; meanwhile simultaneously expressing trust and emotional connection. This combination is particularly concerningas emotional anthropomorphism paired with moral agency attribution creates heightened manipulation vulnerability. Focus groups revealed varied levels of critical awareness regarding risks. Some participants expressed explicit concerns about being manipulated or developing cognitive dependency, while others described deeply personal, trusting relationships with AI—using it for emotional support and personal advice—without articulating such concerns. Despite extensive AI experience, Generation Z demonstrates persistent anthropomorphism with highly variable risk awareness: recognition of potential harms is neither universal nor consistently protective. These findings highlight that AI literacy education must address not only risk recognition but also the emotional and habitual factors that sustain anthropomorphic engagement.

This study to assess the role of non-state actors in protecting children's right to education within the framework of human security, focusing on post-disaster learning recovery in Aceh, Indonesia. The Aceh floods at the end of 2025 caused damage to infrastructure in a number of areas, including rural Aceh, which is difficult to reach. This condition significantly worsened the education infrastructure, threatening long-term human development. Through a qualitative approach with a descriptive case study design, this study analyzes how NGOs and the private sector collaborate to fill the governance gap left by formal state mechanisms. This study uses a human security perspective in which education is treated not only as a pedagogical obligation but also as a key component of protection against human vulnerability. The study aims to assess the development of non-state actors' efforts within formal and non-formal collaborative governance frameworks to build educational resilience in disaster-prone rural areas. The results of the study show that non-state actor diplomacy facilitates the rapid mobilization of emergency learning and psychosocial support, which is often delayed in top-down bureaucratic responses. This study demonstrates the contribution of non-state actors in promoting non-traditional security by repositioning educational sustainability as a fundamental element of human recovery after the disaster in rural Aceh, Indonesia.

Abstract. This paper contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophy, ethics, and social sciences by developing the Affective-Ethical Model of Conceptual Engineering (AEMCE). This model fills a problematic gap in conceptual engineering (CE) by preempting affective and moral aspects of societal constructs. While normative CE attempts to bring concepts in line with a moral and societal purpose, it often does not consider the negative effects that emotionally loaded concepts can have on individuals, including harm, marginalization, or empowerment. The AEMCE is a methodological synthesis of hard philosophical argumentations of high empirical validation, which is guided by the Affective Performance Test (APT). The hybrid instrument presented here offers both quantitative and qualitative data, which makes it possible to measure emotional involvement and reduce harm in various settings and groups. The methodological framework is arranged in four circles of repetitive phases, i.e., diagnosis, design, circulation, and evaluation, which are arranged in such a way as to warrant the continuity of ethical accountability alongside perpetual conceptual revision and metamorphosis. Empirical findings of a pilot application of the topic of stigmatized labeling of illegitimate children in Algeria support the ability of the model to transform harmful categories into language-neutral, socially inclusive terms. The results indicate that AEMCE fosters linguistic equity, social cohesiveness, and conceptual change with the help of emotional intelligence.

Since the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, global modernization has rendered population aging an unavoidable demographic trend in both advanced and developing economies. Although this trend signals societal advancement, aging populations pose considerable challenges to economic vitality, welfare system sustainability, and intergenerational equity. Understanding how demographic aging structurally unfolds within modernization processes—and critically evaluating how different polities have responded—holds direct relevance for China’s ongoing policy formulation. This study adopts a convergent mixed-methods approach. Quantitatively, it analyzes cross-national panel data (1960–2020) from World Bank and United Nations sources, applying growth curve models to examine associations between stages of modernization and aging trajectories across G20 countries. Qualitatively, guided by a most-similar/most-different case selection logic, it examines national policy documents from selected modernized states. A thematic analysis is used to extract institutional designs concerning pension reform, long-term care, and older workforce participation. The analysis draws on intergenerational justice theory and welfare state typology to interpret the drivers and consequences of distinct policy choices. By situating China’s experience within global modernization patterns, this study identifies both universal aging challenges and China’s particular institutional and cultural context. It concludes by proposing evidence-based, context-sensitive policy recommendations for fostering inclusive and sustainable responses to population aging in China.

The Fundão Dam Collapse (FDC), which occurred in 2015 in the municipality of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil), produced social and territorial transformations in the affected communities. Among its impacts were the destruction of schools, the displacement of students, and the reorganization of educational trajectories. In Bento Rodrigues, a district completely destroyed by the disaster, the school became part of the community’s process of deterritorialization, operating in temporary spaces before the construction of the collective resettlement. This paper examines how young people from Bento Rodrigues interpret their school experiences in the aftermath of this territorial rupture. This study is part of an ongoing doctoral research project in the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Adopting a qualitative approach, the research uses narrative interviews as the data collection method. The analysis is based on three interviews conducted in 2025 with 18-year-old youths who experienced the dam collapse during their childhood. The results suggest a persistent tension between material reconstruction and symbolic belonging. Although the new school is recognized for its improved infrastructure, the school in the former Bento Rodrigues remains a central affective and community reference in the youths’ memories. The narratives reveal that young people construct meanings about schooling by articulating memory, territory, and lived experience, showing that educational processes extend beyond formal institutions and are embedded in the territorial and social transformations that characterize the post-collapse context.

Iran’s scientific community faces a silent crisis, manifested through persistent and interwoven barriers that undermine research vitality. This study applies Grounded Theory to dissect the structural, cultural, economic, and personal impediments confronting academia in Iran. Through in-depth interviews with eight PhD candidates experienced in Iran’s higher education system, data were analyzed using open, axial, and selective coding stages to ensure analytic rigor.

The emergent core category, “Challenges of the Iranian scientific community,” encapsulates the complex reality of scientific stagnation. Four interconnected dimensions arise as subcategories: causal conditions (e.g. funding scarcity, bureaucratic inertia), contextual factors (political constraints, institutional norms, and cultural expectations), strategies adopted (e.g. internal adaptation, selective collaboration), and consequences (declining productivity, brain drain, disillusionment). Beyond identifying these patterns, the study emphasizes how systemic and cultural dynamics jointly hinder innovation and international collaboration. It further argues that the sustainability of Iran’s research ecosystem depends on rebuilding trust, transparency, and merit-based evaluation within institutions.

The study proposes a conceptual model clarifying the relationships among these dimensions and offers policy recommendations for institutional reform, international engagement, and capacity building. This work contributes theoretically to understanding the dynamics of scientific decline and practically to designing interventions that may revive Iran’s research environment.

This contribution analyzes how digital embodiment, mediated by avatars and immersive devices, transforms emotional experience in virtual contexts and in the metaverse. Emotions such as empathy, love, anger, and fear are not merely transposed online; rather, they undergo a process of reconfiguration through the mechanisms of virtualization, technological mediation, and cultural hybridization. At the core of this inquiry lies the notion of embodiment, which is conceived not solely as a bodily transposition into a digital body, but also as a profound restructuring of the self within technologically mediated spaces. Avatars function as extensions and transformations of identity, thereby opening up new forms of emotional co-construction and distributed memory. The advent of technological tools, such as haptic feedback and artificial intelligence, has further augmented these dynamics, modulating affective responses and engendering conditions of emotional embodiment that serve to obfuscate the boundaries between physical and virtual existence. The work also underscores the ambivalence of the digitization of emotions. Immersive environments have the potential to facilitate unprecedented opportunities for empathy, intimacy and collective interaction. However, they also present risks of commodification, alienation and emotional fragmentation. The confluence of embodiment and artificial intelligence gives rise to significant sociological inquiries, particularly concerning the role of "digital emotions" in shaping societal norms and collective imaginaries. This contribution offers a broader reflection on the transformation of social life in the age of virtualization by placing digital embodiment within the sociology of emotions. The analysis indicates that emotions in digital environments are not merely residual or marginal elements, but rather, they are foundational components of the manner in which individuals inhabit, negotiate, and interpret technologically mediated worlds. The paper puts forth a critical agenda for the sociology of emotions, underscoring the notion of digital embodiment as a pivotal nexus where the politics of sensitivity and cultural practices intersect.