Maria Laura Ruiu
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3590758 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Maria Laura Ruiu |
| PRENOMES | Maria Laura |
| SOBRENOME | Ruiu |
| ASSINATURA | RUIU M L |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Northumbria University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1136-0389 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 108 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2011 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The intersection of digital practices and environmental orientations
Purpose This study aims to examine how environmental dispositions and digital expertise influence sustainable digital behaviors. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, we test the notion of a “digital-environmental habitus” to explain how ecological values transfer into the digital domain. The research addresses gaps in understanding how pro-environmental orientations shape digital practices in high-connectivity contexts. Focusing on Denmark, w…
Locked among inequalities
This article examines children’s digital experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic as a specific aspect of digital divide. Utilizing a survey of 2004 English parents aged 20–55 years, the study explores how various factors – including household living conditions, parents’ sociodemographic status and sociotechnical variables such as children’s usage frequency and intensity, expenditure on technology and parents’ digital skills – affected different …
The Palgrave Handbook of Everyday Digital Life
This comprehensive Handbook explores the multiple ways in which people experience digital life, interrogating present and future of digital transitions.
Comparing the Empowerment Dynamics of Traditional Media and Social News Sites
This article examines the GameStop episode by contextualising the discussion in the structure-agency interplay to understand the role of social news sites in informing, mobilizing, and giving voice to different social and political actors. First, the GameStop squeeze might be conceived as both an individual and collective agency-led form of resistance to the domination of elite power represented by hedge funds. Second, it might be interpreted as …
Examining the Interplay of Sociodemographic and Sociotechnical Factors on Users’ Perceived Digital Skills
The rapid pace of technological advancements of the last decades, accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, has increased the importance of digital skills for individuals, businesses, and society. However, despite efforts to increase digital ownership and educational initiatives, the digital divide remains a persistent issue and a barrier to social inclusion. Digital exclusion is not limited to access vs. no access but encompasses a spectrum of p…
Exploring the intersection of digital and environmental challenges
This paper explores the intertwined nature of digital and environmental dimensions within Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to address contemporary global challenges. Controversial evidence exists regarding the environmental impact of digitalization, reflecting contrasting theoretical approaches at societal and individual levels. The paper examines how digital practices’ environmental impact depends on usage types, with implications for lifestyles an…
Organizational and Institutional Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic
This issue of American Behavioral Scientist deals with the various ways in which different kinds of organizations cope with the manifold challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, these articles map the challenges and opportunities encountered by a variety of organizations in a major public health crisis. The first section of the issue takes up the theme of adaptive crisis response in relation to two different kinds of organizat…
Between Online and Offline Solidarity
This paper focuses on four e-initiatives that were precipitated by the coronavirus outbreak in Italy. These experiences played a relevant role in developing multilevel solidarity (from the local to the global level) both online and offline. They are represented by the hashtags "#iorestoacasa" (I stay at home) and "#andràtuttobene" (everything will be alright), "performances on the balcony," "influencers' campaigns," and "altruism and e-parochiali…
Perception of Climate Change among Vulnerable Groups and Religious Faiths in Nigeria
This study uses nationally representative survey data collected in Nigeria by the Pew Research Center in 2015, 2018, and 2019 to conduct a secondary analysis of three factors that can interact with concerns about climate change. The factors are: vulnerabilities to climate change, religious affiliation, and concerns regarding the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Socio-economic vulnerability is also studied, and vulnerable groups are defin…
Investigating how the interaction between individual and circumstantial determinants influence the emergence of digital poverty
This paper explores Digital Poverty (DP) in England by adopting the DP Alliance’s theoretical framework that includes both Individual Determinants (individual capability and motivation) and Circumstantial Determinants (conditions of action). Such a framework is interpreted as an expression of Strong Structuration Theory (SST), by situating the connection between social structure and human agency in an intertwined relationship. We focus on new pot…
Measuring digital capital in Italy
First, the paper provides a methodological framework for facing challenges and pitfalls in operationalizing and assessing a complex concept in social research. Secondly, results show that Digital Capital operational definition works in Italy as well as in the UK, thus legitimizing its recognition as an independent capital
Digital–environmental habitus of families in England in times of pandemic
This article uses adopts a revised version of the concept of techno-environmental habitus to investigate and make sense of the differentiation among digital technology users’ attitudes towards the environment in England. Digital–environmental habitus refers to the combination of structural determinants (existing background) and the metabolised increased use of digital technologies in people’s everyday life that also interacts with individual envi…
Between “Empowering” and “Blaming” Mechanisms in Developing Political/Economic Responses to Climate Change
This conceptual paper reviews four dimensions of the climate change (CC) debate concerning perception, framing, and political and economic dimensions of CC. It attempts to address the question posed by sociological research as to what can be done to reduce the social forces driving CC. In doing so, it attempts to uncover mechanisms that delay or prevent the social change required to combat CC. Such mechanisms call into question the Ecological Mod…
Web 3.0
Web 3.0 is not a new concept but one that is constantly evolving. There is no universally accepted definition as its meaning can differ from scholar to scholar, and it is still unclear how it will affect how users interact with the Web. Tim Berners‐Lee envisaged the Web, known as Semantic Web, as an immense source of data governed by intelligent applications, capable of understanding the cognitive context for analyzing the data itself and making …
Lack of 'common sense' in the climate change debate
Based on an online survey conducted among a representative sample in the United Kingdom ( n = 1013), this article investigates the role of traditional and new media in predicting climate change awareness. It suggests that individuals make choices under an ideological convincement that is organised within specific cultural and political-economic boundaries. It shows that the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony is still valuable to make sense of…
The self-reinforcing effect of digital and social exclusion
Since an increasing number of daily activities are carried out online, an exclusion or limited access to the Internet prevent citizens from entering a world full of opportunities that cannot be accessed otherwise; in this sense, inclusion in the digital realm is strictly connected to social inclusion. Digital inclusion is not conceived as a mere dichotomy, access versus no access, but in terms of the degree to which e-inclusion improve wellbeing …
Introduction
This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue
How offline backgrounds interact with digital capital
This article investigates the interaction between digital capital and some offline components (economic, cultural, political, social and personal) that represent the background against which we access and use the Internet. Based on a stratified sample of the UK population (868), six indexes (one for each component) were generated through factor analysis and univariate analysis. We summarised them into a unique model by performing a multiple linea…
Digital practices across the UK population
This article investigates the entanglement between socio-economic and technological factors in conditioning people's patterns of Internet use. We analysed the influence of sociodemographic and techno-social aspects in conditioning the distinctive digital practices developed by Internet users. By using a representative sample of UK users and different methods of analysis, such as factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis and logit analysis, this s…
How the Covid-19 Pandemic Impacted the Perception of Climate Change in the UK
The COVID-19 pandemic erupted during the climate change (CC) crisis, forcing individuals to adapt abruptly to a new scenario, and triggering changes in everyone's lifestyles. Based on a sample of the UK population ( N = 1013), this paper investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic invited/forced individuals to reflect upon a more sustainable way of life (which might be enhanced by the use of digital technologies for daily activities) and to (re)consid…
Persistence of Scepticism in Media Reporting on Climate Change
This paper explores the persistence of scepticism in British newspapers’ narratives around climate change. It is based on 958 news articles collected over three decades (1988–2016) from nine newspapers. The analysis of “general consensus” around climate change and the consensus around both its causes and consequences, shows that scepticism is still present in newspapers’ narratives especially in relation to centre-right political orientations. Th…
Conceptualizing the techno-environmental habitus
This paper conceptualizes the techno-environmental habitus to explore differentiation among media users and their climate change awareness by adopting a dynamic concept that takes into consideration both pre-existing conditions and interactions with the technological field of action. The paper investigates the characteristics of multi-layered dispositions towards climate change in the U.K. through an online survey of a representative sample of th…
Representation of climate change consequences in British newspapers
This article explores British newspaper descriptions of the impact of climate change across three time periods. It shows a reduction in representing the consequences of climate change as ‘out of human control’. It also shows a decrease in adopting alarming and uncertain descriptions within the centre-left group, whereas mocking the effects of climate change is a peculiarity of right-leaning narratives. The complexity of climate narratives produce…
Use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change
This paper investigates the use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change between 1988 and 2016. It is based on the analysis of eight newspapers and their Sunday and online versions (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Daily Express, The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent). We used the keywords “climate / climatic change”, “warm / warming” and “greenhouse / greenhouse effect” to retrieve the articles…
Cascading Crises
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our l…
Measuring Digital Capital
This article develops a Digital Capital Index by adopting the definition provided by Ragnedda, who defines Digital Capital as the accumulation of digital competencies and digital technologies, and the model for measuring it developed by Ragnedda and Ruiu. It aims to develop a measure that can be replicated for comparison in different contexts. This article contributes both theoretically and empirically to the literature by (a) consolidating the c…
Mismanagement of Covid-19
Maria Laura Ruiu is lecturer at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne). She has recently completed her second PhD in Social Sciences (Northumbria University). She also acted as post-doctoral researcher at the Desertification Research Centre (University of Sassari, Italy) investigating the adaptive capacity of some communities to climate change impact. This paper analyses the first phases of the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak management in …
The Social Capital of Cohousing Communities
This article aims to discuss the possibility that cohousing communities might combine both civil engagement and governance systems in order to simultaneously generate three forms of social capital: bonding, bridging, and linking social capitals. Cohousing communities intend to create a 'self-sufficient micro-cosmos', but struggle against the relationships of 'anonymous' neighbourhood. Cohousers build their bonding social capital through the creat…
How offline backgrounds interact with digital capital
This article investigates the interaction between digital capital and some offline components (economic, cultural, political, social and personal) that represent the background against which we access and use the Internet. Based on a stratified sample of the UK population (868), six indexes (one for each component) were generated through factor analysis and univariate analysis. We summarised them into a unique model by performing a multiple linea…
Cascading Crises
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our l…
Collaborative management of studentification processes
The effects of cohousing on the social housing system
Participatory processes in designing cohousing communities
Cohousing communities’ participatory processes take place from the preliminary phases of the development process when the group is expected to collaborate and negotiate its private stakes with those of the whole community. Even after the establishment of the community, every choice regarding the common spaces has to be discussed and approved by the whole group. Results obtained from qualitative research on cohousing in England show how the intern…
Developing adaptive responses to contextual changes for sustainable agricultural management
This article investigates the role played by social capital (in terms of bonding, bridging and linking social capital) in developing adaptive responses to contextual changes (environmental, social and economic) at the local scale. Three questions guided the research: can social capital produce resilience and collective action? Could environmental barriers be turned into opportunities? Can social capital contribute to long-term adaptation to chang…
Il cohousing e la sottile linea tra spazio pubblico e spazio privato
L’obiettivo dell’articolo e analizzare il fenomeno del cohousing riferito alle categorie di spazio e spazio privato. Si focalizza, in particolare, sull’influenza che tale modello abitativo esercita nella definizione del significato di pubblico e e sugli effetti prodotti nel contesto in cui prende forma. Si considerano due prospettive da cui affrontare la tematica: una interna che definisce i rapporti tra la dimensione e privata e quella pubblica …
Digital–environmental habitus of families in England in times of pandemic
This article uses adopts a revised version of the concept of techno-environmental habitus to investigate and make sense of the differentiation among digital technology users’ attitudes towards the environment in England. Digital–environmental habitus refers to the combination of structural determinants (existing background) and the metabolised increased use of digital technologies in people’s everyday life that also interacts with individual envi…
Measuring digital capital in Italy
First, the paper provides a methodological framework for facing challenges and pitfalls in operationalizing and assessing a complex concept in social research. Secondly, results show that Digital Capital operational definition works in Italy as well as in the UK, thus legitimizing its recognition as an independent capital
Between “Empowering” and “Blaming” Mechanisms in Developing Political/Economic Responses to Climate Change
This conceptual paper reviews four dimensions of the climate change (CC) debate concerning perception, framing, and political and economic dimensions of CC. It attempts to address the question posed by sociological research as to what can be done to reduce the social forces driving CC. In doing so, it attempts to uncover mechanisms that delay or prevent the social change required to combat CC. Such mechanisms call into question the Ecological Mod…
Lack of 'common sense' in the climate change debate
Based on an online survey conducted among a representative sample in the United Kingdom ( n = 1013), this article investigates the role of traditional and new media in predicting climate change awareness. It suggests that individuals make choices under an ideological convincement that is organised within specific cultural and political-economic boundaries. It shows that the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony is still valuable to make sense of…
Digital practices across the UK population
This article investigates the entanglement between socio-economic and technological factors in conditioning people's patterns of Internet use. We analysed the influence of sociodemographic and techno-social aspects in conditioning the distinctive digital practices developed by Internet users. By using a representative sample of UK users and different methods of analysis, such as factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis and logit analysis, this s…
Representation of climate change consequences in British newspapers
This article explores British newspaper descriptions of the impact of climate change across three time periods. It shows a reduction in representing the consequences of climate change as ‘out of human control’. It also shows a decrease in adopting alarming and uncertain descriptions within the centre-left group, whereas mocking the effects of climate change is a peculiarity of right-leaning narratives. The complexity of climate narratives produce…
Use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change
This paper investigates the use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change between 1988 and 2016. It is based on the analysis of eight newspapers and their Sunday and online versions (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Daily Express, The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent). We used the keywords “climate / climatic change”, “warm / warming” and “greenhouse / greenhouse effect” to retrieve the articles…
La vetrinizzazione delle cittŕ contemporanee. Bratislava - Milano
La ricerca mette in evidenza come la pubblicitŕ imponga una particolare veste estetica allo spazio urbano. Il lavoro si basa sull'analisi e sul confronto del tessuto urbano di due cittŕ molto diverse da ogni punto di vista (economico, sociale, politico): Milano e Bratislava. Lo studio evidenzia le nuove modalitŕ di utilizzo del linguaggio pubblicitario e le sue applicazioni nel contesto urbano: Bratislava ha una conformazione piů caotica risultan…
Il cohousing e la sottile linea tra spazio pubblico e spazio privato
L’obiettivo dell’articolo e analizzare il fenomeno del cohousing riferito alle categorie di spazio e spazio privato. Si focalizza, in particolare, sull’influenza che tale modello abitativo esercita nella definizione del significato di pubblico e e sugli effetti prodotti nel contesto in cui prende forma. Si considerano due prospettive da cui affrontare la tematica: una interna che definisce i rapporti tra la dimensione e privata e quella pubblica …
Differences between Cohousing and Gated Communities. A Literature Review
On the basis of the literature (produced mainly by sociologists, architects, and geographers) about gated and cohousing communities, this work analyzes how these communities differ from each other. The analysis suggests that cohousing and gated communities are different in the nature of relationships between residents and in the reasons why they arise, even if there are some points of similarity. The risk of a degeneration of cohousing in the gat…
The effects of cohousing on the social housing system
Le nuove forme dell'abitare sociale
Il Villaggio Barona (Milano) e il Villaggio Solidale (Mirano) rappresentano sperimentazioni di co-social housing che, attraverso network strategies, promuovono la formazione di reti di mutuo-aiuto tra gli abitanti, favorendo l’inserimento anche di soggetti in stato di necessita. In questo senso il co-social housing, secondo alcuni principi desunti dal cohousing, intende incoraggiare l’incontro tra i vicini favorendo insieme la formazione di bridg…
Participatory processes in designing cohousing communities
Cohousing communities’ participatory processes take place from the preliminary phases of the development process when the group is expected to collaborate and negotiate its private stakes with those of the whole community. Even after the establishment of the community, every choice regarding the common spaces has to be discussed and approved by the whole group. Results obtained from qualitative research on cohousing in England show how the intern…
Developing adaptive responses to contextual changes for sustainable agricultural management
This article investigates the role played by social capital (in terms of bonding, bridging and linking social capital) in developing adaptive responses to contextual changes (environmental, social and economic) at the local scale. Three questions guided the research: can social capital produce resilience and collective action? Could environmental barriers be turned into opportunities? Can social capital contribute to long-term adaptation to chang…
The Social Capital of Cohousing Communities
This article aims to discuss the possibility that cohousing communities might combine both civil engagement and governance systems in order to simultaneously generate three forms of social capital: bonding, bridging, and linking social capitals. Cohousing communities intend to create a 'self-sufficient micro-cosmos', but struggle against the relationships of 'anonymous' neighbourhood. Cohousers build their bonding social capital through the creat…
Collaborative management of studentification processes
Measuring Digital Capital
This article develops a Digital Capital Index by adopting the definition provided by Ragnedda, who defines Digital Capital as the accumulation of digital competencies and digital technologies, and the model for measuring it developed by Ragnedda and Ruiu. It aims to develop a measure that can be replicated for comparison in different contexts. This article contributes both theoretically and empirically to the literature by (a) consolidating the c…
Digital Capital
This work represents the first attempt to position digital capital as cumulative and transferable, independent from, and intertwined with the other five forms of capitals. The book aims to propose a theoretical toolkit and empirical model that can be used by policy makers to tackle social inequalities created by the digital exclusion of citizens.
Digital capital and online activities
This paper explores inequalities in using the Internet by investigating several digital activities that require different levels of digital capital. Data collected in the U.K. through an online survey of a national representative sample (868 respondents) shows that levels of digital capital and type and quality of online activities are intertwined. The analysis shows that digital capital, conceived and measured as a specific capital, is entangled…
Digital inequalities in time of pandemic
In this article, we argue that new kinds of risk are emerging with the COVID-19 virus, and that these risks are unequally distributed. As we expose to view, digital inequalities and social inequalities are rendering certain subgroups significantly more vulnerable to exposure to COVID-19. Vulnerable populations bearing disproportionate risks include the social isolated, older adults, penal system subjects, digitally disadvantaged students, gig wor…
Mismanagement of Covid-19
Maria Laura Ruiu is lecturer at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne). She has recently completed her second PhD in Social Sciences (Northumbria University). She also acted as post-doctoral researcher at the Desertification Research Centre (University of Sassari, Italy) investigating the adaptive capacity of some communities to climate change impact. This paper analyses the first phases of the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak management in …
Persistence of Scepticism in Media Reporting on Climate Change
This paper explores the persistence of scepticism in British newspapers’ narratives around climate change. It is based on 958 news articles collected over three decades (1988–2016) from nine newspapers. The analysis of “general consensus” around climate change and the consensus around both its causes and consequences, shows that scepticism is still present in newspapers’ narratives especially in relation to centre-right political orientations. Th…
Conceptualizing the techno-environmental habitus
This paper conceptualizes the techno-environmental habitus to explore differentiation among media users and their climate change awareness by adopting a dynamic concept that takes into consideration both pre-existing conditions and interactions with the technological field of action. The paper investigates the characteristics of multi-layered dispositions towards climate change in the U.K. through an online survey of a representative sample of th…
Representation of climate change consequences in British newspapers
This article explores British newspaper descriptions of the impact of climate change across three time periods. It shows a reduction in representing the consequences of climate change as ‘out of human control’. It also shows a decrease in adopting alarming and uncertain descriptions within the centre-left group, whereas mocking the effects of climate change is a peculiarity of right-leaning narratives. The complexity of climate narratives produce…
Use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change
This paper investigates the use of science in British newspapers’ narratives of climate change between 1988 and 2016. It is based on the analysis of eight newspapers and their Sunday and online versions (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Daily Express, The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent). We used the keywords “climate / climatic change”, “warm / warming” and “greenhouse / greenhouse effect” to retrieve the articles…
Cascading Crises
The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our l…
The self-reinforcing effect of digital and social exclusion
Since an increasing number of daily activities are carried out online, an exclusion or limited access to the Internet prevent citizens from entering a world full of opportunities that cannot be accessed otherwise; in this sense, inclusion in the digital realm is strictly connected to social inclusion. Digital inclusion is not conceived as a mere dichotomy, access versus no access, but in terms of the degree to which e-inclusion improve wellbeing …
Introduction
This paper provides a summary of content in this special issue
How offline backgrounds interact with digital capital
This article investigates the interaction between digital capital and some offline components (economic, cultural, political, social and personal) that represent the background against which we access and use the Internet. Based on a stratified sample of the UK population (868), six indexes (one for each component) were generated through factor analysis and univariate analysis. We summarised them into a unique model by performing a multiple linea…
Digital practices across the UK population
This article investigates the entanglement between socio-economic and technological factors in conditioning people's patterns of Internet use. We analysed the influence of sociodemographic and techno-social aspects in conditioning the distinctive digital practices developed by Internet users. By using a representative sample of UK users and different methods of analysis, such as factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis and logit analysis, this s…
How the Covid-19 Pandemic Impacted the Perception of Climate Change in the UK
The COVID-19 pandemic erupted during the climate change (CC) crisis, forcing individuals to adapt abruptly to a new scenario, and triggering changes in everyone's lifestyles. Based on a sample of the UK population ( N = 1013), this paper investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic invited/forced individuals to reflect upon a more sustainable way of life (which might be enhanced by the use of digital technologies for daily activities) and to (re)consid…
Investigating how the interaction between individual and circumstantial determinants influence the emergence of digital poverty
This paper explores Digital Poverty (DP) in England by adopting the DP Alliance’s theoretical framework that includes both Individual Determinants (individual capability and motivation) and Circumstantial Determinants (conditions of action). Such a framework is interpreted as an expression of Strong Structuration Theory (SST), by situating the connection between social structure and human agency in an intertwined relationship. We focus on new pot…
Sociology (30 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Computer Science (17 obras) · Economics (17 obras) · Social science (14 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Social Media and Politics (12 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Economic growth (10 obras) · Environmental Education and Sustainability (10 obras)