This article contributes to the understanding of the racial politics underpinning nation branding through a two-step mixed-method analysis of the Image Bank of Sweden, an online promotional material provided through the branding platform Sharing Sweden. First, an exploratory quantitative analysis reveals a paradox: while White individuals overwhelmingly dominate the images of Sweden, Black and Asian individuals appear at rates disproportionate to their actual demographic presence – particularly in contexts related to education and student life. Second, a multi-modal discourse analysis of images and texts shows how the representations of higher education and student life mobilize racialized bodies to project an image of Sweden as diverse, modern, and globally competitive. At the same time, White students’ portrayal is accompanied by messages of Swedish traditions, reinforcing existing views of Sweden as a White nation. Ultimately, we argue that such portrayals reproduce the logics of tokenistic multiculturalism and commodification of racial difference and whiteness within the aesthetic economy of nation branding.

Especially in the context of climate adaptation policy, creating support for hard policy instruments and convincing people that their individual contributions do matter are two significant challenges. In this study, we test the effect of an individually versus collectively framed gain-appeal infographic on the acceptance of hard policy instruments and this in the context of strictly private climate change adaptation behaviour. We used a mixed methods approach focussing on reducing private paving in domestic gardens in Belgium. Evidence from an online survey experiment (n = 3,389) showed that policy makers implementing a collectively framed infographic can increase the acceptance of a more strict permit policy and a yearly financial contribution, while simultaneously enhancing personal and collective self-efficacy and outcome expectancy beliefs. Complementary insights from qualitative data learned that perceived (in)equity is a crucial point of attention when designing climate policies addressing private paving. A collectively framed infographic may convey the message ‘yes, we ánd I can’. With these “findings, we want to trigger new opportunities in climate policies beyond the current policy scopes.

A barrier to meeting the goal of universal health coverage in India is the inequality in utilisation of health services between indigenous and non-indigenous people. This study aimed to explore the determinants of utilisation, or non-utilisation, of public healthcare services among the Santals, an indigenous community living in West Bengal, India. The study holistically explored the utilisation of public healthcare facilities using a framework that conceptualised service coverage to be dependent on a set of determinants – viz. the nature and severity of the ailment, availability, accessibility (geographical and financial), and acceptability of the healthcare options and decision-making around these further depends on background characteristics of the individual or their family/household. This cross-sectional study adopts ethnographic approach for detailed insight into the issue and interviewed 422 adult members of Santals living in both rural (Bankura) and urban (Howrah) areas of West Bengal for demographic, socio-economic characteristics and healthcare utilisation behaviour using pre-tested data collection schedule. The findings revealed that utilisation of the public healthcare facilities was low, especially in urban areas. Residence in urban areas, being female, having higher education, engaging in salaried occupation and having availability of private allopathic and homoeopathic doctors in the locality had higher odds of not utilising public healthcare services. Issues like misbehaviour from the health personnel, unavailability of medicine, poor quality of care, and high patient load were reported as the major reasons for non-utilisation of public health services. The finding highlights the importance of improving the availability and quality of care of healthcare services for marginalised populations because these communities live in geographically isolated places and have low affordability of private healthcare. The health programme needs to address these issues to improve the utilisation and reduce the inequality in healthcare utilisation, which would be beneficial for all segments of Indian population.

With regards to the latest European Recommendations, developing key competences has become an important goal of education. The purpose of this comparative study is to focus on this topic considering the teaching of Latin and Greek in upper secondary school in Italy and Spain. A multiple case study with a mixed research design was used, with 173 students and 25 teachers as participants in the quantitative part and 40 students and 18 teachers in the qualitative part. The underlined results are a) the importance of working on the learning concepts of the students of Classics, as this influences the way they study b) the teaching factors that help pupils to develop key competences are evaluation, feedback, teacher personality, interactivity and discipline. Useful paths for daily teaching and new perspectives for future research in this field are offered.

Background: In the past decade, a great deal of research has examined the efficacy and mechanisms of attentional bias modification (ABM), a computerized cognitive training intervention for anxiety and other disorders. However, little research has examined how anxious patients perceive ABM, and it is unclear to what extent perceptions of ABM influence outcome. Aims: To examine patient perceptions of ABM across two studies, using a mixed methods approach. Method: In the first study, participants completed a traditional ABM program and received a hand-out with minimal information about the purpose of the task. In the second study, participants completed an adaptive ABM program and were provided with more extensive rationale and instructions for changing attentional biases. Results: A number of themes emerged from qualitative data related to perceived symptom changes and mechanisms of action, acceptability, early perceptions of the program, barriers/facilitators to engagement, and responses to adaptive features. Moreover, quantitative data suggested that patients’ perceptions of the program predicted symptom reduction as well as change in attentional bias. Conclusions: Our quantitative data suggest that it may be possible to quickly and inexpensively identify some patients who may benefit from current ABM programs, although our qualitative data suggest that ABM needs major modifications before it will be an acceptable and credible treatment more broadly. Although the current study was limited by sample size and design features of the parent trials from which these data originated, our findings may be useful for guiding hypotheses in future studies examining patient perceptions towards ABM.

A two-grid method for solving the Cahn-Hilliard equation is proposed in this paper. This two-grid method consists of two steps. First, solve the Cahn-Hilliard equation with an implicit mixed finite element method on a coarse grid. Second, solve two Poisson equations using multigrid methods on a fine grid. This two-grid method can also be combined with local mesh refinement to further improve the efficiency. Numerical results including two and three dimensional cases with linear or quadratic elements show that this two-grid method can speed up the existing mixed finite method while keeping the same convergence rate.

Two-phase fluid flows on substrates (i.e. wetting phenomena) are important in many industrial processes, such as micro-fluidics and coating flows. These flows include additional physical effects that occur near moving (three-phase) contact lines. We present a new 2-D variational (saddle-point) formulation of a Stokesian fluid with surface tension that interacts with a rigid substrate. The model is derived by an Onsager type principle using shape differential calculus (at the sharp-interface, front-tracking level) and allows for moving contact lines and contact angle hysteresis and pinning through a variational inequality. Moreover, the formulation can be extended to include non-linear contact line motion models. We prove the well-posedness of the time semi-discrete system and fully discrete method using appropriate choices of finite element spaces. A formal energy law is derived for the semi-discrete and fully discrete formulations and preliminary error estimates are also given. Simulation results are presented for a droplet in multiple configurations to illustrate the method.

We introduce a family of mixed discontinuous Galerkin (DG) finite element methods fornearly and perfectly incompressible linear elasticity. These mixed methods allow thechoice of polynomials of any order k ≥ 1 for the approximation of thedisplacement field, and of order k or k − 1 for thepressure space, and are stable for any positive value of the stabilization parameter. Weprove the optimal convergence of the displacement and stress fields in both cases, witherror estimates that are independent of the value of the Poisson’s ratio. These estimatesdemonstrate that these methods are locking-free. To this end, we prove the correspondinginf-sup condition, which for the equal-order case, requires a construction to establishthe surjectivity of the space of discrete divergences on the pressure space. In theparticular case of near incompressibility and equal-order approximation of thedisplacement and pressure fields, the mixed method is equivalent to a displacement methodproposed earlier by Lew et al. [Appel. Math. Res. express3 (2004) 73–106]. The absence of locking of this displacementmethod then follows directly from that of the mixed method, including the uniform errorestimate for the stress with respect to the Poisson’s ratio. We showcase the performanceof these methods through numerical examples, which show that locking may appear ifDirichlet boundary conditions are imposed strongly rather than weakly, as we do here.