Shikha Bhagat

LGBTQIA+ educators continue to negotiate educational environments shaped by normative professional expectations, institutional silence, and ethical ambiguity despite growing institutional commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. While the majority of current research has focused on LGBTQIA+ students, the lived experiences of educators who hold difficult roles of vulnerability, authority, and care have received little attention. In order to close this gap, this chapter looks at how LGBTQIA+ educators deal with institutional pressures, identity expression, resilience, and pedagogical ethics. It also looks at how these processes affect classroom environments and how students are perceived. Qualitative interpretive responses are combined with quantitative survey data using a mixed-methods design. Results show that resilience is perceived as an expensive survival strategy rather than a means of empowerment, and that there is a meaningful but indirect relationship between educator well-being and student inclusion and belonging.

This chapter investigates the convergence of event management operations and sustainable practices to guide their function of stimulating innovation and development within the event management sector. With increasing necessity, sustainability becomes central and unavoidable to the world economy, and event professionals are increasingly embracing green practices in order to minimize environmental footprints while enhancing overall experiences for attendees. This chapter gives an extensive overview of important sustainability concepts, energy efficiency, sustainable procurement and encompassing waste minimization and outlines their day-to-day applicability in the planning, staging and post-event assessment of events It also centers the role of stakeholder engagement, ranging from suppliers through to guests, in influencing sustainable action. The chapter ends with suggesting future research directions for embedding sustainability into event management, focusing on the imperative of innovation, cooperation, and constant industry-wide dedication to protecting the planet.

Artificial intelligence has become the need of the hour with balancing technological advancement and the timeless values of critical thinking, creativity, and ethical learning. Educators and students looking for writing assistance, quick access to information, communicating with others, or developing their language skills will consider ChatGPT to be the most useful tool. This chapter focuses on user perspectives, attitudes and concerns towards ChatGPT to essentially guide the ethical development. These trends reveal that ChatGPT has rapidly transitioned from a novel tool to a mainstream academic companion, making it imperative to investigate not just its technological potential but its human-centered implications for general education. This study was conducted through a mixed approach with a systematic analysis of Scopus published research. The authors also extracted Scopus published data and analyzed it using NVivo and VOS viewer software. The sentiment analysis proved that the maximum number of studies affirmed positivity emphasizing the wider acceptance of Chat GPT.

Financial literacy an essential competency in the increasingly intricate financial landscape of today, influencing individuals' capabilities to invest and strategize for the future. Although the domain of financial literacy research has expanded significantly, there has been relatively little focus on investment confidence as a separate outcome variable, and even less on its connection to gamified learning interventions within the Indian context. The chapter synthesizes frameworks including self-efficacy theory, experiential learning theory, and prospect theory with empirical evidence to investigate how gamification can convert financial literacy into actionable confidence. Utilizing national-level benchmarks from the Global Findex Database 2021, published studies on financial literacy among Indian youth, and a survey conducted with Indian college students, the analysis underscores the interplay between financial knowledge, perceptions of gamification, and investment confidence.

The emergence of digitization, automation, and artificial intelligence has transformed service delivery, allowing businesses to increase productivity, tailor client experiences, and provide cutting-edge solutions. The delivery, use, and accessibility of services are changing in various service sectors due to innovations. Among them, healthcare, education, and finance have received considerable attention in recent years. To synthesize prior research on innovations in the service industry, the chapter attempts a thematic, sentiment, and bibliometric analysis of the research domain. For the analysis, data was extracted from the Scopus database and was filtered by application of inclusion-exclusion, with the use of NVivo and Bibliometric software VOS viewer. Most productive and influential articles, authors, journals, and affiliations were recognized. Thematic mapping and trend analysis revealed past and present research subdomains that were used for the prediction of future research agendas. Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.

Green marketing decisively helps businesses distinguish themselves from their competition, strengthen their image, and obtain the attention of consumers who increasingly prefer environmentally conscious businesses. By elevating a business's reputation and image, green marketing creates an effect on how people consider a brand and enhances customer loyalty and retention. The “green generation,” or Generation Z, is well-known for its sustainable product preferences and ecological concerns. The study analysed how green marketing techniques relate to and affect Gen Z customers' purchasing habits in India's garment industry. The study targeted 300+ Gen Z consumers through an online cross-sectional survey to get information on their perceptions of green brands, green marketing tactics, purchase intentions, and buying patterns. This study found that green marketing tactics used by fashion firms have a favorable impact and the ability to affect various aspects of customer behavior. Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.

The traditional retail landscape in Indian metropolises has changed significantly in the last several decades, mostly due to the modern retail economy's growth, including corporate chain stores and e-commerce sites. Small merchants have been gradually displaced as a result of this paradigm shift, which has been exacerbated by changed Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) laws that have brought significant money into the Indian market, as well as a rise in consumer disposable income and the wave of digitalization. This study explores small merchants' consequences as they contend with the growing power of organized retail and e-commerce behemoths. Despite earlier research studies mostly focusing on the organized trade's exponential rise due to changing customer behavior, this paper fills this gap by illuminating the traditional retailer’s perspective towards the contemporary retail landscape and highlighting the threats to small businesses with a traditional focus. The study uses empirical analysis using tools like SPSS and SEM models to examine the initial troubles faced by small retailers of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), highlighting the difficulties they face in competing with the powerful forces of deep discounting, massive sales events, and evolving consumer tastes. This exploratory research analyzed the undermining factors like utilitarian and hedonic, purchasing patterns, menaces, hindrances, pecuniary and location as reasons for the retail paradigm from traditional to modern trade. The outcome emphasized that utilitarian factors like ambience, experience, status, variety, payment modes, single-store distribution and assortment are the drivers behind the explosion of traditional trade by the modern trade in retail economy.