Wiley: Sociological Forum: Table of Contents

Worldmaking for Transformation and Repair: Eastern Sociological Society 2026 Presidential Address

Amy L. Best — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:51:14 -0700

ABSTRACT

Worldmaking is a capacious concept. Far from imagining Empire, sociological treatments of worldmaking are expansive, anchoring the building of new systems, new scaffolds of belonging, and new ways of being in everyday work and collective practices. Worldmaking is a conceptual project and a practical project. This presidential address offers a framework for thinking about worldmaking and its links to both transformation and repair in the context of a prolonged polycrisis. By worldmaking, I mean worlds made and unmade, by people doing ordinary things together, in the face of a temporal and spatial order that limits and constrains. Worldmaking occurs as we bump up against big structure. Worldmaking wards against human vulnerability and despair and sometimes upends harmful systems. Worldmaking is fundamentally grounded in practical labor. It is emergent activity. People are always engaged in building new worlds for themselves, usually worlds within worlds. This address explores the analytical tools for conceptualizing worldmaking on sociological terms, even if ultimately worldmaking, as an analytical intervention, must be both interdisciplinary and community based. This address concludes with consideration of worldmaking and our methods of inquiry.

Sensing Frames: A Contribution to Sensory Pluralism

Giampietro Gobo, Giacomo Lampredi, Enrico Campo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:08:53 -0700

ABSTRACT

Are expressions like “sense of responsibility,” “sense of community,” and “business acumen” merely metaphors, or do they refer to deeper, socially embedded forms of perception? This article introduces the concept of “sensing frames”: the socially learned, culturally shaped, and pragmatically enacted modalities through which people perceive and feel frames—the organizational principles that, according to Goffman, allow us to define the situation and recognize “what is going on” around us. Just as the bodily senses help to orient us in physical space, sensing frames—such as the sense of justice, belonging, or urgency—guide ethical evaluations, shape collective experiences, and structure interactions. Drawing on the sociology of senses through an interactionist perspective, we argue in favor of a rethinking of social perception by radicalizing the sensory dimensions of frames and social interactions. Sensing frames are thus the cultivated modalities and activities of sensing through which the social world becomes intelligible, shareable, and livable.

The Emergence of Peace and Conflict Studies: Comparing Differences in the Creation of Academic Programs With Ties to Social Movements in US Higher Education

Elise Wolff — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:03:59 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article expands the sociological scholarship on the development of academic programs in intellectual fields tied to social movements. After briefly reviewing this literature, which has especially focused on fields like ethnic studies and women's studies, it examines the development of the smaller field of peace and conflict studies. In considering the potential actors, tactics, and outcomes for programs in these kinds of fields, this article explores and seeks to explain why the establishment of peace/conflict studies, despite the influence of the Vietnam War era, was not characterized by student protest akin to that especially for Black studies programs. Doing so points to three major differences amidst their overlapping histories—the central organizational actors involved (i.e., students/non-students), the related influence of ideology, and the major waves of program establishment. This article closes with suggestions for further expanding comparative research, including ways that these fields continue to be politicized, the relationship between broader movement activities and institutionalization, and the recent establishment of conservative-backed academic programs in the university.

Finding Joy in Artificial Experience

Alexa Alice Joubin — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:49:43 -0700

ABSTRACT

The rise of generative AI necessitates a sociological re-evaluation of trust, the concept of virtuality, and meta-critical joy. Both generative AI and imaginative literature create virtuality which can be theorized as artificial experiences. The challenges presented by AI are anthropological rather than merely technological. The current AI hype obscures corporate mismanagement while framing education as a joyless, transactional process. As a solution, this essay proposes the development of intellectual pleasure. By reframing human relationships with technology, educators and students can prioritize the affective processes of discovery and community-oriented storytelling. This essay advocates for reclaiming the classroom as a site of intellectual well-being, where the artificial, but not contrived, nature of learning becomes a pathway to genuine human connection.

Unmarked Emotional States and the Affective Anchoring of Continuity

Lorenzo Sabetta — Wed, 13 May 2026 07:00:30 -0700

ABSTRACT

Narratives around emotions often foreground remarkable episodes that interrupt situations, producing a “rollercoaster” image of emotional life that leaves its stability underdescribed. To analyze the emotional dimension of social continuity, this article theorizes unmarked emotional states (UES): culturally default, interactionally unobtrusive conditions that make situations feel already underway and not in need of reframing. Using emotional markedness, it shows how actors and analysts re-mark seemingly unsettling emotions and downplay the affective halo of ordinary action. Calmness serves as a strategic case, specifying UES as (a) full-fledged affective engagements, (b) durational forms of attachment between peaks, and (c) coordination-friendly stances that lower accounting demands. Interactional calming practices and infrastructural emotional banisters are then identified as processes that secure affective regularity, the patterned return of UES, and because access to emotional unmarkedness is socially stratified, the same mechanisms that anchor continuity can also naturalize unequal arrangements. Finally, the conclusion reframes continuity as the feeling of staying on path, detailing the emotional components that increase the likelihood of continuity.

Is There a Sociology of Suicide?

Enrique Fernández‐Vilas, Juan José Labora González, Juan R. Coca — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:00:09 -0700

ABSTRACT

A sociology of suicide plainly exists in a historical sense. Since Durkheim, sociologists have ssshown that suicide varies with integration, regulation, inequality, relational embeddedness, institutional arrangements, and cultural repertoires of meaning. The stronger question concerns the conditions under which this work coheres as a field. This essay argues that a specifically sociological explanation of suicide locates suicidal trajectories within patterned inequalities and institutional settings, identifies the meso-level arrangements through which these conditions are enacted, and situates action within available vocabularies, scripts, and moral classifications. Reconsidering structural, interpretive, cultural, relational, critical, intersectional, and digital contributions through this lens shows that the field's strongest insights arise when structure, relation, and meaning are treated as mutually constitutive. The essay contends that sociology's contribution weakens when social variables become residual risk markers inside clinical and epidemiological models. A coherent sociology of suicide requires a mechanism-based account of how social worlds distribute vulnerability, organize recognition, shape interpretation, and channel access to support.

Listeners Like Who? Exclusion and Resistance in the Public Radio Industry. By Laura Garbes, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025. 224 pp. $29.95. ISBN: 978‐0‐69‐125742‐6

Syeda Quratulain Masood — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:05:29 -0700

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

The Impact of Early Life Victimization and Prejudice on Adult Socioeconomic Well‐Being Among Sexual Minority Populations

Joanne M. Kaufman — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:58:44 -0700

ABSTRACT

Sexual minority populations experience higher rates of violent victimization and prejudice than heterosexual individuals. While both have long-ranging negative effects, when they happen earlier in life (childhood, adolescence) they have the potential to undermine educational processes, self-esteem, mental health, and physical health, and contribute to reductions in adult socioeconomic well-being. I drew on a theory about victimization in the life course, the stress process model, and research on sexual minority populations to examine how victimization and prejudice in childhood and adolescence may impact adult socioeconomic well-being among sexual minorities. Using structural equation modeling on the Add Health data covering more than 20 years of the life course, I found that exposure to several types of early life victimization and school prejudice led to more adult financial problems and lower educational attainment among those identifying as bisexual, gay/lesbian, and mostly heterosexual, while intimate partner violence led to reduced income among bisexuals. Bisexuals were most strongly affected by different types of victimization and prejudice. There was evidence of mediation through educational self-efficacy, self-esteem, school belonging, depression, and health, though it was primarily for bisexuals. These results highlight how early victimization may reduce socioeconomic well-being among sexual minorities, contributing to patterns of inequality.

Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves. By Stuart Schrader, New York: Basic Books, 2026. 432 pp. $34.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐54‐160803‐0

Aaron Stagoff‐Belfort — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:45:58 -0700

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

The Media Agenda‐Setting Role of Protests in Nondemocratic Regimes: A Case Study From Hungary

Pal Susanszky, Sebastian Haunss — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:10:07 -0700

ABSTRACT

This study investigates how protests influence media coverage in a nondemocratic context, focusing on the 2022–2023 education-related protest wave in Hungary. Drawing on data from the Hungarian Protest Event Database (HuPED) and a corpus of 24,029 education-related articles across 47 online news portals, we examine how different types of media—classified by political alignment and geographic scope—respond to protest activity. Using panel regression models, we find that only independent media exhibit a substantial agenda-setting response to protest events, and only when protest intensity is high. In contrast, pro-government media largely suppress both issue and demand salience, and when coverage does occur, governmental actors dominate the interpretation. These findings provide empirical support for theories of informational autocracy by demonstrating how state-controlled media is able to manipulate the information about grievances and protesters' demands in order to mitigate the risks of regime collapse. By limiting public awareness of grievances, the government can suppress dissent and maintain political stability despite widespread discontent. By combining protest event and media data, this study contributes to the literature on protest outcomes, media agenda-setting, and media systems in nondemocratic regimes. We also suggest that our findings are relevant to democracies experiencing growing polarization and media capture.

Selective Reciprocity: Children's Academic Achievement and Parent–Child Communication in China

Shichao Du, Yi‐Lin Chiang — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:00:06 -0700

ABSTRACT

Studies often portray the relationship between parental involvement and children's educational outcomes as a one-directional causal relationship. However, children's academic achievement shapes parental behaviors, and mothers likely respond differently to children's academic performances than fathers do. This study instead considers parent–child communication, a key indicator of parental involvement, and children's academic performance as a reciprocal relationship. Drawing on panel data of middle school students in China, we test two competing theories: the compensation theory, which hypothesizes a negative relationship between children's academic achievement and parental involvement, and the rational choice theory, which argues for a positive relationship. Our findings show that parent–child communication is positively associated with children's test scores, lending support to the rational choice theory. The bidirectional relationship is evident in children's cognitive test scores, as well as in Chinese, math, and English test scores. Additionally, mothers adjust their communication involvement based on children's performance, while fathers do not. By highlighting the reactive dynamics of parent–child communication, this study underscores the interdependent nature of children's schooling outcomes and parental behavior.

Lessons From the Peripheries: Coloniality, Belonging, and Resistance Among U.S. Territorial Peoples

Sione Lynn Pili Lister — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:49:23 -0700

ABSTRACT

The US territories—Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guåhan, and American Sāmoa—remain permanently subordinated under US rule. Governed through legal frameworks of unincorporation, these places are denied full sovereignty while granted limited mobility and partial political recognition. Territorial migrants occupy distinct social, political, and legal positions that often set their experiences apart from their larger panethnic migrant communities, yet their experiences remain underexamined in US sociology. This article draws on interviews with Sāmoans, Puerto Ricans, and Virgin Islanders to examine how colonial legacies shape citizen-subject belonging and everyday life. I explore how participants navigate structural neglect, legal ambiguity, and cultural displacement, and how they cultivate practices of care, refusal, and political engagement in response. Together, their accounts illuminate how people living at the periphery imagine and enact alternative futures both beyond and within the nation-state.

Identity in the Gig Economy: Aspiration, Deidentification, and Collective Solidarity Among Platform Couriers

Will Charles — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:53:32 -0700

ABSTRACT

This article examines how platform couriers construct occupational identity and why shared platform conditions do not reliably generate community or collective action. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews conducted in 2014–2015, alongside observations of two worker onboarding sessions and non-participant observation in two private courier Facebook groups, I analyze identity as a set of cultural strategies shaped by economic dependence and classed resources. I map participants onto an identity modes matrix defined by two dimensions, aspirational framing and structural critique, which yields four identity modes: aspirational-affirming, aspirational-critical, anti-aspirational-critical, and ambivalent or detached. Across these modes, aspirational narratives and distancing practices often function as stigma management and status protection, but they can also weaken incentives to identify with other couriers or invest in collective projects. Structural critiques of pay, control, and fairness are common, yet they more often remain individualized or episodic than mobilizing, given platform isolation and limited organizational infrastructure. Overall, the findings show how inequality in platform delivery is not only economic but cultural, shaping how workers interpret the job, manage dignity, and imagine what they owe to others and what others might owe to them.

Enacting Lived Sovereignty Amid Epistemic and Ontological Violence in the Settler‐Colonial Academy

Nadera Shalhoub‐Kevorkian, Abeer Otman — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:55:58 -0700

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the tensions between Indigenous sovereignty and the structural and institutional logics of the settler-colonial academy. Critical scholarship suggests that higher education can regulate epistemic boundaries, discipline knowledge production, and shape the subjectivities of colonized students. In this context, the paper explores how colonized students enact individual and collective forms of sovereignty. Drawing on Fanon's reflections on the existential dimensions of colonial domination and Biko's contributions to Black Consciousness, the paper analyzes the formation of psycho-political, ethical, and ontological subjectivities among Palestinian-Jerusalemite students studying within Israeli academia while living amid conditions of heightened political violence. It suggests that students articulate forms of consciousness, futurity, and affective belonging as resources of resistance. Rather than treating sovereignty solely as a legal or political status, the paper conceptualizes it as an ontological orientation grounded in consciousness, relational being, lived experience, and collective memory. The analysis contributes to ongoing debates in decolonial and Indigenous studies by suggesting that sovereignty can be understood not only as a claim to recognition but as a situated, relational, and lived practice that interrupts institutional and state frameworks.

Intersectional Uncertainties: Race, Class, Gender, and College‐Enrollment Anxieties

Melanie Jones Gast — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:06:05 -0700

ABSTRACT

Following rational choice frameworks, past scholarship often points to economic calculations and uncertainties informing college-enrollment decisions of marginalized students. I contribute by examining heterogeneous messages shaping Black high-school students' anticipated college uncertainties. Drawing on intersectionality theory, I connect those messages to prevailing racial, gendered, and classed ideologies within the context of a racially and economically stratified school and surrounding neighborhoods. I use multiple interview waves with 21 working- and middle-class Black 9th- and 11th-grade girls and boys and triangulation through interviews with parents/guardians and teachers/counselors during 2007–2010. I identify what I call intersectional uncertainties—the college-related anxieties reflecting how students existing at the intersection of multiply marginalized positions make sense of future uncertainties within systems of power. I argue that past research on college information and messages often miss intersectional systems of power that are embedded in college-enrollment messages. I demonstrate how 4-year college-enrollment messages translate to salient uncertainties that working-class Black adolescent girls and boys negotiate at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Lastly, I employ the community cultural wealth (CCW) framework by examining Black student responses and social relationships as they manage college-enrollment uncertainties.

The Sociological Stakes of Attitudes Toward the Families and Care of Older Adults With Dementia

Sarah E. Patterson, Kelsi Caywood, Faith Stinson — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:09:12 -0700

ABSTRACT

This Forum essay calls for greater sociological attention to the theoretical and empirical study of attitudes about the families and care of older adults living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD; dementia). Investigating these attitudes can help expand our understanding not only of the social experience of older adults with dementia but also of family members and caregivers, as dementia is often highly stigmatized, memory loss changes relationships, and relationship dynamics influence care provision and inequalities. Attitudes and norms function at multiple levels—individual, family, and societal—and have large-scale consequences for social systems and inequality in an aging and increasingly diverse United States, where a growing number of older adults have dementia and family caregiving is normative. We briefly highlight demographic trends and interdisciplinary developments that underscore the urgency and advantages of addressing these attitudes in sociology specifically. We conclude with a call to action and recommendations for scholars seeking to pursue related research within four relevant subfields within sociology: aging in the life course, stratification (race, gender, class), families, and medical sociology.

Demography: Combining the Science With Human Emancipation

Raisa Vieira de Melo Silva — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:16:44 -0700

ABSTRACT

Demography is a data-intensive social science, yet its dominant paradigms are obscured by the social forces shaping the very dynamics demographers study. In this essay, I argue that contemporary demographic phenomena—fertility decline, migration, health disparities, and environmental crises—can be better understood as expressions of alienated human purpose under capitalist social relations and as objects of biopolitical governance. Drawing on the Marxian political economy and Foucault's work on power over life, I argue for a reorientation of demographic research toward human agency and emancipation. This perspective reframes population research as a critical practice that actively fosters collective agency rather than merely documenting social patterns. It asserts that true human emancipation is achieved only when communities can exercise this agency to shape their own demographic destinies, a possibility systematically obscured by mainstream demography. I conclude by suggesting that participatory approaches, such as participatory action research, offer a promising pathway to bridge critical theory and demographic practice. This integration seeks to enhance the field's capacity to illuminate structural constraints while actively empowering communities. All in the purpose of fostering tangible social improvement and human agency, a shared commitment among many demographers.

Gendered and Sexual Norms in Global South Early Childhood Education: Understanding Normative Discourses in Post‐Colonial Contexts. By Deevia Bhana, Yuwei Xu, and Vina Adriany (eds.), Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2024. 220 pp. £44.99 (Paperback). ISBN: 978‐1‐032‐07564‐8

Peng Zhang — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 21:14:47 -0700

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

Periods, Pains, Pills, and Performance—Fighting Blood, Bodies and Biology

Reem AlHashmi, Debra Forbes, Christopher R. Matthews — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:38:59 -0700

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on various data from long-term immersion in combat sports to explore the period experiences of cis women fighters. We blend theoretical ideas from the social scientific literature on menstruation and the sociology of medicalization, pain and injury. Based on rich empirical data and theoretical tools, we argue that the “ontological pervasiveness” of periods resulted in women “fighting” parts of their own biology within traditional male-dominated spaces—by mitigating, managing and minimizing their periods through various strategies. There were specific and potentially damaging consequences that flowed from this. While we center women's bodies, we argue that a key problem is not the bleeding body per se, but rather the way female biology is hidden and ignored. This is particularly evident in how period blood is marked out as symbolically different—rendered shameful and in need of concealment—in contrast to the routinized, accepted and even valorized forms of bleeding that occur through participation in such sports. By “suffering in silence,” the tensions between their roles as fighters—as constructed following latent masculinized norms that still frame most sports—and women remained largely unacknowledged.

Missing Binds: How Absent Ties Unleash Migrant Worker Activism Under an Authoritarian Regime

Zheng Fu — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0800

ABSTRACT

Migrant workers are considered less militant in collective action than locals, partly because they lack social ties in the receiving community. However, in China's Pearl River Delta, I find the opposite. Comparing five cases of labor protest from 2014 to 2016 drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and labor activists' records, I show that migrant peasant workers are less exposed to the local state's demobilization efforts than are local peasant workers because they are less socially embedded in the receiving community. Due in part to China's internal citizenship system, they have fewer social ties within the territorial domain of the local state—especially the triadic pathways among citizens, intermediaries, and the local state that constitute what I call “interactional conduits of power.” This feature of migrants' social networks affords the local state fewer opportunities to exert interpersonal influence on citizens to withdraw from protests, which leads to a local “missing binds” effect among migrant peasant workers. This paper offers three key insights: First, in authoritarian contexts, local embeddedness may afford the local state greater ease in exercising soft repression. Second, the territorial fragmentation of state power, across regions and within internal citizenship hierarchies, conditions how repression is exercised. Third, migration is a crucial factor driving labor protests in China, with ongoing demographic and policy changes potentially impacting future labor militancy.

From Expansion to Erosion: The Global Trajectory of Judicial Independence, 1960–2018

Nir Rotem — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:18:59 -0800

ABSTRACT

Judicial independence expanded globally throughout the twentieth century, but this trajectory has recently come under pressure. In recent years, governments around the world have increasingly challenged judicial autonomy. This study unpacks this global reversal by analyzing data from 156 states between 1960 and 2018. Drawing on world society theory and related scholarship, I use panel regression models to examine how domestic conditions and states' memberships in liberal and illiberal international organizations are associated with judicial independence. The findings reveal a growing divide: While states embedded in liberal world society tend to maintain higher levels of judicial independence, those aligned with illiberal international organizations show signs of erosion—particularly during the postliberal period since 2008. I conclude by arguing that attention should focus not only on the widening gap between liberal and illiberal alignments but also on the emerging entanglements and erosion of liberal norms themselves.

“I Wish I Had Better Answers”: Organizational Ignorance in US Criminal Courts

Sarah K. S. Shannon, Gabriela Kirk‐Werner, Beth Huebner, Lacey Byram Moore — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:34:08 -0800

ABSTRACT

Systems of monetary sanctions in US criminal courts present an opportunity for furthering the sociological understanding of complex and consequential organizations. We examine whether and how court actors across eight states understand the organizational processes supporting the fiscal logic of legal financial obligations (LFOs). We engage with scholarship on the sociology of organizations to explore how court organizational structures and processes foster defensive ignorance among court actors implementing state policy to recoup operational costs. Our findings reveal that siloing and routines facilitate substantial ignorance regarding the overall operation of LFOs. Court actors often deny responsibility for their ignorance, particularly concerning the assessment of defendants' indigence, leading to inertia in addressing negative consequences. We discuss the implications of this ignorance, especially for the assessment of indigence, which is intended to mitigate the adverse effects of monetary sanctions but is rarely applied in practice.

Decolonizing Academia: Epistemic Gatekeeping and Revisiting “Womanhood” in Global South Studies

Sevil Suleymani — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:27:49 -0800

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes epistemic gatekeeping as a racialized colonial mechanism through which academic authority regulates the boundaries of legitimate knowledge in Global South feminist and postcolonial scholarship. Focusing on Iran, this study argues that methodological nationalism and methodological nationalist feminism construct “Iranian women” as a singular, Persian-coded subject, thereby naturalizing internal hierarchies of race, language, and region and rendering ethnoracial minority women epistemically unintelligible. Drawing on decolonial accounts of coloniality and the coloniality of gender, together with work on epistemic injustice and resistance, I conceptualize epistemic gatekeeping along three mutually reinforcing dimensions: knowledge producers (who is authorized to theorize), knowledge frames (what counts as “Iran,” “feminism,” and “womanhood”), and knowledge solicitation (whose voices are invited, heard, and validated as theoretical rather than merely experiential). Empirically, the article employs qualitative interviews with Azerbaijani women activists and writers, alongside autoethnographic reflection, to examine feminist organizing in and around the women-led cultural center El-Evi in Tabriz. Their practices of translation, memory writing, literary production, and women's libraries constitute forms of epistemic resistance that refuse both Eurocentric and Persian-centric regimes of knowledge, unsettling nation-bound and Persian-dominant constructions of “Iranian womanhood.” The article thus rethinks “womanhood” in Global South studies as a contested, internally stratified category and argues that decolonizing academia requires not simply adding minoritized women to existing archives, but transforming the epistemic architectures through which theory, subjecthood, and legitimacy are defined in the first place.

“Chickens Coming Home to Roost”: The Politics of Community Engagement and a Call for Street PAR

Yasser Aarafat Payne — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

This essay grapples with the problematic legacy that sociology and criminology have with supporting community engaged research with street-identified populations (e.g., gang members, justice-involved). While universities have increasingly called for community engagement, very few tier-1 institutions actually provide poor communities with substantive intellectual and material resources. In fact, the community engaged relationship is mostly transactional and one-sided, with researchers being mostly interested in extracting data as opposed to enacting social-structural change. Consequently, a growing number of local residents have become angry at this parasitic relationship; thus, the “chickens are coming home to roost,” or these residents are demanding clearer explanations about this exploitive dynamic. Furthermore, while most research institutions have not delivered on well-resourced community engaged initiatives, this essay still makes the argument that viable opportunities exist for doing this work inside low-income urban environments. Also, several examples of promising participatory projects and programs with a focus on the criminal legal system are provided, including: Participatory Research in Prisons at the Urban Institute in Baltimore, Maryland; Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School; or the participatory work led by grassroots non-profits like the Center for Structural Equity in Wilmington, Delaware.

The Enduring Legacy of M.N. Srinivas in Indian Sociology: Bridging Academia and Public Discourse

Anshu Kumari, Manish Tiwari — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Sociology, a discipline that engages academia and the public, has been largely hindered by institutional barriers and disciplinary silos, especially in India. M. N. Srinivas, a pioneering Indian sociologist, played a significant role in bridging this gap through his ethnographic fieldwork and public discourse on caste, social mobility, and rural transformation. His theoretical contributions, particularly Sanskritization and Westernization, reshaped the understanding of caste dynamics and social change in India. This paper critically examines Srinivas's legacy in public sociology, assessing its relevance in contemporary debates on caste, identity politics, and social justice. The study highlights Srinivas's methodological innovations, emphasizing his “field view” approach, which prioritized empirical research over abstract theorization. The paper also sees Sanskritization as a transformative framework and looks into what implications it has for caste mobility and its critics among Dalit scholars. The paper calls for revitalizing public sociology through interdisciplinary research, greater public engagement, and inclusivity. By drawing lessons from Srinivas's work, contemporary Indian sociologists can reaffirm their role in shaping public discourse and social policy.

Issue Information

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

Sociological Forum, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 1-2, March 2026.

Children and Youth as “Sites of Resistance” in Armed Conflict. By Tamanna M. Shah (ed.), Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2024. 155 pp. $124.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐1‐83‐549371‐7

Qais Shah — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

Sociological Forum, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 139-140, March 2026.

The Possible Form of an Interlocution: W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber in Correspondence. By Nahum Dimitri Chandler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025. 224 pp. $23.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐47‐803248‐9

Devon Goss — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

Sociological Forum, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 135-136, March 2026.

Reading Du Bois: An Afrocentric Critique of the Color Line by Aaron X. Smith and Molefi Kete Asante, Albany, NY. SUNY Press, 2025. 165 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 979‐8‐85‐580243‐6

Adam Dahl — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

Sociological Forum, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 137-138, March 2026.

Thermal Security and the Lived Experience of Urban Heat Waves: A Sociological Review of Qualitative Studies

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of thermal security as an analytical lens for understanding how individuals experience, interpret, and respond to urban heat waves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens' notion of ontological security, thermal security refers to the continuity and reliability of safe and comfortable thermal conditions that allow people to sustain everyday routines and a sense of existential stability. Through a systematic review of 26 qualitative studies, this paper synthesizes empirical insights from a wide range of geographic and cultural contexts. It identifies five key dimensions of thermal security—exposure, access, affordability, emotional impact, and coping strategies—and shows how these are shaped by intersecting social, material, and infrastructural inequalities. The review argues that qualitative research, often undervalued in climate studies, offers fine-grained and situated knowledge essential for understanding the lived consequences of heat stress, particularly among vulnerable populations. By bridging ecological, emotional, and sociotechnical dimensions, the concept of thermal security provides a comprehensive framework for assessing adaptation needs and justice-oriented climate responses in urban contexts.

Introduction: Black Reconstruction After 90 Years

Ali Meghji, José Itzigsohn — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois published one of the most important pieces of historical scholarship from the twentieth century, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. While the book has received significant discussion in disciplines such as Black studies, history, American studies, and political science, sociologists in general have been slow to discuss this momentous piece of scholarship. This disciplinary oversight is interesting, given that Black Reconstruction has much to offer across a range of sociology's subfields, such as comparative historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of race and ethnicity, and sociology of labor. In order to redress this disciplinary oversight, we arranged for a plenary panel on Black Reconstruction on its 90th anniversary at the Decolonizing Sociology mini-conference of the Eastern Sociological Society's (ESS) annual meeting of 2025. This special section of Sociological Forum—ESS's flagship journal—draws upon that plenary panel.

Diversity and Inclusion in Data Activism: Frame Resonance and the Barrier of Problem Recognition

Jared M. Wright — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Contentious issues around data politics can often involve complex technical aspects that are difficult for everyday people to understand. This can impede how well the frames of social movements dealing with such issues are able to resonate with different segments of society, which can in turn shape the diversity and inclusiveness of their activist culture. To understand this effect, this study comparatively analyzes two prominent data activist groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Anonymous (AnonNews). This is done by conducting a frame analysis on 4 years of archival documents from each, specifically examining frame resonance and vocabularies of motive. Findings identify the EFF's primary framing themes as “internet freedom” and “individual efficacy,” which appear designed to resonate mainly with technologically elite audiences and thereby indirectly reify socioeconomic inequalities. In contrast, AnonNews's frames of “freedom of speech” and “collective efficacy” are intended to be more accessible and inclusive to widely diverse groups; however, its leaderless dynamic and conflicting voices also potentially hinder its resonance with wider audiences. These findings show how different framing strategies and practices can shape diversity and inclusion within social movements, which have significant implications for achieving data justice.

“One Is a Frontier”: Settler Migration as Transmogrification

Joseph Kaplan Weinger — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the trajectories and framing strategies of American Jewish migrants to Palestine–Israel. Drawing on original in-depth interviews with immigrants who migrated between 1976 and 2021, alongside interviews with and observations of an “aliyah” agency, it examines meaning-making around spatial relocation in relation to the perpetuation of institutionalized stratification and the violence of colonial settlement. Central to this analysis is the concept of transmogrification, which describes the profound affective transformations migrants undergo as they transition from diasporic subjects to settlers embedded in a project of demographic and territorial supremacy. Through an exploration of three key framing strategies—persisting nationalization, majoritarian affiliation, and enduring frontierity—this paper investigates how immigrants navigate the material and symbolic landscapes of Israeli society and come to justify their roles within it. By focusing on the cognitive mechanism of framing, the research contributes to broader conversations about the reproduction of structural status positions, the politics of belonging, and the sui generis characteristics of contentious migration.

A Du Boisian Theory of Memory: Truth‐Telling Legacies of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction as Decolonized Theory, Method, and Praxis

Hajar Yazdiha — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

In Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois developed a framework conceptualizing collective memory as a political project of knowledge construction where revisionist history served as the political propaganda of the colonizer. The mechanisms of historical distortion have long been built into our colonial epistemological fabric, reproduced through academic knowledge production. To examine these dynamics and their legacies today, this paper shows how Du Bois's Black Reconstruction provides a framework for both studying and challenging the politics of revisionist memory through three interconnected domains: theory, method, and praxis. The Du Boisian theory of memory shows that truth-telling not only helps us better reexamine the contingencies that lead to collective memory in the present. Truth-telling is a guiding force shaping the creative ways we collectively imagine and embark on the future.

W. E. B. Du Bois on the Logics of Settler Colonialism

Zophia Edwards — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Many scholars have noted that while Du Bois clearly analyzed, theorized, and critiqued racialized labor exploitation, he did not have a framework for understanding settler colonialism. This paper systematically examines Du Bois's corpus of works and adds nuance to this claim. The paper argues that Du Bois did, in fact, theorize settler-colonial dynamics as evidenced by his work on Kenya and South Africa, but he had a narrow, singular conceptualization of settler colonialism as having only one modality—the logic of dispossession. He did not take into consideration eliminatory logics that also form part of settler-colonial domination. The paper excavates the strengths of Du Bois's analysis of settler colonialism, while highlighting its noteworthy limitations.

Situating Black Reconstruction in the Du Boisian Tradition

Ali Meghji — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I develop a contradictory argument about Black Reconstruction. First, I argue that Black Reconstruction certainly is a masterpiece, and indeed, perhaps one of Du Bois's greatest works. Second, however, I argue that we ought to view Black Reconstruction in the context of Du Bois's overall corpus of scholarship. “Singling out” Black Reconstruction on its own actually detracts from the contributions of the book itself. In particular, I will highlight how Black Reconstruction fits into the Du Boisian tradition in three main ways: first, in its move from data to the explanatory framework of racialized modernity; second, in its insistence on theorizing beyond geographical boundaries to understand transnational flows of capital and power; and last, in its insistence on thick description as a necessary prerequisite for conceptual (and sometimes causal) analysis.

Black Reconstruction: W. E. B. Du Bois in Racial Capitalism Theory

Julia Bates — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Black Reconstruction (1935) should be included in discussions on the epistemological history of racial capitalism. I argue its inclusion would address many of the critiques leveled against the theory. Using archival data from the Phelps Stokes Fund records, Du Bois Papers, and The Crisis, I highlight the global political context in which Du Bois's critique of racial capitalism emerged. I also demonstrate how Black Reconstruction challenges critiques of racial capitalism theory, which center on Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism (1983). I conclude that the current occlusion of Black Reconstruction from discussions of racial capitalism speaks to the political context Du Bois was critiquing and hinders sociologists' ability to analyze the connections between racial violence and capitalism within the US Empire.

Textbook Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Boardman, and Black Reconstruction in America

Freeden Blume Oeur, Sophie Dorf‐Kamienny — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

One familiar refrain concerning W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America is that the book is a rebuke of the disreputable historiography of the period, authored by historians including William A. Dunning, John W. Burgess, and Claude G. Bowers. For all the focus on these well-known figures, our essay begins with Helen Boardman, the person hiding in plain sight at the start of the book's stirring final chapter, “The Propaganda of History.” A reporter for The Crisis magazine who undertook investigations of lynchings and other social plagues, Boardman's research on propaganda in school textbooks proved indispensable for Black Reconstruction. As one of the first sustained analyses of Boardman and her relationship with Du Bois and the NAACP, our essay, which draws on an array of primary source materials, makes several contributions on the 90th anniversary of Black Reconstruction. First, it demonstrates how fighting textbook propaganda was central to the NAACP's larger activism. Second, it extends the book's analysis of the psychology of racism to the context of school textbook indoctrination. Third, it highlights how Boardman and Du Bois's activism presaged the work needed today to challenge dangerous propaganda and the full-scale assault on the critical teaching of anti-Black racism.

2023 Presidential Address: Dignity and Denigration in Economic Life

Frederick F. Wherry — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Sociologists have long addressed the puzzles posed by dignity. In The Polish Peasant, families went out of their way to provide a decent burial for their loved ones, even when social workers and others schooled in financial literacy advised against it. In some communities suffering from fracking, those who arrived to advocate for environmental justice sometimes forgot to honor the dignity of those being devastated by their changing economy and society. In studies of the Child Tax Credit, how money was delivered to families in need (and how they earmarked it) affected what they did with it as they sought dignity and dreams. These social issues highlight the twin challenges of dignity and denigration that motivate human interaction and shape economic life. Drawing on the case of debt collection in the United States, I present a novel framework of how people engage in denigration management strategies, as opposed to stigma management strategies, to protect their dignity and to achieve nearly full or partial social integration or full social exclusion. The 2023 Presidential Address at the 93rd Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting explores these themes.

White Grievance as a Predictor of American Attitudes Toward Critical Race Theory

Maria R. Lowe, ThuyMi Phung, Katherine Holcomb — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Critical race theory (CRT), developed by legal scholars over forty years ago, highlights how structural racism is embedded within American institutions. Yet, CRT did not become a national flashpoint until 2020, during the height of Black Lives Matter demonstrations against racial injustice. At that time, CRT attracted widespread condemnation from conservative lawmakers, who claimed it was unfair to whites and introduced legislation to ban it from K-12 public schools, even though CRT was not formally included in these curricula. Given the potentially long-lasting effects of such legislation on how racism is taught in public education, it is important to better understand Americans' attitudes toward CRT and the factors shaping them. Our mixed methods study examines whether white grievance (the belief that whites are victims of anti-white discrimination) predicts opposition to teaching CRT in K-12 public schools. Ordinal regression results show white Americans who endorse white grievance beliefs are significantly less likely than people of color to support CRT instruction in schools. Our qualitative findings identify three key components of white grievance—white victimhood, colorblind reasoning, and fears of liberal indoctrination—all embedded within epistemologies of ignorance. These themes help explain the relationship between white grievance and opposition to CRT.

Black Reconstruction as Decolonial Sociology

José Itzigsohn — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Black Reconstruction provides a foundation for rethinking sociology along decolonial lines. While several sociologists have discussed the need to decolonize the discipline, persistent questions remain about what such an endeavor would entail and whether it could be realized within sociology's existing frameworks. Black Reconstruction, however, anticipated and exemplified the possibility of a decolonial sociology long before these debates emerged. The book achieves this by offering a decolonial understanding of modernity alongside an alternative methodological approach for the discipline. It redefines modernity as inherently racialized and reconceptualizes capitalism as a racial–colonial formation. Furthermore, its methodological vision integrates second sight, conjunctural analysis, and a rethinking of the relationships between sociology and history, as well as between the local and the global. Ultimately, Black Reconstruction shows that a decolonial sociology is not only possible but a far better way to practice the discipline.

Images Assisting Wor[l]ds: Black History Murals in South and West Philadelphia

Gareth Millington, Irteza Anwara Mohyuddin — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:40:24 -0800

ABSTRACT

Black history murals are often understood as examples of state or corporate obfuscation of racial inequality, sometimes known as “artwashing”; or, conversely, as “insurgent” political interventions. Focusing on murals in historically Black neighborhoods in South and West Philadelphia, this article instead highlights the processual, but no less political, relations involved in the production of Black history murals. Departing from “presentist” politically driven accounts that privilege “contemporary concerns and dispositions,” our objective is to offer a cultural and urban sociological analysis that highlights the anteceding words (texts and narratives), urban lifeworlds, “art worlds” and supply of meaningful urban locations that make Black history murals possible. We argue murals not only consolidate “the past” but contribute to the making of Black urban historicity.

Post‐National Solidarity: Re‐Thinking an Essential Concept for the Age of Global Uncertainty

Clayton A. Fordahl, Daniel Levy — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:53:57 -0800

ABSTRACT

Solidarity is a core concept in sociology. The foundational work on solidarity was fundamentally concerned with questions of historical transformation. By contrast, postwar sociological theorizing has tended to take national solidarity as the concept's final and definitive form. This methodological nationalism is poorly suited to explaining and interpreting solidarity in a period marked by world risk. Given contemporary global social problems, it is necessary to re-historicize and re-theorize solidarity. This article develops a novel historical-theoretical account that traces the epochal shifts in the relationship between solidarity and ontological uncertainty. This account concludes with the observation of a new “post-national solidarity” characterized by a sense of pervasive uncertainty and a declining faith in national-level institutions. At the same time, this shift has provoked a wave of re-nationalization, as political actors seek to reclaim solidarity within bounded national frameworks, often in reaction against the cosmopolitan aspirations of post-national solidarities.

Moral Assumptions in Causal Thought: Poverty and Perversity

Lukas Posselt — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:54:48 -0800

ABSTRACT

Causal attributions, framings, and ideas shape moral judgments. Sociologists have long highlighted these causality-to-morality processes, showing how causality underpins blame and moral responsibility. The reverse process of morality-to-causality, where moral assumptions influence causal attributions, has been studied less. Furthermore, the underlying mechanism of this second process remains largely unexplored. Drawing on philosophical research, I theorize this second entanglement of causality and morality and urge sociologists to investigate it empirically. Causal attributions do lead to moral judgments, but they in turn have hidden moral assumptions. I introduce the “normality horizon” as a conceptual tool to examine how moral assumptions shape causal thought. It comprises ontological and epistemological beliefs that allow individuals to select actual causes as opposed to background conditions. To demonstrate the utility of this concept, I apply it to mid-19th-century pauperism discourse in Switzerland, expanding analyses of the perversity thesis and welfare reform. Analyzing economic, political, and clerical writings reveals a shared normality horizon differentiating natural from unnatural phenomena. These results show that market fundamentalist and religious perspectives on welfare policy rested on similar underlying assumptions.

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Eliteby al‐Gharbi, Musa. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press, 2024. 421 pp. $35.00/£30.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978‐0‐69‐123260‐7

Paul Carls — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:49:33 -0800

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

The Scholar Imprisoned: Young‐Bok Shin's Decolonial Thought Against (Sub) Imperialisms in East Asia

Veda Hyunjin Kim — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 19:14:14 -0800

ABSTRACT

This article reads Young-Bok Shin (1941–2016) as a decolonial thinker who theorized transformative worldmaking from the standpoint of the oppressed, rooted in the historical experiences of East Asia. Against the (sub)imperial “logic of sameness” that structures colonial modernity in his social world, Shin advances gongbu (studying) as a practice that cultivates conscience through confronting power, reorganizes human relations transversally, and thus enables transformative agency. He reinterpreted the Confucian dictum “harmony and sameness” as “harmony versus sameness”, advancing the decolonial proposition of harmonizing (hwa-hwa, 화화, 和化) relations to rejoin at the human standpoint. This proposition is particularly relevant for Korea's division, which reflects how the logics of sameness have been embodied by the North and South Korean states in articulation with the imperialisms of China, Russia, and the US. It also calls for critical meditation on South Korea's reckless exploitation of the Third World peoples within the global racial hierarchy. Situating Shin as a thinker who contributed constitutive fragments to the collective enterprise of anti−/de−/postcolonial sociology, this article brings Shin into conversation with East Asian deimperial critique, Black radical thought, and Latin American decolonial critique.

Dissent With Love: Ambiguity, Affect and Transformation in South Asia by Bhandari, Parul. London. Routledge, 2024. 205 pp. ₹1295. ISBN: 978‐1‐032‐61440‐3

Vandana Rai — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:14:14 -0800

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

Canaries in the Code Mine: Precarity and the Future of Tech Work. by Papadantonakis, Max. Philadelphia, PA. Temple University Press, 2025. 136 pp. $21.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐43‐992578‐2

Rianka Roy — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:52:06 -0800

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

Defending Critical Epistemology: The Case of Christian Nationalism and Christofascism

Steven Foertsch — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 02:56:48 -0800

ABSTRACT

Christian nationalism and Christofascism theorists have surrendered the discursive floor to their empiricist critics. A flurry of recent research has asserted that critical paradigms within the sociology of religion are ideologically committed and empirically invalid. In this reply to Jesse Smith's “Old Wine in New Wineskins” (2024), I contend several things: (1) Christian nationalism and Christofascism research is based in empirical validity, (2) claims of “conceptual slippage” are irrelevant given the sociopolitical context, (3) rejection of the critical perspective reifies the unjust power structure through a normative appeal to rational-legal scientific authority, and (4) critical epistemology in the sociology of religion remains a crucial tool in combating authoritarian slippage. It is my hope that this reply sparks further reflection and debate on the role of sociology and the nature of sociological praxis.

Get It Out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy. by Becker, Andréa. New York, NY. NYU Press, 2025. 208 pp. $28.00. ISBN: 978‐1‐47‐982660‐5

Patrice C. Wright — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 21:43:44 -0800

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

Unpacking the Multispecies Family: Predicting Pets as Family Members Using the General Social Survey

Andrea Laurent‐Simpson — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800

ABSTRACT

The multispecies family has grown rapidly over the past 30 years in the United States. Scholarly understanding of pets as legitimate family members is increasing, but most work has been qualitative in nature. Statistical modeling of these dynamics has been bound by a lack of access to large-scale, nationally representative datasets paywalled by industry actors like the American Veterinary Medical Association and American Pet Products Association, yet quantitative analysis of this growing family type is greatly needed. In answer to this need, the 2018 General Social Survey (GSS) included several questions regarding pets and relationship dynamics. The objective of this paper is to use these data to model select variables as predictive of who considers their pet part of the family in the United States. Using binary logistic regression, I measure the likelihood that children ever born, gender, Catholicism, and singlehood predict respondent assignment of family status to household pets. Respondents who had never had children were 107% more likely than those with at least one child to almost always assign family status to their pets. Women were 99% more likely to almost always label their pets as family. Catholics were about 40% less likely to do so than non-Catholics. Singlehood was not significant. No statistical research considers how household structure (as modeled here) impacts the assignment of family to pets in the United States. Furthermore, these findings advance research needed for future work examining how pet ownership impacts fertility intentions.

Reply to Steven Foertsch's “Defending Critical Epistemology: The Case of Christian Nationalism and Christofascism”

Jesse Smith — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:58:20 -0800

ABSTRACT

In his reply to “Old Wine in New Wineskins,” Foertsch argues that positivist critiques of the “Christian nationalism” literature are deficient and advocates for continued application of critical epistemology in this area of research. In response, I argue, first, that the focus on positivism mischaracterizes the interpretivist critique in “Old Wine in New Wineskins” while unintentionally implicating most of the evidentiary basis for claims about “Christian nationalism.” Second, critical epistemology relies on a set of first principles that are, at minimum, non-obvious and controversial, but necessary for his counter-critique to be effective. I reject critical epistemology for its circularity and offer an alternative and more minimal set of first principles from which to conduct sociological inquiry. I nonetheless affirm Foertsch's explicit recognition of the critical epistemological commitments underlying the “Christian nationalism” research agenda as well as his call for deeper philosophical reflection in this area of scholarship.

Emotions in Meaning‐Making: Toward a Sociological Theory of Cathexis

Dmitry Kurakin — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:34:55 -0800

ABSTRACT

The role of emotion in meaning-making remains undertheorized in cultural sociology. This article argues that emotions and affect are intrinsic to meaning-making and proposes cathexis—the attachment of emotions generated in social interaction to objects, symbols, and ideas—as the fundamental mechanism by which emotions co-constitute cultural meanings. Durkheim implied this constitutive role of affect in his theory of collective emotions and model of collective effervescence, but left it unnamed, obscuring the emotional dimension of culture in later research. To address this gap, I reinterpret Freud's concept of cathexis within a Durkheimian framework, reengaging cultural sociology with this crucial insight. Recognizing cathexis as inherent to meaning-making moves us beyond the linear subject-object framework toward understanding meaning-making as extended and enacted within its environments, animated by cathected objects of diverse kinds. I then outline cathexis's key features and their consequences—persistence, thresholds of intensity, boundary-making and surface creation, spontaneity, and the mutual enactment of cathexis and affordances—each offering tools and strategies for future research. Consolidating these insights, the theory culminates in a research program on the “energetic” architecture of environments of action, laying the foundation for a more emotionally attuned cultural sociology.

Morals, Markets, and Medicine

Guillermina Altomonte, Eliza Brown — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:39:46 -0800

ABSTRACT

Healthcare in the United States is defined by profit motives and economic inequality, yet medical providers and organizations are also guided by moral values such as a commitment to patient well-being. How have sociologists made sense of this apparent contradiction? This review evaluates the contributions of social scientists to the understanding of morality and economic exchange in medicine. It focuses on the burgeoning moral markets literature, which examines how moral categorizations concerning economic exchanges emerge, are contested, and change over time and across regional contexts, as it has been applied to medical cases. We argue that this approach has advanced sociology scholarship in three major ways: (1) allowing for the interrogation of the moral dimensions of medical commodification; (2) exposing surprising dynamics of medical markets; and (3) underlining the negotiation of meaning among providers, patients, and other medical actors. We then extend the moral markets theoretical toolkit beyond the arenas where it has been most fruitfully applied and suggest how it can illuminate emerging topics such as the incursion of Big Tech into healthcare, the introduction of AI into medical practice, and managing medical debt through novel strategies such as crowdfunding.

Which Side Are the Faculty on?: Professors, the 2019–2020 Democratic Presidential Primary, and the Politics of Redistribution in the United States

Sean Dinces — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:43:48 -0800

ABSTRACT

Existing scholarship on US professors' political views focuses overwhelmingly on their attitudes toward social and cultural issues rather than economic ones. This study explores American academics' perspectives on redistributive economic policy by analyzing Federal Elections Commission data from the 2019–2020 Democratic Party presidential primary, which include records of campaign contributions from 83,334 faculty and more than 6.5 million non-faculty. Given the unprecedented diversity of economic ideology among the 2019–2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates and the fact that an overwhelming majority of professors in the US support Democrats, these data are uniquely useful in gauging the extent of academics' support for government efforts to downwardly redistribute income and wealth. Moreover, since contributions measure actual political behavior, they offer a more reliable proxy for policy preferences than self-reported survey data. The donations reveal that, in general, professors gravitate more readily than the rest of the population toward candidates who aggressively support downward redistribution. This dynamic, however, derives entirely from academics' disproportionate support for technocratically minded candidates like Elizabeth Warren. In fact, professors are significantly less likely than those in other occupations to give to self-described “socialist” politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, who propose achieving redistributionist objectives by way of popular mass movements.

Two Pathways to Proletarianization: Understanding Professionals' Adaptation to the “Corporatization” of Chinese Law Firms

Xinyi Shen — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 03:57:14 -0800

ABSTRACT

This study examines how lawyers in China adapt to the “corporatization” of law firms, which limits their professional autonomy within bureaucratic structures. “Proletarianization” theory, which emerged in the 1970s, effectively explains employment relations and internal stratification within the legal profession, but it has been underestimated in comparison to the more heated debates surrounding “(de)professionalization” theory. Using a revised “proletarianization” framework, the research analyzes the various responses of lawyers to corporatization by considering both organizational structures and individual strategies. The study is based on qualitative data from 4 months of participatory observation and 44 in-depth interviews, revealing two primary models of corporatized law firms: the “horizontal assembly line” model, focused on routine legal tasks, and the “vertical pyramid” model, aimed at complex legal knowledge. These models involve different labor processes and levels of proletarianization impacting lawyers' control over their work. Furthermore, the study explores how employed lawyers perceive corporatization and manage limited autonomy and alienation, influenced by their individual career ideologies. Overall, this research provides a critical lens for analyzing the work conditions of professionals in corporatized law firms by blending the sociology of work and the sociology of profession.

Traditionalist, Collectivist, and Marketist: Value Orientations and Pro‐Solidarity Inclinations in Contemporary China

Anning Hu — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:40:56 -0800

ABSTRACT

How can individuals with differing beliefs, values, and ways of thinking live together within a society experiencing rapid and comprehensive social transitions? This paper addresses and contextualizes this enduring sociological question by examining the complex correlations between value orientations and pro-solidarity inclinations in contemporary China. Multivariate analyses of the Cultural Change and Value Survey 2024 reveal that: (1) the marketist orientation, which underscores the principles of the market, receives the strongest support among Chinese citizens, who also exhibit a tendency to endorse the notion of fostering solidarity through instrumental exchange; (2) compared to traditionalist and collectivist orientations, the marketist orientation reveals a significantly stronger correlation with pro-solidarity inclinations that emphasize instrumental exchange, shared compassionate experiences, and generalized understanding and respect of others; (3) individuals who have a more balanced adherence to multiple value orientations—an indication of potential value rivalries—tend to display weaker pro-solidarity inclinations; and (4) a positive synergistic relationship is detected between traditionalist and collectivist value orientations, as well as between marketist and collectivist value orientations.

People, Places, and Belonging: Deepening Our Sense of Community and IdentityBy William Marsiglio, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025. 369 pp. $36.95 (hardcover). ISBN: 978‐1‐48‐755146‐9

Krista E. Paulsen — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 07:38:11 -0800

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

What's Hard Is Yet to Come: Critical Junctures and Changing Gender Beliefs at the Transition From College to Career

Emily K. Carian, Amy L. Johnson — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 08:02:59 -0800

ABSTRACT

Drawing on 71 interviews with 20 respondents across four waves before and after their graduation, we explore whether and how the transition from college to career can lead to new experiences with and understandings of gender inequality for elite graduates of color. While all respondents experienced or witnessed gender inequality and recognized it as such, they differed on whether and how these experiences shaped their explanations for gender inequality and their proposed solutions. We outline four potential pathways respondents could take in regard to their gender beliefs: Navigators, Reflectors, Survivors, and Advocates. Most followed the first pathway, describing inequality as an individual problem and prioritizing what they as individuals can do to circumvent it. For a small minority of respondents, their experience of critical junctures catalyzed new, structural understandings of inequality. Shaped by intersectional identities and proximity to privilege, we show how critical junctures are distinctly personal moments that can direct young people toward or away from change efforts. We find that awareness of inequality is insufficient for changing beliefs about inequality and willingness to engage in change efforts, which has important implications for the likelihood of change in the future.

“General Interest” Group or “Special Interest” Group? Understanding Nonworker Support for Unions

Katherine Copas, Teke Wiggin — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 05:18:08 -0800

ABSTRACT

The labor movement has mounted a comeback in recent years, with breakthrough organizing and strikes at employers including Starbucks, Amazon, UPS, and the major automakers. The continuation of this trend, which could help stem rising economic inequality, may depend partly on how successful unions are at rallying public support. Yet this may be difficult if unions are perceived as “special interest groups” that primarily serve wage earners, as they are often portrayed in the literature. Our paper challenges that view through an examination of union support among nonemployed Americans—a group that might be expected to be most likely to perceive unions as self-serving. Drawing on data from the American National Election Study and generalized additive models, we find that, contrary to our expectations, most non-employed groups, including retirees and disabled individuals, express greater support for unions than workers themselves. Our findings contribute to labor scholarship by providing the first systematic analysis of union support among nonworkers and reinforcing broader patterns of higher union support among economically vulnerable groups. By reframing American unions as a “general interest group,” this study offers new theoretical insights into public perceptions of organized labor and the potential for union revitalization in the US.

Theory ex Ante and Theorizing ex Post: The Article Format and the Activity of Theorizing

Ådne Meling — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 21:58:01 -0700

ABSTRACT

The article suggests that authors should be encouraged to include sections entitled ‘Theory ex ante’ and ‘Theorizing ex post’ (or equivalents) in sociological journal articles. It is argued that such a structural separation between previous theory and the author's own theorizing could help facilitate collective theoretical progress.

It's Not for the Faint of Heart: Empathy Socialization Among Birth Doulas

Natalia Ruiz‐Junco, Shaconna Haley — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 03:06:39 -0700

ABSTRACT

Birth doulas provide services to those giving birth and their families during pregnancy, labor, and postpartum. A central part of their emotional labor consists of empathizing with their clients. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of doulas practicing in a large metropolitan area of the US South, we examine empathy socialization among these workers. We identify three interrelated phases of empathy socialization: preparing for empathy, getting involved, and detaching from empathy. While these stages are interlinked, we consider detaching from empathy a crucial step in empathy socialization, given that doula work is physically and emotionally exhausting and that doula training programs and their peer support networks systematically encourage detachment. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of this research for birth workers, birthing people, and parents in the United States.

Micropolitics in School‐Based Health Centers' Provision of Sexual Health Services

Dara Shifrer, Alyssa Nestler, Haley Simons, Rachel Springer — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:42:14 -0700

ABSTRACT

School-based health centers are ideally situated to provide sexual health services to adolescents but face a macropolitical climate with competing sets of interests. We apply an organizational theory to 2019–2021 interview data from 33 school-based health center (SBHC) coordinators and their educator partners in Oregon to reveal the micropolitics that coordinators engage in to provide sexual health services to adolescents. Interviewees described how health practitioners' interest in providing sexual health services conflicts with anti-contraception, puritanism, and parental rights interests across school boards, parents, students, and the public. SBHC coordinators strategically engage their influential power by building relational trust with educator partners, students, and parents. They also employ the micropolitical strategy of compromise, avoiding pushing too hard for their ultimate interests to maintain the relational trust and interests they have already achieved. These findings provide a parallel for research focused on other systems, especially systems also characterized by morality-based conflict.

“I Can Do It, We Can Change It”: Protest as a Catalyst for Political Efficacy

Manuel Jiménez‐Sánchez, Lucía Rubio Vicedo, Patricia García‐Espín — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 03:47:53 -0700

ABSTRACT

This study examines how protest episodes foster political efficacy among ordinary citizens. Based on 44 in-depth interviews with participants in two major 2018 mobilizations in Spain—the feminist strike of International Women's Day and the pensioners' protests—the analysis identifies discursive expressions that reflect attitudinal change across three dimensions: cognitive, agentic, and collective. These include increased political attentiveness, feelings of empowerment, and renewed belief in collective action. Notably, these expressions often combine in participants' narratives, suggesting a dynamic interplay between efficacy dimensions that reinforces perceptions of political agency. The study highlights three key mechanisms behind these transformations—exposure to reliable information, vicarious learning, and shared mastery experiences—that nurture both individual and collective efficacy. The analysis shows that the specific forms of efficacy change are shaped by both the nature of the protest episode and participants' prior protest experience, with first-time participants displaying the most varied changes. These findings underscore the transformative potential of emotionally resonant protest episodes. Far from being trivial or symbolic, even low-cost protest episodes may function as socially embedded learning environments.

The Male Complaint: The Manosphere and Misogyny Online. By Simon James Copland (ed.), Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2025. 208 pp. $22.95. ISBN: 978‐1‐50‐956255‐8

Garrett L. Grainger — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 09:09:24 -0700

Sociological Forum, EarlyView.

Understanding “Friendship” Among Autistic Adults: Insights From Narratives of Everyday and Social Life

Jad Brake — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 04:00:45 -0700

ABSTRACT

This work explores the ways autistic individuals describe and perceive their friendship relationships. Through qualitative analysis of participants' accounts, I discuss the importance that autistic adults attribute to values of “comfort,” “acceptance,” and “trust” in their relationships with the people they call “friends” and explain the centrality of these aspects to how they understand and define “friendship.” By conceptualizing friendship as relatedness, I argue that perceptions and practices of friendship among autistic people cannot be fully understood if not examined in the context of the intersection of personal difficulties, physical-social environments, cultural attitudes, and lived experiences of autistic individuals. Accordingly, this study offers an analysis of how these intersecting aspects constitute a basis for the building of intersubjectivity among autistic persons and construct the shared moral values and expectations that underlie their understanding of, and approach to, friendship. Furthermore, by showing how friendship perceptions among autistic individuals stem in part from shared corporeal and perceptual experiences, this study offers insights into the perceptual foundations of social relationships. Through examining friendship and sociability, I tease out the intricate daily and social experiences of autistic people and elucidate the complexity of the category of friendship and its efficiency for understanding human experiences.