In his Winter 2024 Contexts feature, “An Australian Uproar Over CRT,” Dr. Ryan Al-Natour investigates the similar narratives animating anti-CRT contingents determined to keep Whiteness at the curricular core in American and Australian education. He explains, “I just want to echo the words of a social work professor by the name of Ozy Alozeim, who once said that White privilege is your history being part of the core curriculum and mine being taught as an elective.” Read the article here ..read more

Since our founding as a discipline over 180 years ago, sociologists have become masters at studying social problems. Sociologists can explain the overt and covert mechanisms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism with great precision. Our disciplinary ability to explain social well-being and flourishing, however, is dull. We need to sharpen our tools. Many disciplines are trying to answer important questions about well-being and flourishing: What is well-being? How do we nurture it? And how do we sustain it? The most prominent subdiscipline answering these questions is positive psychology ..read more

How we teach the past can be a contentious issue, especially around sensitive subjects like race, gender, and genocide. But the debates are high-stakes, as history classes play a vital role in the construction of collective memory, and they demonstrate the powerful emotion elicited by what we do—and don’t—teach. In other words, as Chana Teeger argued in a recent article in the American Journal of Sociology, it’s not just the content of history curricula that matters but also the emotions elicited by these lessons. Drawing from ethnographic observations among students in two racially and socioe ..read more

Ethno-nationalist movements have gained traction globally, with consequences as far-reaching as the modern detainment of Uygher peoples in China. But while we know that ethno-nationalist beliefs are inherently racialized, we know little about how such sentiments may vary across different racial/ethnic groups within a single national context. A new article by Sam Perry and colleagues in The Sociological Quarterly addresses this question through the lens of Christian Nationalism in the United States, asking how the relationship between Christian Nationalism and attitudes about ethno-racial exclu ..read more

“Welcome to this warrior gang and we are bad motherfuckers!” exclaimed Jenny McCarthy to an audience of applauding parents. During an early autumn weekend in 2015, nearly 700 parents gathered at the InterContinental Hotel in Dallas to learn and exchange combat strategies. McCarthy, a media personality infamous for her vaccine skepticism, exhorted her audience to remain stalwart in this fight: “If something doesn’t work in your treatment along the way, you do not give up hope!” Every parent in the room, including McCarthy herself, was fighting the same elusive enemy: autism, a lifelong developm ..read more

Why write for Contexts? Hear from authors who have published with us! In this video, Contexts feature essay authors DeAnna Y. Smith, Michelle Pannor Silver, and Emily Huddart Kennedy explain why they wanted to publish with Contexts. Spoiler: it’s a journal that does justice to storytelling. We want to help you tell your story! For information on pitching a peer-reviewed feature or submitting to the other sections of our magazine, see our Author Guide. Additional questions can be directed to our Sr. Managing Ed., letta@contexts.org ..read more

“Celebrate good times, come on!” The start of a new year brings opportunities for gratitude. Check us out: here we are, all smiles, celebrating our one-year anniversary as editors of Contexts! Looking ahead to 2024, we anticipate another year of scintillating stories and invigorating new voices—starting with this issue. These pages are packed with thought-provoking inquiries, but we are especially ecstatic about the chat we had with the inimitable Malcolm Gladwell, the first of many Q&As with global thought leaders that we will present over the year. As a public-facing magazine, Contexts i ..read more

For a long time, sociologists and policymakers have assumed that the fact kids in some neighborhoods do better in school than others can be boiled down to the quality of the schools in those neighborhoods. In this narrative, kids at elite, hard-to-get-into schools located in leafy suburbs outperform their peers in underfunded, concrete-clad inner-city institutions. But a new study in the American Journal of Sociology finds little evidence supporting this notion. In their study, Geoffrey T. Wodtke and colleagues utilize data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and supplement it with a c ..read more

Some people still have stress dreams about high school exams. I still have stress dreams about working for David Bouley. Famed chef David Bouley passed away in February 2024. His New York Times obituary notes that his masterful cooking transformed fine dining. As a former employee of Bouley’s, I know the class politics of fine dining says as much about Bouley’s legacy as his highly lauded cuisine. I spent a couple of formative years working at Bouley, the Chef’s namesake lower Manhattan flagship. Working for a legendarily dictatorial boss in a legendarily dictatorial business premised on inequ ..read more

We are thrilled to welcome Benjamin Shestakofsky to the Contexts Blog to celebrate the publication of his new book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality. In this post, blog editor Elena van Stee chats with Ben about everyday life inside a tech startup and the consequences of venture capital funding. You can watch the full interview above and find lightly edited excerpts from their conversation below. Elena van Stee: Can you tell us about the startup you studied and what prompted your initial interest in it? Benjamin Shestakofsky ..read more