Twitter’s post-January 6th suspension of Donald Trump’s account silenced his digital megaphone in an instant. While the immediate consequences for the former president were evident, the broader impact of account suspension on the everyday user is less understood. To untangle this unknown process, Shangwei Wu and Hui Fang delve into the intricacies of “account bombings,” or the termination of social media accounts in China, in a recent paper in New Media and Society. The data consist of 115 bloggers’ posts about their account bombing experiences and interviews with 48 social media users whose a ..read more

It was a bracingly cold morning in 2019 in a far suburb of Toronto, Canada. I stepped across the threshold of Amina’s bungalow, taking her hand and leaning in to kiss the air beside each of her cheeks. In my other hand, I clutched a box of sweets I’d brought for her elderly mother, a token of appreciation for welcoming me into their home. Amina, a mother of five, was a participant in my multi-year study following the successes and challenges of 148 Syrian mothers and teenagers admitted to Canada under the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative (SRRI). On that chilly November morning, I found A ..read more

As the distinction between life on the internet and life in the real world blurs, one consequence is that our online behavior can have a tremendous impact on our offline lives—think of someone who gets fired over an insensitive Facebook comment or derogatory Tweet. But as Yuan Hsiao and colleagues show in their new study, this relationship goes both ways. Our real world lives also affect our online interactions. Published in the American Sociological Review, this mixed-methods paper examining on- and offline conflict between Latino gangs in Chicago combines the strengths of computational techn ..read more

Employees increasingly encounter workplace conditions that contribute to poor mental health outcomes and, over time, burnout. But what comes after burnout? A recent article by Philippe Sterkens and colleagues helps uncover the ongoing career effects of burnout stigma. The study, published in European Sociological Review, draws from an online vignette experiment administered to 405 American and British managers. Participants were asked to evaluate a fictitious candidate’s suitability for an internal vacancy. The vignettes included evaluations of a graphic designer, billing and cost clerk, sales ..read more

When we think about the spread of American culture, we might picture someone eating a Big Mac in Bangladesh, listening to Bruce Springsteen in Singapore, or watching a Disney movie in Denmark. This process, often referred to as Americanization, involves the top-down export of distinctly American products to other countries. But, as Tamara Kay shows in her new Theory and Society article, culture can also spread through more synergistic processes between American distributors and local cultural producers. The beloved children’s program Sesame Street, which now exists in over 50 countries around ..read more

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