Anna Strhan is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Sociology at the University of York (UK), where she leads the Culture, Values, and Practices Research Cluster. She also co-leads the Social Studies of Ethics, Morality and Values Network. Her research explores the culture and politics of religion, childhood, parenting, and education. She is the author of a number of books, and her work has appeared in various media outlets, including The Guardian and BBC Radio 4. You can find her on BlueSky @annastrhan.bsky.social or on her website.

Rachael Shillitoe is a sociologist and a senior social scientist in the civil service. She was previously a research fellow at the Universities of Birmingham and York (UK). Her research interests focus on the formation of beliefs and values across generations. She is the author of Negotiating Religion and Non-Religion in Childhood with Palgrave Macmillan.

Here, I talk to them about their new book, Growing Up Godless: Non-Religious Childhoods in Contemporary England.

AMW: Your research highlights how non-religious children still engage with questions of meaning and morality. What were some of the most striking ways these children made sense of such big ideas outside of religious frameworks?

AS & RS: We were working with children aged 7 – 10 years old, and one of the most striking things was how reflective they were in talking about big questions! They were, in fact, highly articulate and thoughtful in discussing what made life meaningful to them, as well as about their views about the origins of the universe, their thoughts on the existence of God and other supernatural phenomena, life after death, ideas of morality, and how their beliefs related to the views of their parents, siblings, grandparents, friends and peers.

Several ways that the children were making existential meaning in their lives were especially striking. Firstly, when we asked the children about what was important and mattered in their lives, they all spoke about relationships: family, friends, and pets. And when they spoke about particular objects – for instance, special toys – they talked about how these were special to them because they had been given by a particular family member or were something that their friendship group had a shared love for, rather than being about consumerism. Secondly, many spoke about how they were sceptical about belief in God because they felt that the ideas of God they had encountered were at odds with their own scientific worldview – and they often elaborated on how they believed in the Big Bang theory and the theory of evolution. However, despite their acceptance of science, many of them had fun, playful beliefs in magical figures like unicorns, dragons, or ghosts, and again, linked these to their friendships – commenting that it was fun to talk about these things with their friends. Thirdly, many also spoke about how animals and the natural world were important to them – indeed, many mentioned that they admired figures like David Attenborough or Steve Irwin who had inspired their love of nature.

Across all these ideas, it was striking that the children had a sense of meaning and purpose as based in this world, rather than some heavenly, transcendent realm. The decline of religion has often been portrayed as leading to a loss of meaning and enchantment. But our book shows that this non-religious world wasn’t disenchanted or meaningless for these children – it was rather, a site of fullness and wonder. Indeed, several said that they didn’t have any need for religion, because the needs that religion might fulfil were for them being met in other ways, for instance, through their sense of belonging with friends and family.

In terms of morality, a really prominent issue for the children was equality. They really cared about fairness, and many spoke about how important it was to treat others equally and to respect differences in relation to religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. In fact, while their parents were often quite critical of religion, very few children expressed moral critiques of religion and instead emphasized the importance of respecting religious diversity. They also often mentioned the importance of trying to understand others’ viewpoints and experiences, and the importance of not judging. For instance, when discussing whether a particular action was wrong, they felt it was important to try and understand the reasons why the person had acted in that way.

AMW: The book challenges the assumption that secular upbringings are neutral or empty of tradition. What patterns did you observe in how non-religious families construct and pass down values or rituals?

AS & RS: A core value that all the parents emphasized was autonomy and the importance of supporting their children’s own worldview choice. Although a few expressed a sense of discomfort about the idea that their children might, say, become a conservative evangelical, by and large, they generally spoke much more about how they wanted their children to have freedom and self-confidence to make their own choices in life.

In terms of patterns across generations, it was striking that some parents spoke about how they’d experienced religion as stifling or undermining freedom in their own upbringings, and they saw their own desire to ensure their children’s sense of freedom and authenticity as a reaction against that. In the book, we look at how the parents’ emphasis on enabling the children’s freedom in relation to religion is part of a broader cultural change. This shift is something the cultural theorist Raymond Williams called ‘the long democratic revolution’, in which ideas of choice and voice have been extended to previously more marginalized groups of people. And we argue that this includes children. This is part of a long-term process in which ideas of individual freedom and rights have been ‘made official’ in things like international treaties, and professional ethics codes, and these have also infused parenting and educational cultures with ideas of respectful parenting and child-centred education. All of this means that the children are growing up with a strong sense of their own rights and freedoms, as well as those of others.

The question of rituals is an interesting one. Because historically, rituals have often been most clearly linked to religious institutions, there’s quite a strong narrative in social theory about the decline of rituals. But actually, all the families still celebrated things like Christmas, Easter, Eid, or Hanukkah – depending on their religious heritage. However, they mostly did not see the meaningsof these festivals as linked to religion, even if for some of the families, they might go to church, for instance, at Christmas. Instead, they spoke about these rituals as about celebrating or honouring family, caring for others, or creating a sense of childhood magic.

Some parents described Christmas and Easter as meaningful in relation to pre-Christian seasonal rituals, for instance, pagan midwinter festivals. Some families also created new rituals to mark important life events – for instance, one family held placenta-burying rituals in their allotment and garden, with a plum tree and a rose bush planted to mark their daughters’ births. Birthdays and Halloween were, of course, also important for the families too.

Besides these annual, seasonal or lifecycle rituals, more regular ritual practices varied quite a bit between families. A few engaged with things like meditation and mindfulness together, while others spoke about the importance of getting out into nature together regularly at the weekend – for instance, a walk by the seaside. Some also spoke about the importance of watching nature documentaries on TV together. Although not exactly a ritual, the weekly routine of watching a programme like Blue Planet or Planet Earth together on a Sunday – evoking a sense of awe and wonder in the natural world – was something that several parents spoke about as an important way they were encouraging their children to care about the planet.

But as well as rituals, the parents were shaping the children’s values in more implicit ways – through what they signalled to children were things of interest and importance, the things that are worth their attention. So, what they talked about with their children and how they talked about it – and what they didn’t talk about – influenced what the children were coming to value for themselves. And here, in relation to religion, the fact that the parents generally didn’t talk much about religion with their children meant that the children were picking up the idea that religion wasn’t something that was especially important to them.

AMW: In documenting the everyday lives of non-religious children, what did your findings reveal about how schools shape—or sometimes clash with—their developing worldviews?

AS & RS: Many children we spoke to were growing up in homes where there was relatively little engagement with religion. For these children, it was therefore actually in schools that they first really encountered forms of religion – for instance, through classmates who were religious or through learning about religion – and it was through these encounters that they began to reflect on their own stances in relation to religion, and to think of themselves as non-religious. But schools and friendships both also played an important role in shaping the children’s sense of what mattered to them and what they felt was significant or interesting. So, the fact that the schools prioritized teaching about maths and science and tried to make these lessons fun (with games-based learning, for instance) meant that many children spoke about liking science or maths, and seeing these as things that mattered in life. One child, for instance, said ‘almost everything involves maths’, while others said they wanted to be scientists when they grew up.

But as well these ways of thinking about knowledge, the schools were – like the parents – strongly reinforcing ideas of individuals’ rights and freedoms, and principles of equality. Indeed, the value of ‘respect’ was a core value at each of the schools, and the children took it for granted that this was just a basic principle of how you should treat others – even if they didn’t always do so in practice.

We didn’t find very strong clashes between the children and the schools, although many of them did find some aspects of school boring (including, often, religious education lessons). But the children were sometimes critical of classmates who expressed beliefs that were at odds with their own more pluralist stances – for instance, one child criticized a conservative Christian classmate who had said that another child’s Muslim beliefs were wrong.

In general, we found that the schools and the parents were encouraging the same kind of broadly liberal values. What’s interesting here is that these values are often seen as taken-for-granted and something you just figure out for yourself, autonomously. But our book shows how, actually, they are being encouraged by wider institutions – such as schools – and other cultural resources and traditions, linking with recent work by Galen Watts about how a liberal imaginary is often seen as intuitive, but in reality it is shaped by cultural structures and institutions. In our book, we call this a broadly ‘humanist’ culture – which emphasizes the agency, achievements and significance of humans – even though most of the parents and children wouldn’t have necessarily called themselves humanist.

Overall, we suggest that rather than just thinking of what is happening here as the decline of institutional Christianity, it’s important to pay attention to the question of what these children are becoming and what they are learning to value, and how this is being fostered through particular traditions, institutions, and everyday practices.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

When same-sex marriage became legal nationwide in the United States in 2015, it was heralded as a monumental victory in the long struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. For many, this legal shift symbolized full citizenship—access not only to tax benefits and hospital visitation rights, but also to social legitimacy and recognition. However, nearly a decade later, we’re still left with important questions: Do queer people want to get married? And perhaps more importantly—why, or why not?

Despite growing acceptance and legal recognition, scholarly work about marriage has often overlooked the voices of LGBTQ+ young adults, many of them who also self-identify as queer. Much of the research predates 2015. More recent work has primarily focused on legal debates surrounding same-sex marriage, demographic trends, or public sentiment toward the legalization of same-sex marriage. Less attention has been given to the personal narratives and desires of queer individuals—especially queer women.

In a recent study, I interviewed 36 college-educated women of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds who also self-identified as queer. I asked about their desires—or lack thereof—for marriage in a time when it is legally possible, yet still politically and socially complicated. I find that most women in this sample want to marry someday, but a relevant portion are ambivalent or reject marriage. I argue that the reasons they provide for their attitudes toward marriage demonstrate that sexual minorities are not fully accepted in American society, even though they can now be included in one of the most exclusive institutions in the US.

First, most of the queer women in this sample express a desire to marry someday. Additionally, queer women of color are more likely to desire marriage than their white counterparts. Interestingly, queer women of color are more likely to desire marriage than their white counterparts—representing the most notable racial and ethnic difference in the study. Among queer women who desired marriage, the meaning of marriage often extends beyond personal fulfillment. The women recognized that marriage made them eligible for the over 1000 rights, rewards, and privileges that are exclusive to married individuals. More importantly, however, they also see it as an opportunity to assert their equality and claim space within a society that has historically marginalized their relationships. Annabelle, a 24-year-old white woman, explained that she wants to get married because her marriage would symbolize the triumph of the legalization of same-sex marriage. “I think that I would want to be legally married as opposed to just in a committed relationship, because it was such a triumph when gay marriage was passed into law. I want to celebrate that by being married.

Women who want to be married also see marriage not only as an opportunity to resist traditional, heteronormative norms about marriage, but also to queer marriage itself. For them, the desire to queer marriage is intimately connected to the desire to be married. Stella, a 27-year-old Middle Eastern woman, stated, “I think that while marriage is a legal arrangement that is traditionally understood to imply exclusivity, couples can decide for themselves, under mutual terms, what that exclusivity extends to. Being part of the queer community has definitely normalized this concept for me. I’ve had far more friends in queer relationships opt for an open long-term partnership…Seeing that polyamory can be implemented successfully, peacefully, and happily in a variety of forms has definitely empowered me to feel more comfortable breaking from the more traditional, monogamous model.” Additionally, as Stella and other women mention, being members of a community where married queer couples are practicing alternative forms of romantic partnership gives them the confidence and support to challenge heteronormativity and homonormativity in their future marital relationships. It also makes marriage even more appealing to them. While debates persist about whether the institution of marriage inherently conflicts with the goals of queerness, the desires these women express—for marriage as both a declaration of humanity and a site of resistance—demonstrate that queering marriage can be a way to resist homophobic structures without compromising deeply held personal values.

A significant, but smaller, portion of the sample expressed ambivalence about or resistance to marriage. These women cite serious reservations about participating in an institution that has historically perpetuated inequality, particularly against women and queer people. They also question the state’s outsized role in a deeply personal decision and highlight the financial burdens associated with modern weddings. At the same time, they overwhelmingly acknowledge that marriage confers class privilege, which could maintain or elevate their current social standing. Hope, a 30-year-old white woman, reflects on the class advantages of marriage even though she is unsure about being married in the future. “There is the one situation where I’m okay with that [being called a wife] actually…if it’s gonna gain you capital. Let’s say I do get married to an attorney or something. They’re at posh networking dinners. This is kind of your class power, for someone to say, ‘I have a wife. This my wife.’ There is a kind of power in that.” Hope’s insight is particularly striking because she points out that the class power marriage can confer is often rooted in the inferior status traditionally associated with the “wife” role. Her comment encapsulates the ambivalence that many queer women feel: desiring the social capital of marriage while being critical of its embedded inequalities.

Some women in the sample also expressed concerns about the legal precarity of same-sex marriage. Given the 2024 presidential election of Donald Trump and the rightward turn of the United States Supreme Court, they fear that same-sex marriage may not remain legal in the future. Furthermore, their ambivalence to marriage allows them to resist gender inequality and heteronormativity in ways that are more in line with queerness. Kamilah, a 27-year-old white woman explained, “I know I would like a long-term relationship; and marriage offers security and benefits that cohabitation does not…the current political landscape— if I ended up in a queer relationship, would marriage even be an option?” It is difficult to desire an institution whose legality for queer people feels uncertain. For some, this precarity fuels skepticism. For others, it becomes another reason to resist gender inequality and heteronormativity through non-marital forms of commitment more aligned with queer values.

In conclusion, whether desiring marriage, feeling ambivalent about it, or rejecting it altogether, the queer women in this study articulate complex reasons for their perspectives. Their reflections suggest that the legalization of same-sex marriage has not erased the structural inequalities that LGBTQ+ people face. They also demonstrate that while the granting of civil rights to marginalized groups is essential, it is not sufficient. More must be done to dismantle the systems and institutions that disproportionately privilege married and heterosexual individuals.

Sarah Adeyinka-Skold is an assistant professor in the Sociology department at Loyola Marymount University. She can be reached at sarah.adeyinka-skold@lmu.edu.

Anna Kirkland has been studying law, health, and discrimination for twenty-five years. She is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan and the author of multiple books and articles, many available for download on her website. Here, I ask her about her new book, Health Care Civil Rights: How Discrimination Law Fails Patients, which is out now from University of California Press and available free and open access. You can follow her on Bluesky @annakirkland.bsky.social

AMW: You argue that civil rights law in health care is “set up to fail.” Can you unpack what structural features of the U.S. health care system most undermine the effectiveness of civil rights protections, especially for trans patients?

AK: One way to think about this problem is through both push and pull – that is, what other operations and incentives in U.S. healthcare pull towards something else and what barriers and outright hostilities push rights away? The pulling incentives in healthcare that I focus on are patient safety and patient experience, and the ways laws incentivize those priorities through funding and accreditation. Now, it’s good to care about those things, but that’s not the same as thinking through how healthcare systems exclude, ignore, devalue, and harass trans patients in ways that go far beyond a patient experience or even a quality-of-care problem. But it also means that hospital administrators, for example, are doing a lot of things that seem like they might help but actually do not (issuing fake apologies but not fixing anything). And then they don’t see what they’re missing because they’re doing what is required. The push away from rights protections comes from many places. Catholic healthcare systems are allowed to refuse whole categories of care while taking public dollars. A right wing social and legal movement has installed very conservative judges throughout our courts and set up cases to block extensions of rights to trans people. The very structure of our government (every state gets 2 Senators regardless of population, for example) means that our courts have been able to become much more conservative than the median voter, for example, and we’re stuck with it. In addition, our healthcare system is a massive public-private partnership with insurance carriers and businesses and our federal civil rights bureaucracy has always been underfunded deliberately. So there aren’t many investigations and insurers are allowed to have their own rules about what they do and don’t cover. When there is regulation of these things, enforcement options are either weak or non-existent.

AMW: One of the most striking arguments in your book is that insurance companies—not courts or doctors—often end up deciding which civil rights matter. How did we get here, and what does that reveal about the political economy of health care?

AK: Most working age adults have employer-sponsored health insurance through their jobs. Trans people are more likely to be on public programs like Medicaid, but even so, most trans people have employer-based insurance, too. We got here for lots of reasons, but the main ones are that employer-sponsored health plans served a lot of interests historically, like presenting a group of people who were an organized set but not for any reasons related to their health but rather because of their jobs. Giving benefits instead of wages has also been a nice thing for employers to offer, especially when costs were lower. Another big reason is that doctors have opposed any kind of national health insurance alternative that would take away some of their independence. Once the employer-based system is in place and national health insurance efforts failed (and I mean back in the Truman administration), it’s very hard to change. Health care as an employee benefit managed by insurance carriers means that the care you get from your doctor is mediated by what your insurer will pay for. Insurers use sophisticated business practices combined with medical knowledge to say what’s medically necessary and to manage our usage of our health insurance. Laws regulate this, but in a federalist system that is fragmented. State insurance laws have some say, but national laws intervene over them and sometimes make it hard for states to protect rights or innovate. So you have all these layers of control: the corporate insurance carrier, your employer, state laws, and federal laws. These entities are very sophisticated, but the patient and the doctor often know very little about insurance even though people pay $9,000 as an individual or $25,000 for a family per year for it. Consider the alternative: we could have a national health plan and it could say what care is required for health equity. We would have to organize politically to say what that should be, and we should have a conception of rights, constitutional and statutory, that protect people even when their care is costly or politically unpopular. We don’t have any of that in place right now, and where we sort of have it, it is fragmented, privately determined, or undercut.

AMW: Many readers may assume that antidiscrimination law is a solid safeguard for vulnerable patients. What do you most want the public—and policymakers—to understand about the limits of current civil rights frameworks in medical settings?

AK: The main limitation is that there is no real enforcement mechanism for health care civil rights. The setting in which you may encounter discrimination has been subject to wildly shifting rules between administrations, and they may not be very well informed at all about your needs or their obligations. There is a structure in place to respond to your complaints, and if you feel comfortable, you should use it because they don’t want you to give them poor survey ratings. It may be a useless process, but you might find someone who cares who can help you. If you work for an employer that self-insures for your health benefits, you should consider lobbying them to improve coverage for things you need. Employers have been somewhat responsive to LGBT employees, employees with infertility, and others who want expanded benefits. They can change the benefits because they design them. Engage at multiple policy levels, from your own workplace to state civil rights boards to professional groups to national advocacy. Often when one area is hostile, others are more hospitable.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

Corey Moss-Pech is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University. His research focuses on the relationship between higher education and labor markets to better understand stratification and social mobility outcomes. His scholarship places particular emphasis on gender inequality and its intersection with race and class. Corey has published in Sociology of Education, Social Forces, Qualitative Sociology, the Washington Post and other outlets. His first book, Major Trade-Offs: The Surprising Truths about College Majors and Entry-level Jobs, is out now from University of Chicago Press. You can find him on X @CoreyPech, Bluesky cmpech.bsky.social or learn more on his website https://coreymosspech.com/
Here, I interview him about his book.

AMW: Your book highlights how liberal arts majors often end up using their degree skills more directly than their peers in so-called “practical” majors, yet they receive less institutional support and lower pay and receive cultural messages that devalue their degrees. What does this suggest about how we define success and value in higher education vis-a-vis the job market? And how does this reproduce inequality across fields of study?

CMP: Understandably, there’s a lot of discourse—both in public commentary and among higher education practitioners—about the return on investment (ROI) of a college degree. When we think about the value of a degree, we often focus on whether it pays off financially. This makes sense. College has become significantly more expensive, public funding for higher education has declined, many students take on substantial debt to attend college, and labor markets have become more uncertain and unstable. So, it’s reasonable for people to wonder whether their degree will ultimately pay off.

As a result of these concerns, many colleges have placed greater emphasis on so-called “practical arts” majors—fields of study directly tied to specific occupations. For example, engineering is both a college major and a job title. From a narrow ROI perspective, these practical majors do tend to yield higher short-term earnings than liberal arts majors. But this framing undervalues other important aspects of people’s work experiences—such as the opportunity to use their skills and find meaning in their jobs.

Popular narratives often assume that high-paying jobs are also the most skilled. Think of engineers designing robots, writing code, and developing algorithms—work that’s seen as both in-demand and skill-intensive. But that assumption doesn’t always hold true. In my research, as discussed in my book, I found that liberal arts graduates are actually more likely to report using their skills in their entry-level jobs. So, if we think about the value of a degree in terms of doing interesting, skill-intensive work, not just short-term earnings, we see real advantages in liberal arts education.

In fact, liberal arts graduates tend to catch up in earnings over time. They’re not handicapping themselves in the long term. This matters especially when we consider who is choosing which majors. Students aren’t randomly assigned to fields of study. Many college majors are highly gendered, and liberal arts disciplines—which are often devalued in the labor market—are disproportionately chosen by women, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and people of color.

This creates a double devaluation: the majors themselves are seen as less economically valuable, and so are the students who pursue them. As a society, we need to recognize that liberal arts degrees provide critical skills that are in demand—even if they’re not immediately rewarded with high salaries. If we want to promote equity among college graduates, we must acknowledge that all degree fields impart a mix of practical and general skills. It’s not just students in practical majors who go on to use those skills in the labor market—liberal arts graduates do too, and commentators often miss this essential truth about the college-to-work transition.

AMW: Your book challenges the assumption that a college degree guarantees meaningful or intellectually engaging work. How does this mismatch between degree field, employment conditions, and job content affect how young adults think about work, identity, and purpose after graduation?

CMP: That’s a great question—and an interesting one—because you’re right: there’s a real disconnect between people’s employment conditions and the actual content of their jobs. What I found in my research is that many graduates from practical majors, particularly in business and engineering, often land high-paying jobs that are overwhelmingly clerical in nature. These positions frequently involve routine tasks like data entry or sending emails, and many of the people I interviewed were unhappy in those roles.

One example I write about in my book is a student named Courtney, who graduated with a business degree and started working for a greeting card company. On paper, it looked like a solid job. But in reality, 90% of her day was spent emailing salespeople in the field to check if they had any problems. The role required very few of her actual skills—and not much of her time, either. In the introduction of the book, I talk about how, on a good day, Courtney had maybe two hours of work. She’d go on long lunches, come back to no emails, and her bosses wouldn’t even notice she was gone. She was extremely dissatisfied with the lack of challenge and meaning in her job.

That said, liberal arts graduates didn’t always have it easy either. Many found roles where they could use their skills, but those jobs were often low-paid, unstable, or short-term. Another example from my book is Jennifer, who moved to New York City to work for a social media firm. She enjoyed the creative writing aspect of the job and found the media work fulfilling. But the pay was low, and there was no room for advancement.

So yes, it’s a real struggle for graduates to find work that is both meaningful and well-compensated. Some do manage to get both—and I wish I had the secret formula for how that happens—but I don’t. At the end of the day, students face real choices. They can pursue high-paying, stable jobs that often end up being clerical and corporate in nature. Or they can look for work that feels meaningful and makes use of their skills, even if it pays less and offers fewer opportunities for advancement.

Ultimately, most people want to feel like they’re using their skills. And I think employers could do a much better job at actually utilizing the full range of talents their employees bring to the table. For young people, it’s important to understand this trade-off. If you go for a more practical, so-called “safe” major, you might end up in a job that’s financially stable but not very intellectually engaging. If you follow a liberal arts path, you might find the work more fulfilling but less financially secure.

Everyone’s definition of purpose is different, and people need to choose what’s right for them. One of my favorite examples is a graduate I call Vance in the book. He worked at an African American community center, earning just $23,000 a year—the lowest salary among full-time workers in my study. But he loved what he did. He believed in the center’s mission and found the work genuinely interesting. Still, like many others in similar situations—including a number of English majors—he eventually left the role to pursue something with more stability.

So yes, it’s a tough balance. But I hope my book gives students and graduates a clearer, more informed perspective as they navigate these decisions. It’s not just about choosing a major—it’s about figuring out what you want out of your work and career.

AMW: Given your findings, how should parents, educators, and policymakers rethink the advice they give students choosing college majors?

CMP: I think it’s important to start with the scope conditions of my book. My research focused on a large Midwestern public research university—one that isn’t particularly selective or what people might consider “elite.” This context matters. If you’re at a highly elite institution, like Princeton, where they only offer liberal arts majors, then major choice might not have much of an impact on long-term outcomes. On the other end of the spectrum, if you attend a low-income serving, open-access institution, you might also see less variation in outcomes by major. But for this broad middle—large research universities that aim to serve multiple constituencies and offer a wide range of programs—the trade-offs are more pronounced.

For students at these kinds of institutions, I would say: major in something you find interesting but go in with your eyes open. One of the key things my book helps clarify is the trade-off many students face—between high-paying but often clerical work, and lower-paid but more meaningful or interesting work. Understanding that trade-off can help students make more informed choices.

It’s also important to note that the gaps between majors are the biggest early in graduates’ careers. Over time, liberal arts students tend to make up ground. What my book really shows, though, is that liberal arts graduates often start using their major-specific skills right away in the workforce, something that’s frequently overlooked.

There’s often a tendency—even among liberal arts advocates—to talk about college as either preparation for the labor market or as a place for personal and intellectual growth, as though those two goals are mutually exclusive. My book challenges that idea. It actually defends the liberal arts using the very criteria that are usually used to justify practical majors: workforce readiness. Liberal arts graduates do have market-relevant skills immediately after graduation. And that’s something parents, educators, and policymakers should recognize.

So, while practical majors do offer certain advantages, it’s not always because of the specific skills they teach. A lot of their benefits come from things like institutional support, connections with employers, and broader cultural ideas about what types of knowledge are seen as “useful.” As I discussed earlier, these forces shape how we value different fields of study.

In the end, at these large, comprehensive universities that offer a wide range of majors, students should feel empowered to study what interests them. And we, as a society, should invest more in the liberal arts and be less dismissive of their application to the workforce.

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: Unexpected Lessons for Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, her Hidden Desires column, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

“I’m asexual bisexual,” Scott, 37, told me in 2018 as we sat in the Southern California sun.

That summer I was collecting interviews for a project on gay, bisexual, and queer men’s relationships with masculinity. Frankly, Scott’s description of his sexuality baffled me. How could someone be both asexual and bisexual?

It wasn’t until years later when my research focus turned fully toward asexuality that I began to understand: Scott, like many other people under the asexuality umbrella, was drawing on a concept of sexuality often unacknowledged outside of asexual circles. Scott later clarified that his sexual attraction was asexually oriented while his romantic attraction was bisexually oriented. In this explanation, Scott, like many others under the asexuality umbrella, was drawing on the idea of split attraction.

Although this idea is common in asexual spaces, there is (to my knowledge) no research specifically on the split attraction model… until now.

I recently published a study in Social Currents focusing on the split attraction model. You can read the article, “Splitting Attraction: Differentiating Romantic and Sexual Orientations Among Asexual Individuals,” here.

As an asexuality studies scholar, I cannot avoid encountering the idea of split attraction. Although hardly explored in academic literature, the concept of split attraction is prevalent in asexual communities.

Split attraction models frame various types of attractions/orientations (e.g., sexual, romantic, platonic, sensual, and esthetic)as operating separately from one another. They might “match” (i.e., someone might be romantically and sexually attracted/oriented exclusively to women) or they might not (i.e., someone might be romantically attracted/oriented to women but sexually attracted/oriented to men).

This conception of split orientation stands in contrast to prevailing understandings of orientation. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick explains, “the common sense of our time presents [sexual identity] as a unitary category” in which one’s sexual and emotional feelings, behaviors, and affiliations should all align. Under this normative framework, which operates both in the heteronormative and queer worlds, knowing someone’s sexual identity also leads us to assume with whom they prefer to fall in love, cohabit, procreate, and form cultural and political communities.

Although social scientists have largely embraced the idea that sexuality is multifaceted—composed of behavior, desire, and identity—far less attention has been paid to how desire and identity can themselves be broken into differentiated parts.

In my research, I draw on interviews with 77 individuals who identify under the asexuality umbrella to define and describe frameworks of split attraction/orientation. I also put my findings and the scholarly literature related to this topic into conversation with community theorizing on split attraction. I argue that this conceptual framework reveals that, broadly in U.S. culture, sexual identity is typically treated as a “unitary category” in which “sexual orientation” and “orientation” are used interchangeably and romance and sexuality are assumed to necessarily be intertwined and aligned.

The concept of split attraction helps reveal and deconstruct sexuality as a unitary category. The concept challenges three core ideas to the model of unitary sexual categories: (1) that “sexual orientation” and “orientation” are interchangeable, (2) that romance and sexuality must necessarily be intertwined and aligned, and (3) that people’s attraction/orientation can and should be described in a single word (straight, gay, asexual, bisexual, etc.).

As a result, I consider split attraction as a helpful framework not only for scholars of asexuality but also for the study of sexuality more broadly.

Is split attraction specific to asexuality?

I suspect that split attraction is prevalent among asexual individuals not because asexual individuals are necessarily more likely to experience split attraction, but rather because prevailing unitary category models of sexuality pose unique challenges for asexual individuals.

When asexual individuals experience an absence of sexual attraction but a presence of romantic attraction, it is difficult to resolve within a unitary sexual category framework. This is particularly true given the lack of knowledge about and invalidation of asexual identities as well as the presumption that all humans experience sexual attraction.

Conversely, when a non-asexual person experiences a “mismatch” between their romantic and sexual feelings, these feelings may be more easily resolved through labels like pansexual and bisexual—or even through concepts like sexual fluidity. Thus, even though the concept of split attraction could be applied to both asexual and non-asexual experiences, the need for the concept of split attraction may simply be more pressing for asexual individuals than for non-asexual individuals.

In other words, as we introduce the idea of split attraction to people outside of asexual communities, I strongly suspect we will find that it’s useful for many non-asexual people too. Splitting attraction opens up new frontiers in the study of sexuality, intimacy, romance, family, and beyond. Let’s embrace it.

Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University and a leading scholar of asexuality. You can keep up with his research on Substack or find him on Bluesky at @cantonwiner.bsky.social.

Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where she studies religion, politics, and money and directs the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the the host of the new documentary podcast When The Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism, and the author of My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, which delves into how paying taxes became a moral battleground in public life. Dr. Braunstein’s award-winning research has appeared in top scholarly journals and been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine. She also writes op-eds for publications including The Guardian, Religion News Service and The Conversation. Here I ask about My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America. You can find Ruth on Bluesky @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social and at https://www.ruthbraunstein.com.

AMW: Much of the public debate around taxes focuses on policy (rates, deductions, fairness). But My Tax Dollars shifts the focus to culture and meaning-making. What do you think we miss, politically or socially, when we overlook the emotional and moral dimensions of taxation?

RB: In doing research for this book, I spent a lot of time reading about the history of the antitax movement in the United States. This is a movement that has grown in size and intensity over the past century. And yet, over that same time period, the highest marginal tax rate has *declined*—from a peak of more than 90% to around 37% today. So if we think this movement is just about tax rates (and other technical nuts and bolts of tax policy), we are missing something more fundamental about what drives their concerns. 

When I went looking for those deeper answers, I heard a lot about the form that the income tax exchange takes. Essentially, the idea that most individuals are required to chip in a portion of what they earn each year; that the more they earn, the more they owe (which is the basis of a progressive tax system); that all of these “tax dollars” go into a big pot controlled by the federal government; and that this pot of money is then used to fund the myriad programs and services that Congress includes in the federal budget each year. 

This approach to taxation raises a number of concerns among antitax groups. Some people don’t like the idea that individuals would not have complete control over the “fruits of their labor.” Some would be comfortable donating the same portion of their money to a church or charitable organization, but not to the government. Some focus on the progressive nature of the federal income tax, which they view as unfairly punishing hardworking people while rewarding those who choose not to work. 

When we take these arguments seriously, we see that it hardly matters how much one’s tax bill is at the end of the year. What matters is that the current tax system embeds Americans in political relationships (with their government and with their fellow citizens) that are inconsistent with some people’s understanding of how those relationships should be structured. 

So a central theme that runs through the book is that we need to be attuned to how different tax arrangements imply different kinds of political relationships; how our perceptions of these relationships actually vary significantly and are contested; and how different groups respond when taxation presents them with a “relational mismatch.” My hope is that by being attuned to these questions, we can have more constructive public conversations about what we hope to achieve together as a society, and about the tradeoffs of varied fiscal strategies for achieving those ends. 

AMW: You write about the sacred and profane meanings people attach to how their tax dollars are used. How do those meanings play out when it comes to funding programs for families, like public education, childcare, or parental leave?

RB: So as I mentioned, many Americans are focused on the form that taxation takes. But many are also focused on the uses of their tax dollars. In large part, this is because Americans across the political spectrum tend to think of public revenues not as something we share collectively, but as aggregations of their personal tax dollars. 

This means that at the very least, they want to feel like they getting good value for their money, much as they would when they make an investment or a consumer purchase. In addition, many Americans also assess whether the ways their tax dollars are being spent aligns with their values. This assessment often involves fixating on a few specific uses of tax dollars that are perceived as morally concerning, or even as profane threats to one’s vision of what is sacred. 

So what does this mean for the many funding programs that would benefit American families, like public education, childcare, or paid parental leave. We know that large shares of Americans either currently do or would benefit personally from these programs. Put differently, the programs offer high value for one’s money, especially as the costs of raising families increases. In this light, it seems perplexing that these programs would be controversial. Especially in a moment when the Trump administration is publicly lamenting low birthrates and supporting the “pronatalist” cause, it seems counterintuitive to also be defunding public education and dismantling programs that help people build families.  

The approach I propose offers an answer to this puzzle. It directs us to consider how these policies, which provide empirically good value to many Americans, are also viewed by some Americans (and the elites and movements that speak for them) as undermining their values. Public education, which religious conservatives often refer to disparagingly as “government schools,” are viewed by many on the Right as promoters of secular values and knowledge that challenge white Christian privilege in society. Publicly funded or subsidized childcare gets the same bad rap. And, along with policies like parental leave, it is viewed by some on the Right as encouraging women to abandon of their “proper” role in society, which is to be mothers and caretakers of children. 

When conservatives argue these programs are simply too expensive, that is not the whole (or perhaps even the real) story. If we accept such arguments on their face, we will never have a real conversation about what we value as a society, and what we don’t; what kinds of families we want to support, and under what conditions. People are entitled to different opinions on these big questions—but our leaders also have a responsibility to speak clearly about them so citizens can make informed decisions about who will represent their best interests.

AMW: You write about very different groups—antiwar activists, tax defiers, antiabortion protesters—who all claim moral authority over “my tax dollars.” How do these competing claims shape the legitimacy of government and civic belonging in today’s polarized political climate?

RB: One of the background themes of the book is that the United States is a country marked by profound diversity, deep political polarization, and also an individualistic streak. Given all of this, it is an actual marvel that we manage to have a functioning tax system and to pass a federal budget every year. Like truly, we should recognize this as a profound accomplishment of our pluralistic democracy. 

Even more astonishing is that Americans have famously high “tax morale,” which translates into extremely high levels of voluntary compliance with the tax system. This reflects a widespread understanding that part of the deal of living in a country like this is that, as individuals, we are never going to agree with every single thing that our tax dollars are spent on. As long as the process is viewed as legitimate, and is responsive to citizens’ input through mechanisms like elections and advocacy and, yes, even antitax protest, most Americans are willing to accept their responsibilities as taxpayers.  

But we are living in a precarious moment, and the delicate balance we have managed to strike on this issue could easily be knocked off-kilter. The activist groups I write about in this book all shape our public debates about taxation. But they do not all represent the same degree of threat to the viability of this system. 

Antiwar activists, for example, employ one of the most radical tactics I write about in the book: they publicly refuse to pay the taxes that they owe. But, they do this as a form of civil disobedience intended to display their moral opposition to war, not because they believe the tax system is illegitimate. In this sense, their tactics are radical, but their position toward the tax system is not and does not represent a major threat to its legitimacy.

On the other hand, the current presidential administration and many elected members of Congress may appear to be promoting the relatively mainstream goal of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government by cutting wasteful spending. But in reality, they are implementing a far-right antigovernment playbook that was developed over the past century by activists operating at the radical fringes of American politics. 

Within only the first few months of this administration, they have dealt blow after blow to the legitimacy of the tax system: they have promoted conspiracy theories about the IRS that paint the underfunded agency as an armed and dangerous shadow army of the deep state. Ironically, it is the administration itself that has recently breached the privacy of taxpayers’ data and is using that data to surveil and punish those they view as enemies. Meanwhile, they have made cuts to the IRS that will decimate its capacity to collect unpaid taxes, especially from the super rich. This naturally undermines ordinary people’s sense that everyone is paying their fair share, a key condition on which people are willing to pay their own share. 

Each of these alone would raise concerns about the ongoing legitimacy of the tax system; together, they could be catastrophic. Whether or not one likes to pay taxes or has different spending priorities, the implications of these attacks should be chilling. Without a functioning tax system, we would lack sufficient revenues to fund even the most basic functions of government, including the military. We would not be able to pay our debt, or raise more funds. Even if we had a well-designed tariff system that could generate some revenue (which we do not), relying exclusively on this as the president has proposed would make us wholly financially dependent on foreign countries. 

We have reached this moment, in part, because Americans have settled for an impoverished conversation about taxation, one that reduces all tax questions to tax rates, and paints one party as wanting to lower them and the other as wanting to raise them. This conversation has convinced large swaths of Americans that these attacks on the tax system are being done in their best interest, or at least in the interest of lower taxes. But at what cost? We need a conversation that involves a much fuller accounting of what is at stake. 

Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: What Practitioners can teach Everyone about Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd

LGBQ+ youth raised in conservative Christian spaces often struggle to develop a positive understanding of their sexuality. Home, church, school, and other community institutions can ideologically align in ways that teach them to hate, fear, and suppress, rather than embrace and explore, their emerging sexual desires. Counternarratives can be hard to come by.

As a result, and despite scholarly critique, there is a persistent narrative that in order to thrive, LGBQ+ people must leave these spaces and find more supportive communities. For those with the resources to do so, a four-year college away from home is one pathway out. LGBQ+ students are almost five times as likely as heterosexual students to select a college away from home in an effort to find a more welcoming space.

These students have high hopes for college, but does college live up to their expectations?

We interviewed 26 LGBQ+ college students in order to understand how their transition to college affected their emerging sexual identities and sense of self. In particular, we focused on how this process is impacted by opportunities for and barriers to sexual and romantic relationships. As we found in our recent article in Social Currents, while community support was important to positive identity-development, so, too was the ability to enact their sexual desires through sexual and romantic relationships.

Most students quickly built supportive communities that gave them new ways of understanding themselves. Sydney, a pansexual cis woman, said, “Everyone is just incredibly accepting, and their beliefs correlate with mine. I feel like it’s the family I wanted growing up… It’s exciting to meet somebody who also feels the same as you do in that regard. Growing up as a member of the LGBTQ community, it was hard to enjoy normal things because you felt so different all the time.”

This created a newfound freedom for students to be open about who they were to those around them. Tyler, a gay cis man said, “I used to be really conscious about [being gay]. But now I don’t even think about that. I mean I think people can tell that I’m gay. I don’t try to conceal it here anymore and I never faced any sort of retaliation or anything.”

New communities replaced their old ones. Almost all of the students we interviewed had distanced themselves from the Christian churches of their youth and instead involved themselves in spaces such as the LGBT Center or other LGBTQ+ organizations on campus. As Riley, a queer transmasculine person, said, “When I was younger, I very strongly believed in God. But it made me feel really shitty because of my sexuality and gender identity. I just couldn’t connect to [Christianity] once I realized it conflicted and I wasn’t going to be in line with it.” Instead, they joined a social justice advocacy organization for trans people on campus, explaining, “[It helped] me get resources initially and it made me feel like part of the community. Which I hadn’t had before because I didn’t know that many trans people.” Many now had social networks mainly comprised of LGBQ+ people.

But these communities did more than just make people feel good about identifying at LGBQ+; they also helped students broaden their understanding of their sexuality, which many found deeply affirming. Specifically, opportunities to explore their sexuality through sexual and romantic relationships mattered a great deal.

Just being able to act on their sexual desires validated their sense of self. As Benjamin, a gay cis man, explained, “After experimenting throughout college a little bit, I became more comfortable with myself.” Nicole, a queer cis woman, had hooked up with ten people since arriving at college, but only once with a woman, which she ranked that as her most enjoyable hookup, saying, “I think it’d be the one with the girl, just because it was the first time [having sex with a woman], and it really validated me. It validated my sexuality – like confirmed how I was feeling.”

Students also had the opportunity to experiment with BDSM, threesomes, and polyamory, which they found revelatory as each new opportunity taught them something about themselves and their desires.

But despite these positive experiences, LGBQ+ students still faced challenges finding sexual and romantic opportunities. And because these opportunities were so valuable for feelings of inclusion and positive identity development, students who struggled to find partners felt like they were missing out.

Given the contrast with their communities of origin, the LGBQ+ scene felt big when students first arrived on campus. But they quickly realized how small it was. Not only was it hard to find partners who hadn’t hooked up with a friend, a potential source of drama, it was also difficult to find LGBQ+ social spaces. Most of the parties and bars on campus were dominated by heterosexual students.

LGBQ+ students were left with organizations and spaces that felt better suited for advocacy and community building than for finding sexual and romantic partners. And through this, it became clear that LGBQ+ students had different ideas about what these spaces should be doing.

Hailey, a lesbian cis woman, said, “I feel like the LGBTQ Center should have some kind of resource. Whether it be a speed dating situation or a potluck, just creating the space. Cause the space isn’t working.” Owen, a gay cis man, avoided the LGBT Center because he felt it was more about activism than a space to meet other LGBQ+ people, explaining, “It doesn’t really appeal to me much. I feel like it’s more political than I’d like to be involved with. The main reason I would want to go to that is to meet other LGBT people, not necessarily to get involved with more political aspects.”

But other students felt that LGBTQ organizations should be more focused on social justice issues, calling out people like Owen as the privileged face of the community. For example, like Owen, Nashe, a queer genderqueer person, avoided the LGBT Center, but with a different critique, saying, “The spaces definitely feel uncomfortable to me…. It’s uncomfortable being the only Black queer person in a space.” In both instances, the spaces weren’t working in ways that facilitated desired connections and the resultant tensions spilled over into the hookup scene. Students felt like they missed out on opportunities for sexual and romantic relationships as a result.

This matters, because as our research makes clear, sexual and romantic exploration is critical to positive identity development in emerging adulthood. These experiences affirmed LGBQ+ students’ desires and allowed them to reconceptualize what they wanted from sex and relationships. Thus, any barriers to exploration are not minor for LGBQ+ students. Colleges must take the lead in creating spaces that attend to the diverse social needs of LGBQ+ students. This includes attention to sexual and romantic inclusion, which is vital to developing positive self-concepts, sense of self, and a feeling of belonging on campus.

Ellen Lamont is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Appalachian State University. She can be reached at lamontec@appstate.edu. You can follow her on X @EllenCLamont.

Teresa Roach is specialized teaching faculty and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at Florida State University. She can be reached at tar09c@fsu.edu.

Sociologists have long examined how states shape families. In the recent case of Syrian refugees resettled in Canada, state policy did more than shape. It dismantled and redefined the family, imposing a narrow structure that ignored the realities of refugee kinship systems.

Our seven-year ethnographic study followed 52 Syrian households resettled under Canada’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative. Most arrived with their extended kin networks intact. Instead, they came as reduced units: parents with young children, and rarely anyone else. Grandparents, adult children, siblings, and in-laws—core members of the family in their countries of origin—were systematically excluded.

In a new article published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, part of a special issue on “Refugee Resettlement as an Institution,” my co-author Laila Omar and I argue that this exclusion was not incidental. It was built into policy. Canada’s immigration law narrowly defines “family” for reunification purposes, and the United Nations’ guidelines for refugee referrals reinforce this restriction. The dominant assumption behind these definitions is that the nuclear family is universal. In reality, this model clashes with the kinship norms of many refugee communities.

The result was not just separation, but a fundamental restructuring of family life. One mother, Rima, explained, “We are used to being a family, not alone.” Her teenage daughter often cries after video calls with her aunt, who helped raise her and remains abroad. For this family, and many others, the physical distance from kin reshaped the emotional and developmental experiences of daily life.

Before displacement, caregiving was shared. In Syria, grandmothers bathed babies, aunts helped with homework, and uncles offered both discipline and emotional support. Families relied on dense kin networks that extended well beyond the nuclear unit. In Canada, those supports vanished. Mothers were left to manage everything alone, in unfamiliar systems and in a new language. Several were unable to attend English classes or pursue job training, not because of a lack of motivation, but because no one was there to help with the children. Integration was expected, but the social infrastructure that made it possible had been cut away.

The most common experience across our study was what we call unresolved protracted separation. Of the 52 families, over 40 remained separated from key family members throughout the research. These separations were not due to neglect or lack of effort. Instead, families encountered impenetrable bureaucratic barriers and financial hurdles.

Zeinab, a widow resettled in Canada through BVOR, a public-private partnership, described the process as unfair and corrupt. She had tried repeatedly to bring her sister to Canada. “I told them last time, ‘Bring my sister here. Just for my children. I can’t go back to Syria. They want to murder me and my children’,” she explained. But the UN rejected her sister’s application. Zeinab was devastated. “Even in Amman, the UN is all about money and bribes. Those who need help die, and those who lie come here.” Though she remained committed to working within the system, even imagining herself appealing directly to the Prime Minister, her experience reflects the exhaustion and helplessness many families voiced. Reunification was not simply delayed. It was denied.

A smaller number of families achieved what we term negotiated reunification. These households succeeded in bringing over extended kin through private sponsorship, often by taking on enormous financial burdens. Noor, a mother of eight, borrowed $40,000 to sponsor one adult son and his family from Jordan. She said her mental health improved dramatically once he arrived, but the family remained in debt. She had no hope of affording sponsorship for her other children. In Noor’s words, “There is no way other than through the UN.” For families like hers, reunification required both money and access to private networks. These resources are unevenly distributed.

A third group pursued what we call next-generation reunification. As their children reached adulthood, some parents arranged marriages with extended relatives abroad. These were not simply traditional matches. They were intentional strategies to reestablish broken kinship ties. Yasmin, for example, planned for her 23-year-old son to marry a cousin living in Turkey. She hoped the marriage would eventually allow the bride to immigrate and rebuild a family structure that had been lost in migration. Others did the same. These marriages became one of the few available paths for restoring the extended family, especially as families gained permanent residency or citizenship and greater mobility.

Across all three outcomes—protracted separation, negotiated reunification, and next-generation strategies—the underlying issue remains the same. The state forced refugee families to conform to a model that does not match their reality. Families that arrived with broader definitions of kinship were pressured to shrink. Those that resisted or tried to adapt did so under immense strain.

For family sociologists, this case offers a sharp illustration of how the state defines and regulates family life. In the context of refugee resettlement, that regulation is not abstract. It is felt in daily routines, missed celebrations, caregiving gaps, and long-term developmental impacts on children. The nuclear family is not simply encouraged. It is enforced.

Despite these constraints, families continue to assert their own understandings of what family means. They do so through sponsorship efforts, strategic marriages, and daily calls to loved ones still abroad. These acts are not just emotional. They are political. They reflect a refusal to accept the family model imposed by resettlement systems.

When policy continues to ignore the lived reality of family among displaced people, separation and loss will remain defining features of refugee life. But even in the face of exclusion, families continue to reimagine and rebuild. Their efforts deserve not only recognition, but support.

Neda Maghbouleh is the Canada Research Chair in Race, Ethnicity, Migration, and Identity and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her work increasingly engages family, following the lead of study participants whose lives revealed these connections. Follow her on Bluesky/Twitter @nedasoc or reach her at neda.maghbouleh@ubc.ca.

Most of us have heard that body weight can influence health, but far less attention has been paid to the ways it can influence romantic partnership. In our new article in Social Forces, we followed more than two thousand older adults over five years to see whether body size relates to having a partner and partnered sexual activities.

The study relies on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, a nationally representative survey that includes anthropometric measures of weight and height while also recording the interviewers’ rating of each respondent’s body shape on a five‑point scale from very thin to obese. Those two indicators overlap only modestly, meaning we may pull apart two routes by which body size can matter: the functional component of mobility and comfort captured by Body Mass Index (BMI) and the component of social evaluation captured by the interviewers’ rating.

When we looked five years down the road, body size clearly shaped people’s chances of having a partner, but it did so in different ways for men and women. Women who were described by interviewers as carrying more weight were less likely than women described as slimmer to be married, cohabiting, or in a steady dating relationship. The same pattern appeared—though a little more modestly—for BMI independent of the visual rating. Men, in contrast, showed no significant drop in the probabilities of having a partner as body size increased. These patterns held after we adjusted for age, education, and race, suggesting that the impressions tied to body size play a role independent of social background.

Among those partnered, the patterns of body size remain for partnered sex. Women at the upper end of the BMI range reported fewer occasions of vaginal intercourse in the past year, fewer experiences of genital touching and oral sex, and were more likely to say there had been several months when sex simply was not pleasurable. Men’s reports varied little across the body size spectrum and occasionally ticked upward. Solitary sexual activities told another story. How often people thought about sex and how often they masturbated showed no link to either BMI or the visual rating for men or women. When no partner’s eyes are involved, the influence of body size seems to fade.

At least two possible mechanisms could explain how size leads to these outcomes, and we tested each of them in the research just published in this paper. The first mechanism concerns attractiveness. Because the same interviewers who rated body shape also gave each respondent an overall attractiveness score, we could see whether attractiveness associated with different body shape mediate its association with partnership or sexual activity. Our results show that the negative associations of rated body shape with having a partner and engaging in partnered sex were mostly explained by the differences in the attractiveness scores. This mechanism mattered a lot for women and their access to intimate sexual activity. For men, attractiveness explained their patterns between body shape and finding sex not pleasurable and engaging in any sexual activity.

The second mechanism concerns comfort and mobility. The survey asked whether respondents had trouble walking one block, walking across a room, dressing, bathing, eating, such as cutting up food, getting in or out of bed, and using the toilet. Higher BMI predicted a higher count of such limitations for men and women alike. These limitations partially explained connection between high BMI and both men and women’s reports that sex had not been pleasurable. They did not explain the lower odds of having a partner or smaller number of sexual encounters, which points back to the importance of social impressions.

These evidence of social patterning matter for everyday life because partnership shapes so many other outcomes: household income, caregiving arrangements, emotional support, and shared decision‑making. When the chances of partnership and satisfying sex shift with body size, other parts of family life shift as well. Health guidelines and research often present BMI as a personal health indicator. The patterns we see remind us that body size also carries social meaning, and that meaning can open or close doors.

Body size is far more than a health statistic. It is part of a social script that guides who meets, who matches, and how intimacy unfolds, and that script reads differently for men and for women. Recognizing both the perception side and the functional side of body shape can help individuals, clinicians, educators, and media creators open more pathways to lasting partnerships and satisfying intimate sexual activities for people of every shape.

Yiang Li is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is also a predoctoral trainee in the NIA T32 Program in the Demography and Economics of Aging at the Center on Healthy Aging Behaviors and Longitudinal Investigations and a student affiliate at the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago. His research focuses broadly on social demography, health, family, neighborhood, and aging. You can follow Yiang Li on bluesky @yiangli.bsky.social and learn more about him on his website.

Linda J. Waite is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, sexuality, and social well-being. She is the Principal Investigator of the NIA-funded National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project. Waite is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the NIA and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

What does it mean for survivors of the Shoah and their children to be “at home” with the Holocaust? Of course, this question does not suggest that survivor-families lived comfortably with or found a sense of refuge in the memories, stories, or traumas from the Holocaust post-1945. For survivors and their children, those known as the second generation, this was most certainly not the case; these two groups, affected both directly and indirectly, were not uncommonly traumatized by the murderous events that took place during Hitler’s reign between 1933 and 1945. This question of being “at home” with the Holocaust instead refers to how the memories, stories, and traumas from the Shoah took up residence, abided with, and haunted survivors and their children alike in their homes for years to come. For both groups, their domestic lives were in significant ways shaped by the Holocaust; it came home with them, so to speak, darkly coloring how they interacted with and inhabited their domiciles. Being at home with the Holocaust thus denotes a state of domestic existence that was (and is) imbued with the enduring legacy of the Nazi regime.

My new book, At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), examines the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Analyzing second-generation (and, to a lesser extent, third-generation) Holocaust literature—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid, Elizabeth Rosner’s The Speed of Light, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated—as well as oral histories of children of survivors, my research reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as spaces of traumatic transference. As survivors’ traumas became imbued in the very space of the domestic, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating environments that, not uncommonly, second-handedly wounded their children. As survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas, like concentration camps and ghettos, their homes catalyzed the transmission of these traumas.

At Home with the Holocaust’s examination of the literature and oral histories of children of survivors gives voice to a number of interrelated themes and phenomena, including how members of the second generation’s relationships to their homes reveal their relationships to themselves, their parents, and the Holocaust; how their homes and material belongings contained therein spatialize, temporalize, express, and shape their inherited traumas; how survivor-family homes paradigmatically shape subsequent domestic spaces (along with space and place in general); how the home, often in complex ways, stands for the self in second-generation Holocaust literature and oral history; and how notions of home(lands) are complicated for descendants of survivors. An exploration of survivor-family homes as represented and narrated by members of the second generation moreover sheds light on how the affective impact of survivors’ memories—as expressed in their verbal and nonverbal communication—manifest, invade, and permeate their and their children’s domestic lives. It is these emotional intensities that radiate from survivors and are perceived by their children as both parties navigate time and space in their family homes. Second-generation authors and narrators give expression to this affective transmission, particularly in and through their narratives about their homes.

But although survivor-family homes are markers of haunted pasts, they are also markers of separation from those pasts—those which symbolize a severing of continuity. They stand for new starts, New-World beginnings, ruptures from the Old World, and archival containers of that which occurred after the catastrophic years of 1933–1945. Holding within them both traumatic pasts and the severing of those pasts, survivor-family homes represent the second-generation paradox: They are not only intimately connected to and gripped by the past, but they are also emphatically distant from the Shoah. This proximity and distance—this simultaneous connection and disconnection from the Holocaust—defines many second-generation lived experiences, certainly within the home but also, no doubt, without.

Throughout the literary representations of survivor-family homes and homelands analyzed in At Home with the Holocaust, along with selected oral-history discussions of domestic space, it becomes clear how space speaks. As survivors’ traumas and experiences of the Holocaust were imbued in their homes, such traumas and experiences were expressed in and by the emotional space of the second generation’s childhood and adulthood homes. Surrounded by their parents’ Holocaust pasts that found emotional, material, and spatial expression in their domestic milieus, children of survivors became aware of and subject to their inherited traumas of the Holocaust. Survivor-family homes were and are integral actants that emotionally speak to the second generation about their parents’ Holocaust experiences. This specific sort of speaking—this type of emotional, material, and spatial communication—typified and, in many cases, continues to typify many survivor-family homes, wherein the second generation have found themselves, in complicated and complex ways, at home with the Holocaust.

Lucas F. W. Wilson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga and was formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (JKP Books, 20205), and he is the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also the co-editor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature (Lexington Books, 2023). His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues. He is currently working on an edited collection about queer experiences at Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. You can follow him on Twitter (@wilson_fw), Instagram and Threads (@lukeslamdunkwilson), and Bluesky (@lukeslamdunkwilson.bsky.social).