Leana Cabral (Researcher at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Columbia University) wrote an article for The Conversation about anti-Black attitudes in elementary and middle schools in Philadelphia. From interviews with current and former Black students across three generations, Cabral found that students consistently described feeling like their white teachers had low academic expectations of them, they received harsher punishments than non-Black students, and that they “had to work twice as hard” as white students. Cabral also found that some students experienced classrooms that “affirmed their Blackness and did instill in them a sense of pride,” primarily in schools with a majority of Black teachers.

ProPublica ran an article describing how immigrants face harsher sentencing than U.S. citizens. The article cites Michael Light’s (Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin) research on citizenship and sentencing in California and Texas. In Texas, Light found that noncitizens received 62% longer sentences than citizens with the same charges and similar criminal records.

Reformed Journal featured Ryan Burge’s (Professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University in St. Louis) new book, The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us. The book discusses the “hollowing out” of American religious life as a space to find belonging and community “no matter how much or how little one believed in Jesus Christ that particular Sunday.” Burge argues that “American religion has become an ‘all or none’ proposition—conservative evangelical religion or none at all,” leaving little space for theological or political moderates. 

While diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programing is often criticized as politicizing workplaces, Celina McEwen (Senior Researcher in Sociology of Work at the University of Technology Sydney), Alison Pullen (Professor of Gender, Work and Organization at Macquarie University), and Carl Rhodes (Professor of Business and Society at the University of Technology Sydney) argue that DEI is “failing because it refuses to be political at all.” In an article for The Conversation, they discuss three common shortcomings of DEI programs: 1) treating people as categories, 2) treating diversity as a “checkbox,” and 3) avoiding substantial discussions of power.

The Brink interviewed Japonica Brown-Saracino (Professor of Sociology at Boston University) about her new book The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea. In the book, Brown-Saracino describes how the world gentrification has evolved from describing neighborhood change (or, brick-and-mortar gentrification) to a broader metaphor. “I think [gentrification has] become shorthand for talking about social inequalities and capitalism without having to call those things by name—to say that something’s been appropriated, or that something’s become more upscale,” Brown-Saracino explains.

In an article for The Conversation, Meaghan Furlano (Sociology PhD Student at Western University) argues that recent trends of “heteropessimism” and “decentering men” are not novel, but rather part of a longer history of frustration in heterosexual relationships. Furlano describes how the division of domestic labor and the idea that women “can effortlessly balance work and family responsibilities in workplaces not designed to support them” have sustained frustrations across decades.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (Professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science) wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, discussing violence and phone recording by ICE agents in Minneapolis. “The gun and the phone are both weapons, one a tool for violence and the other a tool of control. […] ICE knows that it cannot shoot us all. But the Department of Homeland Security is close to being able to track us all.” McMillan Cottom argues that big data collection and surveillance are threats to our civil liberties. “Many of us have come to believe that our data is something outside of ourselves, when, in fact, data is our self.”

USA Today ran a story on the difficulty and strain of caregiving duties in romantic relationships. The article features Laura Mauldin’s (Associate Professor of Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut) new book, In Sickness and in Health, which shares caregiving love stories and describes how inaccessible healthcare and low support for caregivers impacts relationships. “There’s a romanticization of the idea of ‘the one,’” Mauldin commented. “Because we don’t have robust social safety nets, that love that ‘the one’ has then gets transformed into unending, unrecognized labor that really threatens the stability of our relationships.”

Kate Price (Associate Research Scientist at Wellesley Centers for Women) wrote an article for The Conversation on how the law–particularly state law–can further harm sexually exploited minors. Price explains that children can be criminally charged with prostitution in 35 states, which “risks retraumatizing victims by labeling and stigmatizing them as criminal.” Price notes that black and brown children are at a higher risk for being prosecuted.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss (Professor of Public Affairs at American University) appeared on The Contrarian, discussing the connections between violence and masculinity. Miller-Idriss describes how people may gravitate toward a “protector” narrative of masculinity in times of economic hardship (when a “provider” narrative of masculinity is less achievable). Miller-Idriss notes that we are in a cultural moment of “hyper masculinity that associates being a man with being violent” and this image appears in recruitment for federal agencies. 

Tressie McMillan Cottom (Professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science) appeared on PBS News Hour to discuss how to fight political exhaustion. McMillan Cottom describes how we often feel tired from passively taking in negative news: “We are tired then, not from doing too much, but from doing too little.” She suggests that political action, rather than disengagement, is the antidote to political exhaustion: “People who feel agentic aren’t as tired; they are not as easily overwhelmed.”

Murat Haner (Assistant Professor  of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Arizona State University), Justin Pickett (Professor of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany), and Melissa Sloan (Professor of Sociology & Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, University of South Florida) wrote an article for The Conversation on U.S. political violence. In the 1970s, the bulk of political violence was aimed at property, now the targets are specific people. In a survey study, the authors found that belief in white nationalism was the strongest predictor for support of political violence and argued that “white nationalism poses substantial danger to U.S. political stability.”

Sociologist Stephen Whitehead wrote an opinion piece for NationalWorld arguing against the idea that “masculinity is in crisis.” Whitehead first notes that “masculinity is not singular but multiple. There are countless ways of men performing maleness, manhood, masculinity.” Some men are in crisis, “struggling to find a place in the world that values them as men” and facing depression and isolation. Whitehead names this “collapsed masculinity.” Whitehead also notes that, while there is widespread concern about “toxic masculinity,” he would not describe these men as “in crisis.” Male fundamentalists–those who embrace an “unapologetic, explicitly anti-female, misogynistic position”–are convinced of their superiority and do not trend towards depression or social isolation. Whitehead says that, while this group is dangerous, they are not in crisis.

Willy Pedersen’s (Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo) new book The Beauty and Pain of Drugs reveals an eye-catching correlation: Norwegians who drank heavily in their late teens and early twenties reported higher income and education levels later in life, as compared to their sober or light-drinking peers. “The most likely explanation is that all alcohol is a kind of marker of sociality, and that habit comes with some types of benefits,” Perdersen explained. That is, drinkers forged bonds and social skills that paid off later in life. This story was covered by The Times (London), Vice, and the New York Post.

Victor Onyilor Achem (Researcher in Sociology at the University of Ibadan) wrote an article for The Conversation on how Nigeria’s Benue State Anti‑Open Grazing Law (which “banned the open grazing of livestock and required herders to establish ranches instead”) impacted the dynamics between farming and herding communities. Achem describes how the law–intending to reduce conflict–faltered in both design (as “it expected herders – many of them nomadic, landless and low-capital – to invest in ranches with minimal support”) and enforcement. This left herders feeling “criminalized” and farmers feeling “abandoned.” The law also became a symbol of power, land-based identity, and religious tension: “Both farmers and herders saw it as a struggle for survival, one group fighting to defend ancestral land, the other to preserve livelihood and identity,” Achem writes. “It became a law about belonging, rights, who gets to claim the land, and whose identity is recognised.”

Ruth Braunstein (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut) featured a Q&A with Ernesto Castañeda (Professor and Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab at American University) on her Democracy is Hard Substack site, discussing the impact of the “No Kings” protests. “The “No Kings” events are loosely coordinated transnational contentious performances. The question is whether they represent the seed of a social movement and whether onlookers — the American (and increasingly global) public — see them as “legitimate” and sympathetic,” Castañeda commented. “Some critics say the marches had no clear demands; historically speaking, that is not a fatal flaw but indeed a strength.”

OSU News ran a feature on Ashley Railey’s (Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University) work on how rural areas address substance use. “Across the U.S., evidence suggests that people who use drugs are disproportionately viewed as dangerous, to blame for their disease, and unreliable,” Railey explained. “Combined with limited availability of health care services that are often seen in rural areas, these views — or stigma — can prevent people from seeking out and receiving help, limit the provision of services, and create divisions within communities about who is deserving, or not, of treatment and recovery services.”