New & Noteworthy

April 1st, 2025 marks the official launch date of TSP’s official journal, The American Journal of Unfinished Sociology. We have several submissions that we will be sharing in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Gender-Affirming Care and Gender Stereotypes, our latest Discovery my Mallory Harrington, ​covers research by Tara Gonsalves‘s research reveals that insurance coverage for gender-affirming healthcare has expanded over the past two decades, but insurers often rely on gender stereotypes to determine which procedures are deemed medically necessary.

This week’s Clippings by Mallory Harrington includes:

  • Rebecca Hanson, David Smilde, and Verónica Zubillaga argue that deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador echo the authoritarian practices they fled, warning that criminalizing these individuals based on exaggerated fears of gang mobility undermines both justice and U.S. credibility.
  • Oneya Fennell Okuwobi critiques corporate diversity programs that prioritize optics over equity, showing how they often burden employees of color with performative expectations while corporations reap the reputational rewards.
  • Lucius Couloute shares how parole, once meant to support reentry, now functions as a carceral extension—trapping individuals in cycles of surveillance and punishment that undermine rehabilitation.
  • Manuela Perrotta and Lucius Couloute explores how I.V.F. technologies are reshaping emotional relationships to embryos, as patients develop profound attachments to time-lapse videos of developing cells—perceiving them not as potential life, but as life already unfolding.
  • Christine L. William’s concept of the “glass escalator,” describing how men in female-dominated professions are often fast-tracked to leadership, gained national recognition this week when it appeared as a clue on Jeopardy.

From the Archives

Severe storms and tornadoes have recently devastated parts of the South and Midwest, resulting in at least seven fatalities and widespread destruction. But what makes something a natural disaster? In this 2018 piece, such events become disasters not just because of nature, but because of how society shapes people’s risk and ability to respond. Things like poor infrastructure, uneven government response, and economic inequality all play a role in who gets hurt the most. This reminds us that behind every weather event, there’s a social story about who is most vulnerable and why.

With nationalist rhetoric escalating and reshaping policies in unprecedented ways, it’s crucial to understand why nationalism can also escalate tensions. This piece from the Sociological Images breaks down some of the dangers of nationalism.

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