This article examines the political, social, and relational consequences of artificial intelligence through an anti-colonial and Indigenous lens. Challenging claims that AI is neutral or inevitable, we show that it is embedded in settler-colonial, racialised, and gendered power structures. Across predictive policing, facial recognition, automated welfare, deepfake sexual violence, and embodied robotics, AI does not malfunction; it performs exactly as designed, reproducing historical domination. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and critiques of technological progress, we show how AI amplifies epistemic and material inequalities, particularly for Indigenous women and communities. We unsettle Western techno-futurist imaginaries and instead position Indigenous relationality as a pathway to ethical, accountable, and sovereign AI futures. AI harm is not accidental but systemic and extractive. We call for rejecting AI inevitability and advancing community-led responses that disrupt algorithmic settler colonialism and reimagine intelligence beyond domination.
The traditional concept of filial piety characterising Asian cultures has undergone change. However, research is limited on how filial support is redefined and negotiated in Asian immigrant families in the context of acculturation. This study adopted theories of acculturation and life course to examine how continuity and change of filial piety were practised in Asian immigrants’ families in Australia. Data were collected from interviews with 73 older immigrants from Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Malaysian, Japanese, Myanmar, Lao, Indian, and Pakistani cultural groups. Their age ranged from 65 to 93 years. Thematic analysis showed that participants continued to value filial piety as their cultural tradition, but adjusted expectations of filial practices in response to acculturation experiences, age at immigration, and sociocultural contexts. The findings revealed the interconnections between continuity and change of culture and suggested integrating community and family care to better support older immigrants to age well in a foreign land.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian state governments adopted strict border restrictions. In rural border communities, difficulties associated with government interventions were routinely conceptualized by rural peoples as a continuation of a theme of disenfranchisement derived from a rural-urban schism. This qualitative study, comprising semi-structured interviews (N = 35) with participants from the town of Goondiwindi, Queensland (Australia), contributes to the literature on urban-rural divides. The findings demonstrate not only the continuation of a theme of rural dissatisfaction with city-based government, but an emergent "othering" of city-based compatriots resultant of experiences with state border restrictions. These findings have political implications and broader consequence for social cohesion between predominantly urban citizenry and the rural minority.
This article examines how YouTube creators act as neoliberal pedagogues in the circulation of data work platforms. Drawing on a qualitative examination of 43 videos, it investigates how these creators embed entrepreneurial logics and moral discourses into the everyday practices of aspiring workers. We argue that YouTube operates as a paraplatform that mediates how data work is circulated, legitimized, and contested across transnational contexts. The analysis identifies three key dimensions: (1) motivational aesthetics and slogans that frame data work as desirable and morally legitimate; (2) tactics and skills conveyed through step-by-step tutorials that both naturalize and expand the platform labor circuit; and (3) contested discourses in which frustration and disillusionment surface but are often reabsorbed into neoliberal pedagogies. These pedagogies converge into relatively standardized repertoires, revealing how religious and moral frameworks reinforce neoliberal pedagogies. The article theorizes creators as discursive-ideological intermediaries who reproduce individualized survival strategies, absorb critique, and shape worker subjectivities within global circuits of data work.
This article examines how responsibility is understood and enacted among S & amacr;moan diaspora living in Greater Brisbane, Australia. Drawing on 46 in-depth, repeat interviews with 16 participants, the study demonstrates that responsibility is a multifaceted practice shaped by cultural values, migration histories and everyday social relations. Participants described responsibility across three interconnected domains: the household; the community; and the future self. These accounts reveal how S & amacr;moan collectivist practices, such as fa'alavelave and tautua, intersect with the expectations of life in Australia, often producing tensions between individual aspirations and communal obligations. The findings highlight the ways responsibility is embedded in fa'as & amacr;moa, encompassing reciprocity, service and relational identity, while also negotiating the pressures of Western individualism. By foregrounding S & amacr;moan-centred perspectives, the article argues for a more nuanced sociological understanding of responsibility that moves beyond dichotomies of personal versus societal responsibility and recognises its fluid, relational and culturally situated nature.
This exploratory study examines factors influencing support for treaty-making among parents and caregivers of Indigenous youths in Australia. Despite calls for Indigenous-state treaties for more than half a century, empirical evidence on attitudes towards contemporary treaty-making remains remarkably limited. Using data from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (n = 682), over 80% of respondents rated treaty as 'very important' increasing to 95% when including moderately important. Binary logistic regression indicates that significant predictors of strong treaty support include treaty knowledge, Indigeneity, and understanding of one's family, history, and culture, while many standard socioeconomic variables were non-significant. Despite high levels of expressed importance, overall treaty understanding was comparatively low. This disjuncture suggests that views on treaty may reflect a range of relational and experiential influences. At the same time, the association between knowledge and support indicates that improving access to balanced, historically grounded information may support informed engagement with treaty processes.
The "information economy" is a mixed blessing, since it widens social division between workers who possess digital abilities and those who do not. Urban labor markets in cities, particularly in the Global South, have greatly been transformed due to the growing expansion of app-based transportation platforms. As existing studies rely largely on qualitative studies, hence, using a quantitative method, this paper examined how the app-based transportation system in Dhaka, Bangladesh, affected the employment and livelihoods of traditional transport workers. This study explored that app-based transportation platforms attract numerous digitally savvy professionals; thus, using survey data from 480 respondents, it is shown that traditional and digitally illiterate transport workers and their earnings have become vulnerable in Dhaka city. This paper offers recommendations for developing and implementing policies to enhance digital skills that will effectively include them in the platform economy, thereby reducing their employment and livelihood vulnerabilities and safeguarding their rights within the information economy.
This article examines how Chinese digital platforms export tight temporal governance, characterised by algorithmic urgency, work intensification, and short-term monetisation, into Global North labour markets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022-2025), it analyses two Chinese-owned platforms operating in Australia: Bigo Live, a livestreaming platform, and HungryPanda, a food delivery platform serving Asian diasporic communities. Rather than treating Australia as a uniformly protected labour regime, the article approaches it as a typical Global North dualised core-periphery system, where stable working conditions are concentrated within a protected core while peripheral workers face increasing time insecurity, despite a broader discourse of fairness and protection that is not consistently realised in practise. Within this context, Chinese platforms extend domestic labour practises across borders and amplify pre-existing forms of time insecurity, along with racialised understandings of international labour, through platformised governance, algorithmic incentives, and migration precarity.
This special issue of the Journal of Sociology explores the variegated nature of digital labour platforms and their operations across the Global South and Global North. In recent years, digital labour platforms have emerged as a significant technological wave, reshaping and reconfiguring the landscapes of labour and the broader economy. However, their emergence and expansion have not followed uniform trajectories across different parts of the world. Within this context, drawing on case studies from Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, France, Sweden and the UK, the contributors examine how platform work is shaped by shared 'techno-social logics' while remaining differentiated by local contexts, power relations and modes of contestation.
This article focuses on migrant youth in regional areas of Australia who write and perform hip-hop. Hip-hop music serves as a means of 'juggling' the contradictions in the sense of belonging experienced by these young people, who identify as both 'Australians' and 'migrants', while also addressing regional inequalities that affect a young generation. The article examines the regional cultural context in which migrant youth create and engage in cultural practices of self-expression, reimagining and 'localising' global hip-hop culture. Regional practices of hip-hop can be seen as indicators of transformations in regional cultural identities brought about by gradual changes in demographics and the growing presence of non-Western migrants. The article draws on the potential wider cultural and social impacts of migrant youth's music-making, urging policymakers to utilise these grassroots practices in regional cultural, migration and settlement policies.
Loneliness is a growing public health and public policy concern and, internationally, governments are promoting volunteering as an important remedy for ageing populations. Research shows there are positive health and social outcomes from volunteering; however, the dominant approaches to understanding loneliness reinforce an individualising understanding of the issue as occurring primarily among older people, and investment in volunteering-based solutions is subject to economic justifications. This article investigated the experiences of volunteers in community centres in South Australia seeking to remedy their loneliness with attention to the impact of neoliberal rationales and funding arrangements. Applying a Marxist lens to data from 123 participants in 15 focus groups, we argue that, while the community centres aim to be spaces for connection and preventing loneliness, the effect of neoliberal funding prioritises productivity through volunteer labour.
Healthcare worker migration and international student migration have received extensive attention in public, political and scholarly discourse. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted Australia's fraught relationship with students and healthcare workers from overseas and these tensions persist. Despite these parallel tracks of concern, the connections between healthcare and education migration have been underexplored. Building on Robertson's 'education-migration nexus' and grounded in Wyss and Dahinden's 'entangled mobilities' approach, the paper proposes the healthcare-education-migration nexus as a framework for understanding the interdependencies of international education and Australia's healthcare workforce. Drawing on in-depth interviews with overseas-trained healthcare workers, this paper presents five 'exemplary entanglements' between these two domains, often characterised as operating under different structural, regulatory and discursive regimes. The findings show that international education underpins the mobility pathways of healthcare workers in Australia. With policymakers proposing restrictions on student migration, this paper points to potential unintended consequences for Australia's struggling care economy.
This article applies a feminist multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) to 19 Australian women's financial self-help books (WFSH) published between 2004 and 2024 to examine how paratextual aesthetics feminise finance. Data are presented in three sections. First, book covers display spatial motifs and neoliberal postfeminist signifiers to appeal to a heterosexual, white, middle-class reader, promising that WFSH is fun, girly, and playful. Second, on the back covers, devices such as rhetorical questions, dot points and author biographies depoliticise financialisation, framing financial success as simple and meritocratic ignoring broader context and emphasising individualism. Third, while some chapter headings and prefaces gesture towards structural barriers and differences among women, these acknowledgements are fleeting and ultimately subordinated to dominant discourses of self-responsibility and universalism. In sum, the genre's aesthetics construct feminine financial inclusion narrowly for subjects who are heterosexual, middle class, and white and, in doing so, marginalise women whose experiences fall outside these norms.
This paper critically examines conceptualizations of "transnational," "global" or "cosmopolitan" habitus in migration, globalization and inequality research. We conceptualize habitus as a configuration of basic dispositions, using items from the Schwartz values battery, and compare the effect of habitual dispositions, class, and migration on cosmopolitan self-identification via country-specific multiple regression models, based on data from the World Values Survey (2005-2015) of around 100,000 individuals from 74 countries. We show that migration experiences and habitual dispositions of openness to new and stimulating experiences rather than orientations toward tradition and security are associated with stronger global self-identification. We also find a tendency among the upper classes toward cosmopolitan identification; however, these effects vary between an economic and a cultural capital route as well as among societies. Our findings thus caution against the uncritical use of "one-size-fits-all" concepts such as transnational, global and cosmopolitan habitus independent from specific social and cultural contexts.
The rise of technocapitalism profoundly reshapes societal structures, sparking critical debate and demanding new analytical frameworks to grasp its multifaceted implications. This article argues that cyberpunk, far from mere speculative fiction, can function as a retrospective experimental laboratory for social theory. Its central claim is not that sociological theory simply enriches literary interpretation, but that literature - in this case, the foundational cyberpunk works of the 1980s - provides conceptual resources for apprehending technocapitalism in its current forms. Rather than focusing on detailed case studies of individual texts, the article develops a synoptic framework based on four recurring 'refractions' - existential, social, cultural and moral - that consistently structure the genre's portrayal of 'high tech, low life'. By situating these fictional worlds alongside contemporary debates (from Kellner's work on technocapitalism to the effects of an era dominated by widespread uncertainty and systematic precarity, as analysed by Bauman), the article demonstrates how cyberpunk illuminates the paradoxes of technological advancement accompanied by social disintegration. Its contribution is twofold: first, to show how cyberpunk fiction remains heuristically valuable for understanding precariousness, marginality and moral deregulation under technocapitalism today; and second, to position literature as a resource for social theory, offering imaginative yet analytically illuminating insights into contemporary civilizational challenges.
This article presents an auto-ethnographic analysis of research on technology-facilitated abuse affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, grounded in the author's experience as an Indigenous scholar working across academic, policy, and funding institutions. Indigenous women experience disproportionate levels of online harassment, image-based abuse, surveillance, and algorithmic profiling, yet are excluded from shaping research agendas, funding decisions, and policy responses. Key institutional processes governing technology-facilitated abuse research are opaque by design and inaccessible to conventional empirical methods. Auto-ethnography is therefore used to expose how settler institutions extract Indigenous experiences as data, accumulate funding and prestige, and reproduce colonial research economies that deny Indigenous authority over knowledge. Drawing on Critical Indigenous Studies and Indigenous feminist scholarship, the article argues that technology-facilitated abuse reflects settler-colonial logics embedded in research governance. It calls for Indigenous leadership, data sovereignty, and relational accountability as foundations for ethical research and meaningful reform.
Work on food delivery platforms is characterised by increasing vulnerability and a disproportionate representation of a racialised male workforce composed primarily of (undocumented) migrants. Despite mounting criticism of the gig economy model, entrepreneurial discourses and practices continue to be celebrated, produced, and reproduced by politicians, mainstream media, and workers alike. This article draws on three years of ethnographic research with food couriers in the UK and France and explores how platform workers mobilise entrepreneurial aspirations to assess and enact their masculinity within and beyond the workspace. It focuses on two common tactics adopted by these workers: account renting and multi-apping. However, the intensification of work resulting from these practices - combined with a lack of citizenship rights and economic precarity - ultimately undermines their entrepreneurial ambitions.
Australian identity continues to evolve, and remains highly contested, reflecting the socio-cultural and historical tensions of the nation. Understanding which characteristics individuals prefer to define Australian identity is crucial for shaping inclusive national identity constructions and fostering social cohesion. Using Q methodology, this study aimed to examine preferred characteristics of Australian identity by identifying and interpreting shared archetypal viewpoints, highlighting broad commonalities and divergences in how Australian identity is constructed. Forty-six participants ranked a set of statements about Australian identity from most to least preferred. Analysis revealed three distinct viewpoints, reflecting preferences for: (a) prioritising the inclusion of Indigenous Australians and their cultures alongside broader cultural diversity; (b) inclusive civic values reflective of diversity and equity; and (c) social contribution and conditional inclusion. These viewpoints reveal novel constructions of Australian identity, highlighting the need to promote Australian identity in ways that reflect contemporary preferences for inclusion and social cohesion.
Platforms mediating care services are increasingly reshaping the geographies of social reproduction, offering care fixes to some, while exacerbating the crisis of care for others. In this paper, we draw on research on healthcare, deliveries and cleaning platforms in Sweden to argue that platforms reinforce and redistribute flows of care privilege and care poverty between the Global North and the Global South, between urban and rural locations, and within cities, thus deepening the uneven geographies of care. These uneven geographies apply to those performing social reproductive work as well. While the working conditions of migrant platform cleaners have clear repercussions for their own social reproduction, other segments, such as healthcare professionals, may experience platform work as a fix to both working conditions and work-life balance. Ultimately, we propose that the political economy of social reproduction unfolds as a spatially uneven process, making life easier for some and harder for others.
Veganism, the eschewing of Nonhuman Animal production and consumption, promises to deliver a significant disruption to the nation-state's heavy dependence on the systematic exploitation of other animals. For precarious newly developed nation-states, this disruptiveness takes on another level of sociological relevance. First, economic reliance on other animals is often presumed mandatory for global participation and legitimacy. Second, citizens of these new nations are frequently overcoming the legacy of colonialist racialization, which characteristically animalizes subjects to justify their subjugation. Animal nationalism is an emerging field which presses the discipline to negotiate the importance of animality in defining national and cultural identities. Using Ireland as a case study, this article advances animal nationalism theory by positing that it is more than humanity's relationship with actual nonhumans that is at play in nation-building, but also the metaphorical relationship between humans and other animals, given their utility in maintaining human stratification systems.
