ABSTRACT For some time now, medical education research has documented increased levels of undesirable outcomes as a byproduct of professionalization, such as decreased mental health and increased burnout. Whether or not some of these trends begin at an earlier point remains a primary gap in this research. We introduce the concept of boredom proneness to this research, proposing that students' sense of the flow of time is an important factor, and outline how this affects their health throughout their undergraduate studies. Trait measures of boredom tap into not merely momentary discomfort with a context or situation, but a deeper existential challenge of socially‐induced discordance with a self in time. This study uses unique data following three consecutive cohorts of pre‐health undergraduate students in a small liberal arts college through all 4 years of undergrad ( n = 530). We use random intercept autoregressive structural equation models to show how burnout, mental health, overall health, social support, and a novel measure of boredom proneness change throughout time. We find that trait boredom is highly time‐invariant. Importantly, we find that boredom is a potent predictor of burnout and decreased health (mental and overall health) over time. In fact, boredom is a more potent predictor of worse mental health than the same measure from prior waves.
ABSTRACT Drawing on a large corpus of political rhetoric that encompasses 21 US presidential campaigns between 1952 and 2020, this article provides a sociological account of the politician's anti‐intellectual performance. To exact the dynamics of this understudied performance, I compare frames on intellectualism put forth by populist and non‐populist candidates on both the political left and right. In order to distance themselves from the intellectually elitist aspects of their position, I find that anti‐intellectual performers have repeatedly (1) integrated notions of common sense into ideal conceptions of political leadership, (2) justified a lack of cooperation with experts by characterizing references to complexity and expertise as illegitimate and/or ploys to cover self‐interestedness, and (3) established proximity to the audience by using symbolic signifiers that coalesce into a low epistemic style. By locating salient patterns of anti‐intellectualism in political rhetoric, this article elaborates both the logic of political performance and the social character of the populist actor.
In June 2023, the US Supreme Court in 303 Creative v. Elenis held that an anti-discrimination statute could not force a Christian business owner to provide certain business services to gay people. The decision has created a slew of legal and social uncertainties, which require a deeper investigation of the contemporary conflict between the gay community and the Christian community. This article begins that investigation by examining data from 46 briefs submitted in favor of the Christian business owner in 303 Creative. The following themes were identified: (1) Christians believe that they are under attack by powerful gay rights activists, (2) having a strong stance on the sinfulness of homosexuality is so central to Christian identity that it requires refusing services to gay people, and (3) Christians believe that their religion mandates closing their business if they are asked to provide services to gay customers. By bringing together Bourdieu's social theory and legal consciousness literature, this article offers insights for researchers who are interested in studying this conflict, including how narratives of marginalization and power are constructed within legal texts regardless of broader structural asymmetries, and it highlights the need for these researchers to consider incorporating into their research a right for gay people to participate in society by receiving goods and services as full citizens.
Research on the far right has shown that its resonance does not depend solely on ideological alignment but also on the moral connections individuals build with these groups. Scholars have done significant work clarifying the ways in which resonant relationships are experienced. However, there is room to supplement these perspectives with works that show the heterogeneity of moral values that underpin far-right resonance and the different ways they are used to sustain that support across shifting contexts and rhetoric. Building upon a tradition that sees morality and identity as interdependent, this paper asks: How do individuals' self-understandings shape their support for the far right? It approaches this question by drawing on interviews with organizers, militants, and supporters of Chile's Republican Party (CRP), the country's most prominent far-right formation, and its leader, Jos & eacute; Antonio Kast. The findings indicate that support for the CRP emerged through the reworking of moral backgrounds centered on social order, Catholicism, the heteronormative family, and resilience. Participants sustained their support by drawing on these moral backgrounds to interpret significant events in Chile's political history, the authenticity of Kast's persona, as well as discursive shifts in ways that relate to their personal experiences. These findings contribute to the theorization of resonance within the far right by showing how it is locally embedded while selectively adapting transnational themes to specific historical and cultural contexts.
ABSTRACT The rise of generative AI necessitates a sociological re‐evaluation of trust, the concept of virtuality, and meta‐critical joy. Both generative AI and imaginative literature create virtuality which can be theorized as artificial experiences. The challenges presented by AI are anthropological rather than merely technological. The current AI hype obscures corporate mismanagement while framing education as a joyless, transactional process. As a solution, this essay proposes the development of intellectual pleasure. By reframing human relationships with technology, educators and students can prioritize the affective processes of discovery and community‐oriented storytelling. This essay advocates for reclaiming the classroom as a site of intellectual well‐being, where the artificial, but not contrived, nature of learning becomes a pathway to genuine human connection.
This essay grapples with the problematic legacy that sociology and criminology have with supporting community engaged research with street‐identified populations (e.g., gang members, justice‐involved). While universities have increasingly called for community engagement, very few tier‐1 institutions actually provide poor communities with substantive intellectual and material resources. In fact, the community engaged relationship is mostly transactional and one‐sided, with researchers being mostly interested in extracting data as opposed to enacting social‐structural change. Consequently, a growing number of local residents have become angry at this parasitic relationship; thus, the “chickens are coming home to roost,” or these residents are demanding clearer explanations about this exploitive dynamic. Furthermore, while most research institutions have not delivered on well‐resourced community engaged initiatives, this essay still makes the argument that viable opportunities exist for doing this work inside low‐income urban environments. Also, several examples of promising participatory projects and programs with a focus on the criminal legal system are provided, including: Participatory Research in Prisons at the Urban Institute in Baltimore, Maryland; Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School; or the participatory work led by grassroots non‐profits like the Center for Structural Equity in Wilmington, Delaware.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rely on donor support to pursue their missions. As such, NGOs may forgo initiatives that do not appeal to constituents, such as racially coded activities. This dynamic is especially relevant for environmental NGOs (ENGOs), which have faced considerable pressure to integrate racial equity from environmental justice movements. Here, we use ENGOs as an exemplary case of the challenge facing NGOs attempting to address racial equity, using a survey experiment (n = 1220) to examine donor support for racially marked ENGOs (i.e., those with explicit mention of racially marginalized groups) and racially unmarked ENGOs (i.e., those with no mention of racial groups). We find that including racially marked initiatives does not affect overall donation levels or willingness to donate in the future. However, this null finding is driven by countervailing responses: Individuals with high levels of colorblind racial ideology donate less, while those with low levels donate more. These results suggest that, rather than losing material support, NGOs are more likely to experience a constituency shift. Our study contributes to the underexplored topic of environmental justice donations and posits that NGO hesitancy to integrate racial equity may stem from organizational cultures rather than a legitimate threat of losing donations.
Worldmaking is a capacious concept. Far from imagining Empire, sociological treatments of worldmaking are expansive, anchoring the building of new systems, new scaffolds of belonging, and new ways of being in everyday work and collective practices. Worldmaking is a conceptual project and a practical project. This presidential address offers a framework for thinking about worldmaking and its links to both transformation and repair in the context of a prolonged polycrisis. By worldmaking, I mean worlds made and unmade, by people doing ordinary things together, in the face of a temporal and spatial order that limits and constrains. Worldmaking occurs as we bump up against big structure. Worldmaking wards against human vulnerability and despair and sometimes upends harmful systems. Worldmaking is fundamentally grounded in practical labor. It is emergent activity. People are always engaged in building new worlds for themselves, usually worlds within worlds. This address explores the analytical tools for conceptualizing worldmaking on sociological terms, even if ultimately worldmaking, as an analytical intervention, must be both interdisciplinary and community based. This address concludes with consideration of worldmaking and our methods of inquiry.
Are expressions like "sense of responsibility," "sense of community," and "business acumen" merely metaphors, or do they refer to deeper, socially embedded forms of perception? This article introduces the concept of "sensing frames": the socially learned, culturally shaped, and pragmatically enacted modalities through which people perceive and feel frames-the organizational principles that, according to Goffman, allow us to define the situation and recognize "what is going on" around us. Just as the bodily senses help to orient us in physical space, sensing frames-such as the sense of justice, belonging, or urgency-guide ethical evaluations, shape collective experiences, and structure interactions. Drawing on the sociology of senses through an interactionist perspective, we argue in favor of a rethinking of social perception by radicalizing the sensory dimensions of frames and social interactions. Sensing frames are thus the cultivated modalities and activities of sensing through which the social world becomes intelligible, shareable, and livable.
Credit is a necessary tool for consumption and wealth accumulation. However, credit invisibility, a low credit history, or none at all, diminishes its power. Some credit-invisible borrowers recoup credit's power through a cosigner, someone who guarantees a loan to unlock lower interest rates and favorable terms. While the benefits of a cosigner are well known, less is known about the distribution of access to one. If access to a cosigner is distributed along existing social hierarchies known to shape access to credit unequally, then it may have implications for understanding how stratified credit markets are reproduced. Using data from the Year 15 follow-up wave of the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), the most recent wave with information on cosigning, we examine the incidence and correlates of access to a cosigner among primary caregiver mothers. We find access to a cosigner is concentrated among White, economically advantaged, and financially included mothers who receive financial support. Our findings indicate access to a cosigner may be a financial resource that compounds existing economic and social advantages.
This article expands the sociological scholarship on the development of academic programs in intellectual fields tied to social movements. After briefly reviewing this literature, which has especially focused on fields like ethnic studies and women's studies, it examines the development of the smaller field of peace and conflict studies. In considering the potential actors, tactics, and outcomes for programs in these kinds of fields, this article explores and seeks to explain why the establishment of peace/conflict studies, despite the influence of the Vietnam War era, was not characterized by student protest akin to that especially for Black studies programs. Doing so points to three major differences amidst their overlapping histories-the central organizational actors involved (i.e., students/non-students), the related influence of ideology, and the major waves of program establishment. This article closes with suggestions for further expanding comparative research, including ways that these fields continue to be politicized, the relationship between broader movement activities and institutionalization, and the recent establishment of conservative-backed academic programs in the university.
This paper introduces transboundary spanning as a novel concept for social movement analysis. Using Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the United States as a case study, we examine the relational dynamics of social movement boundary spanning: processes wherein actors and organizations engage across symbolic boundaries. Drawing on a 3-month ethnography of XR in the Northeastern US, 44 in-depth semi-structured interviews with US activists, and 199 interviews across 24 other countries, we examine how divisions over racial justice and organizational configuration played out within the movement. Our analysis illustrates how social movement transboundary spanning works in practice, interrogating the ways in which multiple forms of boundary spanning occur simultaneously, impacting each other and creating multiplex outcomes. The study contributes to key debates in sociology by providing a granular analysis of how the politics of race and organizational debates unfold at the meso level of environmental social movement organizations.
ABSTRACT The literature on burnout and persistence for activists or other social change actors has diversified from an explanation of causes to the study of how to address the challenges of disengagement. This review of the literature provides an analysis of organizational strategies for reducing burnout and disengagement. The review uses an explicit search, selection, and inclusion strategy to identify the most relevant English‐language sources. The review identifies thematic areas within three main groups of strategies (individual‐level support, organizational culture change, and relations with non‐movement actors). Significant and novel approaches to strategies are analyzed for each area. To date, the literature has focused more on the first group and, within it, especially on the strategy of educating activists about psychological and related self‐care approaches. However, knowledge is growing about other kinds of strategies for reducing disengagement and burnout. The discussion suggests several areas of future research, including the analysis of synergies across strategies, new comparative issues, and assessment of strategies.
This study investigates how protests influence media coverage in a nondemocratic context, focusing on the 2022-2023 education-related protest wave in Hungary. Drawing on data from the Hungarian Protest Event Database (HuPED) and a corpus of 24,029 education-related articles across 47 online news portals, we examine how different types of media-classified by political alignment and geographic scope-respond to protest activity. Using panel regression models, we find that only independent media exhibit a substantial agenda-setting response to protest events, and only when protest intensity is high. In contrast, pro-government media largely suppress both issue and demand salience, and when coverage does occur, governmental actors dominate the interpretation. These findings provide empirical support for theories of informational autocracy by demonstrating how state-controlled media is able to manipulate the information about grievances and protesters' demands in order to mitigate the risks of regime collapse. By limiting public awareness of grievances, the government can suppress dissent and maintain political stability despite widespread discontent. By combining protest event and media data, this study contributes to the literature on protest outcomes, media agenda-setting, and media systems in nondemocratic regimes. We also suggest that our findings are relevant to democracies experiencing growing polarization and media capture.
A sociology of suicide plainly exists in a historical sense. Since Durkheim, sociologists have ssshown that suicide varies with integration, regulation, inequality, relational embeddedness, institutional arrangements, and cultural repertoires of meaning. The stronger question concerns the conditions under which this work coheres as a field. This essay argues that a specifically sociological explanation of suicide locates suicidal trajectories within patterned inequalities and institutional settings, identifies the meso-level arrangements through which these conditions are enacted, and situates action within available vocabularies, scripts, and moral classifications. Reconsidering structural, interpretive, cultural, relational, critical, intersectional, and digital contributions through this lens shows that the field's strongest insights arise when structure, relation, and meaning are treated as mutually constitutive. The essay contends that sociology's contribution weakens when social variables become residual risk markers inside clinical and epidemiological models. A coherent sociology of suicide requires a mechanism-based account of how social worlds distribute vulnerability, organize recognition, shape interpretation, and channel access to support.
Sexual minority populations experience higher rates of violent victimization and prejudice than heterosexual individuals. While both have long-ranging negative effects, when they happen earlier in life (childhood, adolescence) they have the potential to undermine educational processes, self-esteem, mental health, and physical health, and contribute to reductions in adult socioeconomic well-being. I drew on a theory about victimization in the life course, the stress process model, and research on sexual minority populations to examine how victimization and prejudice in childhood and adolescence may impact adult socioeconomic well-being among sexual minorities. Using structural equation modeling on the Add Health data covering more than 20 years of the life course, I found that exposure to several types of early life victimization and school prejudice led to more adult financial problems and lower educational attainment among those identifying as bisexual, gay/lesbian, and mostly heterosexual, while intimate partner violence led to reduced income among bisexuals. Bisexuals were most strongly affected by different types of victimization and prejudice. There was evidence of mediation through educational self-efficacy, self-esteem, school belonging, depression, and health, though it was primarily for bisexuals. These results highlight how early victimization may reduce socioeconomic well-being among sexual minorities, contributing to patterns of inequality.
