In public debate about gender inequality and violence, gender is frequently framed as an ideological construct in competition with more amenable, material drivers. This paper examines how such representations are produced, analyzing the performative effects of a sex−gender dualism in interviews with alcohol policy researchers discussing “alcohol-fueled violence” in the night-time economy. Demarcating the natural and the social, this “inscription device” stabilizes the individual body as a container for gendered personhood, privileging assumptions about the pharmacological effects of alcohol, and the moderating influence of various social factors. Although presented as objective, these scientific practices foreground alcohol as the primary cause of violence, and downplay the contribution of men and masculinities. We argue that public health approaches to gender equity, grounded in binary biological distinctions, risk not only marginalizing gender analysis, but constituting sex and other objects as more materially and evidentially “real” in research and policy debates.
Australia has faced a considerable number of significant environmental challenges in recent years. These have involved record-breaking droughts, widespread flooding and large-scale bushfires across the country. The intensity of the Australian climate and the image of untouched natural beauty mean that the environment is important in the public consciousness. Conversely, the country's economic performance has been grounded in natural resource extraction. Competing interests and visions of the physical environment have led to high-profile clashes between ‘greenies’ and ‘Aussie battlers’, resulting at times in physical conflict. The aim of this article is to explore the scale and character of environmental activism in Australia. It considers how environmentally focused protest has unfolded over the past three decades, paying attention to locations, actions and claims. Drawing out patterns of protest in this way can aid understanding of how claims around environmental issues enter the public arena in contest with official, state-backed perspectives.
This study examines how generational location becomes translated into value orientations through musical life in the context of China's social transformation. Using an explanatory mixed-methods design, it combines a stratified survey of five birth cohorts (1960s–2000s; N = 1,800) with lyric analysis of 15 representative popular songs. Hierarchical regression and structural equation modeling show that sociodemographic characteristics have limited explanatory power once musical life is considered. Instead, affective listening emerges as the principal mediating mechanism linking generational location to both instrumental and terminal values. Lyric analysis further illustrates how shared symbolic themes are interpreted differently across generations, revealing the cultural translation of historically situated experiences. Rather than treating generational differences as direct cohort effects, this study conceptualizes musical life as an affective mediating field through which generational location becomes associated with value orientations, extending Bourdieu-inspired cultural sociology from cultural reproduction to cultural translation.
Economic transactions involve concerns about seller honesty and product quality, requiring a baseline level of trust from consumers. While economic sociology has extensively studied how networks and market intermediaries foster trust, the role of social macrostructures has been examined less. This paper makes the case that consumer trust is embedded within institutions, operationalized as consumer policy, and culture, represented as market norms. To test our case, we analyze a pooled (2016–2020) dataset of the European Union survey on consumer trust and establish multidimensional indicators of consumer policy and market norms. We find a positive association between consumer policy and consumer trust, even when controlling for economic variables and the sociodemographic composition of countries. Furthermore, cross-level interactions show varied effects on social groups, as consumer policy disproportionately benefits the non-vulnerable. By adopting a comparative perspective on institutions with a focus on social-inequality, this study fills a lacuna in research on consumer trust.
Multiculturalism in Australia is predominantly framed as a benevolent process of “inclusion and diversification”. It promises equity, participation, and belonging for racialized minorities, as well as a pathway to ‘social cohesion’. Inclusion, as it is widely understood, implies equitable access to systems, spaces, and institutions. These enable social and economic mobility while safeguarding belonging and safety. However, for African Australians, “inclusion projects” often fail to protect against racial harm and can instead reproduce assimilationist expectations that demand compliance and a collapse into whiteness as the condition of acceptance. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, this article interrogates the limitations of inclusion as a framework for addressing the “challenges” of belonging. It proposes racial dignity as a more expansive concept that has remained largely unaddressed in Australian political and social dialogues on integration, social cohesion, and belonging. Against this backdrop, we read participants’ resistance as politics of refusal. Here, refusing indignity and insisting on “living with dignity” directly challenge the hierarchical distribution of belonging. Refusal signals that belonging is not a reward to be “granted” by those in power, but a practice that can be cultivated, defended, and expanded by those who are marginalized, excluded or cast as unworthy of belonging. By reframing belonging as an outcome of dignity rather than inclusion, this article redirects the debate toward how dignity is re/claimed in sites where belonging is produced through indignifying processes.
The concept of hope is fundamentally intertwined with the notion of human freedom. In this paper, we explore the hopes of 24 men who have sex with men (MSM) interviewed in Yogyakarta in relation to place, which we refer to as a ‘hopeful place‘, a place that enables them to have hope for the future. This topic is significant because a place and its characteristics can influence, hinder, transform, create, or foster hope for the future. Data analysis employed sociological theory on hope. This study highlighted MSM's experiences of stigma, discrimination, and social relationship challenges that pushed them away from their hometowns/villages. It also highlighted their knowledge and experiences of various factors about Yogyakarta, which attracted them to visit and settle there and how their new hopes for the future were shaped/created. The findings highlight that these pull factors enhance MSM's hope by fostering acceptance, support and freedom to express themselves and build their futures.
Male infertility is often framed as a profound threat to masculinity, particularly within patriarchal contexts where fatherhood is central to male identity. Drawing on nine months of qualitative research at a private fertility clinic in Lahore, Pakistan, this article analyzes men's responses to the social, cultural, and emotional disruptions triggered by a clinical diagnosis of male infertility. Interpretive thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with these men revealed that infertility does not simply produce emasculation or sense of loss. Rather, it pushes them to actively intensify and mobilize existing masculine scripts of endurance, provision, religious faith, and alternative pathways to fatherhood. The study employed the term inflating masculinity as an analytical lens to describe the ways these men expanded the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity without destabilizing its underlying logics. Participants reframed invasive medical treatments as tests of endurance, emphasized financial sacrifice as evidence of responsibility, invoked religious interpretations of infertility as divine trials, and, in some cases, reworked adoption as a legitimate expression of paternal authority. These strategies enabled men to maintain alignment with the dominant gender norms while negotiating reproductive disruptions. By grounding the analysis in men's situated narratives, this study empirically contributes to the sociological debates on masculinity and reproduction in non-Western contexts. Primarily, it adds that hegemonic masculinity is not merely challenged by infertility but actively negotiated and intensified through culturally specific practices. Taken together, these dynamics highlight the adaptive and relational nature of masculinity under conditions of reproductive uncertainty.
If a pedagogy of care is to care about students’ learning, academics often bridge the gap between students’ multiple expectations of tertiary education and institutional demands. The article explores how tertiary funding distributions result in narrowing higher education's potential through subject and staff loss. It suggests that when universities focus on job-ready approaches to learning, they can appear to care less about students’ learning to critically question the present and reimagine possible futures. This article provides an account of three overlapping ways in which universities are becoming and have become careless. First, it considers the recent erosion of the Arts to show, second, how this manifests as the contraction of staff and critical knowledges and third, unsustainable expanding workloads for academic staff. The article concludes by situating a pedagogy of care as an ethical commitment to student learning, and a form of resistance to the instrumentalising higher education.
Online platforms play an important role in how people understand their experiences of chronic illness, learn about their condition(s), and connect with others. This paper draws on 33 semi-structured interviews with young adults (aged 19–29) living with chronic illness in Australia to examine the varied impacts of online platforms on young people's understandings and experiences of illness. Focusing on participants’ experiences of the intensification of anxieties around illness, the finding and sharing of information, and supportive communities, I suggest that this array of experiences demonstrates the need to deliberately cultivate online platforms that provide digital intimacy and support for those experiencing chronic illness, in contrast to those that affectively amplify fear. I further argue that this pursuit is connected to the broader need to uncover, interrogate, and reform stigmas and silences about chronic illness, given that online community can be an important way to resist these individualizing and stigmatizing discourses.
Dating apps are but one of the many digital technologies that extend digital labours, but limited research has examined this in the context of one's thirties. Much of the research on how people navigate dating apps has focused on users’ goals and motivations, with less focus on the different temporalities that are negotiated and produced. This paper explores the distinct dating app experiences of Australian heterosexual women in their mid-thirties, drawing on in-depth interviews with women 34 to 35 years old. This study shows that for these women, online dating is a unique gendered imperative characterized by conscious awareness of how they “invest” their time. Analysing the “time work” of online dating illustrates how, for these women, apps are reconfiguring and intensifying the labour of dating, therefore becoming another form of domestic labour that produces ambivalent feelings and connections.
There is growing recognition in family research that relationship dissolution is not always a linear process. This is exemplified by the fact that some couples who separate subsequently reunite. However, empirical evidence on the prevalence and correlates of such reuniting behaviour in the general population remains extremely limited, particularly outside the United States. Using data from a large-scale longitudinal survey, we examine the prevalence and predictors of reuniting following marital or cohabitation separation in Australia. Five years after separation, 7% of previously married couples and 9% of cohabiting couples had reunited, with reunification most common in the early years following separation. Pre-separation relationship satisfaction was the strongest predictor of reuniting, while indicators of relationship investment and socio-demographic characteristics showed weaker and less consistent associations. The study highlights reuniting as a distinct post-separation trajectory that competes with singlehood and repartnering.
Teaching as care work requires exploring the intersections of care, emotions, and ethics. Educators often navigate personal vulnerability, balancing ethical responsibilities and emotional labour. This article raises three central questions: How does care manifest in classroom teaching? What negotiations occur in treating teaching as care work? Moreover, how do care and ethics intersect? Using Tronto's five phases of care – caring about, caring for, care giving, care receiving, and caring with – the study adopts a methodology closely aligned with Bourdieu's idea of ‘scientific reflexivity’ and Sparkes’ notion of auto-ethnographic writing. Drawing on over two decades of teaching experience across different educational institutions, the article examines the complexities of teaching theoretical courses in a neoliberal context, where market-driven, skills-based curricula dominate. Students increasingly choose practical subjects aligned with industry demands, reflecting the neoliberal care agenda’s shaping of educational policy and institutional goals. A self-reflexive pedagogy is essential to critically engage with the challenges and possibilities of care.
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.
