2025 Publications

Learn about the latest books, journal articles, and reports of BU social scientists here.

The Center’s mission is to promote the work of Boston University’s social science faculty and our affiliates. If you have or know of someone who has a new publication, please email us at ciss@bu.edu.

2025 Publications

Mary Elizabeth Collins (SSW/Human Behavior  & CISS Affiliate) Key Factors Associated with Connection to School and Work for Emerging Adults Experiencing Low-Incomes (Journal of Social Service Research, Nov 2025) Collins and coauthors analyze which factors help or hinder low-income emerging adults (ages 18-24) in staying connected to school or work over a three-year period. Using longitudinal data from the Pathways to Advancing Careers and Education (PACE) evaluation, covering nine career pathways programs and a sample of 3,340 young adults, the study employs logistic regression to identify predictors of disconnection. The authors find that baseline educational attainment, initial employment status, being born outside the United States, transportation challenges, and the specific program attended all significantly shape whether young adults remain engaged in school or work.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Childhood and Adulthood Social Relationships and Trajectories of Cognitive Function Among Older Chinese Adults (Journal of Aging and Health, Nov 2025) Carr and coauthors examine how social relationships across childhood and adulthood shape later-life cognitive trajectories among older Chinese adults. Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011–2018), they identify four distinct patterns of cognitive aging and show that individuals who had strong childhood ties—particularly warm relationships with mothers and frequent time spent with friends—as well as adults who maintain social interactions with peers, are more likely to follow favorable cognitive paths. The study finds no evidence that Hukou status moderates these associations. Their results highlight the long-term importance of early familial and peer relationships, as well as adult social engagement, for cognitive health in later life, underscoring the potential of relationship-focused interventions to slow cognitive decline.

Maxwell Palmer (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Durable Majority Gerrymanders: Where Partisan Gerrymandering Can Displace Democracy (American Journal of Political Science, Sept 2025) Palmer and coauthor introduce the concept of durable majority gerrymanders, showing how state legislative maps can be drawn to secure a party’s control even under sizable future electoral swings. Using the shortburst optimization algorithm and election-forecast simulations, they identify the most extreme maps each party could create and find that in every state, at least one party can construct a map that would likely preserve its majority—sometimes for an entire redistricting cycle. Comparing these counterfactual maps to enacted plans, the authors show that while geography explains much of existing durability, gerrymandering substantially boosts majority security in many competitive states. They also find that compactness rules and independent commissions meaningfully limit how extreme enacted maps can become.

Ana Villarreal (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Defending the Innovation District: Violence, Urban Entrepreneurialism, and the Privatization of Public Security in Monterrey, Mexico (International Journal of Comparative Sociology, OnlineFirst, 2025) Villarreal and coauthor Dairee Ramírez analyze how Monterrey’s Distrito Tec—a university-led innovation district—has fused urban entrepreneurialism with public–private security regimes. Drawing on ethnographic data collected six years apart, they show how the district’s “open” urban renewal simultaneously produced new forms of surveillance, exclusion, and socio-spatial enclosure. The study reveals how innovation districts in violent contexts become defended entrepreneurial spaces, reshaping both governance and inequality through the privatization of public security.

Zachary Rossetti (Wheelock/Special Education & CISS Affiliate) Effect of a Legislative Advocacy Program among Parents of Children with Disabilities: A Randomized Controlled Trial (Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, Oct 2025) Rossetti and coauthors tested a six-hour legislative advocacy training for parents of children with disabilities in a randomized controlled trial. The program, led by Parent Training and Information Centers, significantly increased participants’ special education knowledge and showed positive trends in empowerment, motivation, and civic engagement six months later. The findings demonstrate how structured advocacy programs can equip parents to participate more effectively in special education policymaking and promote systemic inclusion.

Claudia N. Anderson (Former CISS Postdoctoral Affiliate) Pretrial Jail Experiences and the Criminal Justice Legitimacy Divide: Race Differences in Key Sources of Legitimacy During Pretrial Detention (Theoretical Criminology, OnlineFirst, Oct 2025) Anderson and coauthors analyze nationally representative data from the National Inmate Survey (2011–2012) to examine racial differences in perceptions of procedural justice and staff effectiveness among people held in pretrial detention. They find that Black detainees are significantly less likely than White detainees to view jail staff as fair or competent, revealing how pretrial incarceration reinforces racial divides in perceptions of criminal justice legitimacy.

Makarand Mody (SPH/Hospitality Marketing & CISS Marketing) From Service to Virtue: How Organizations Harness Hospitality for Transformative Social Change (International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Oct 2025) Mody and coauthors propose that hospitality can function as an organizational virtue—not just an industry practice—capable of advancing global sustainability and social transformation. Using the E3 framework (empathy, execution, embrace), they analyze five cases—from Project Hope to World Central Kitchen—to show how organizations apply hospitality to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals. The study reframes hospitality as a moral and strategic pathway for systemic change across sectors.

Michel Anteby (QST/Management and Organizations & CISS Affiliate) Beyond Professional Experts: The Rise Of Lay, Counter-, And Neo-Experts As Alternative Claim-Makers (Research in Organizational Behavior, Oct 2025) Anteby and coauthor examine how rising mistrust and digital media have eroded traditional professional authority. They identify three emerging challengers—lay experts, counter-experts, and neo-experts—who claim legitimacy through experience, counter-evidence, or audience engagement rather than credentials. Linking the ecologies of professions and expertise, the authors show how these actors reshape who counts as an expert and how public attention now determines credibility.

Hyeouk Chris Hahm (SSW/Social Work & CISS Affiliate) Predictors of Sociopolitical Involvement Among White Young Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Race and Social Problems, Oct 2025) Hahm and coauthors examine factors linked to White young adults’ engagement in sociopolitical action during the pandemic. The research identifies attitudes and contextual experiences—particularly lower color-evasive racial ideology, liberal political views, witnessing racial discrimination, and perceiving the social climate as affecting wellbeing—as the strongest predictors of involvement. The findings highlight how both psychological traits and current-event exposures can motivate anti-oppressive engagement among individuals with racially privileged identities.

Jyoti Puri (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Toward a Sociology of Loss and Life (Thesis Eleven, Oct 2025) In this introduction to a special issue, Puri advances a sociology of loss and life, framing death and mourning as both analytical and methodological tools for understanding the social. She calls for critical, intersectional, transnational, and decolonial approaches to loss that link mourning to power, affect, and social transformation. Arguing that bereavement and bio-death are not merely ruptures but arenas of struggle and life-making, Puri reimagines the social as constituted as much through loss as through life, foregrounding how mourning can illuminate and remake the damaged pasts and emergent futures of collective existence.

Jessica K. Hlay (GRS’25/Anthropology) Eyelash Morphology Is Unrelated to Markers of Immunocompetence and Health (Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, Oct 2025) Hlay and coauthors investigate whether eyelash length signals underlying health or immune function. Drawing on data from 163 adults aged 18–38, the team measured eyelash length and eye-width ratios alongside biomarkers from saliva (immunoglobulin A, cortisol) and blood (serum lysozyme, lactoferrin). The analyses revealed no significant associations between eyelash morphology and any indicators of health or immunocompetence. The authors conclude that eyelash traits are unlikely to function as sexually selected cues of immune robustness, though they may instead reflect age-related variation.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Silver Splits and Parent–Child Disconnectedness: Mental Health Consequences for European Older Adults (European Journal of Population, Oct, 2025) In this brief report, Carr and coauthor Lisa Jessee examine how late-life partnership dissolutions (“silver splits”) affect depressive symptoms among older Europeans. Using longitudinal data from the SHARE survey (2004–2022), they apply fixed-effects models to account for time-invariant confounders, revealing that parents disconnected from their adult children experience lasting increases in depressive symptoms post-dissolution, while those maintaining child ties show stability—underscoring how relational contexts shape mental health trajectories in later life.

Eugenio Menegon (CAS/History & CISS Affiliate) The Tragic Jesuit Embassy of the Kangxi Emperor to Pope Clement XI, and the Lisbon Experience of “Imperial Envoy” Antonio Provana (Santo Antão: The Jesuit College in Lisbon and its History, Brill, June 2025) In this chapter, Menegon traces the extraordinary mission of Jesuit Antonio Provana (1662–1720), envoy of the Kangxi Emperor to the papacy, situating his journey from Beijing to Lisbon and Rome within the entangled politics of Qing, Portuguese, and papal empires. It examines how theological disputes, diplomatic rivalries, and Jesuit hierarchies shaped Provana’s tragic fate, revealing the global dimensions and tensions of early-modern Catholic diplomacy.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Why Ethical Research on Aging in the Context of Climate Change Must Address Social Susceptibilities and Assets (International Psychogeriatrics, Oct 2025) Carr and coauthors argue that ethical research on aging and climate change must address both biological vulnerabilities and intersecting social, cultural, and economic factors that shape older adults’ susceptibility and resilience. They argue that such research should not only identify risks but also focus on the assets and strengths older persons bring at the macro (policy), meso (community), and micro (individual) levels to foster resilience and participation in climate adaptation.

Alice Cronin-Golomb (CAS/Psychological and Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) Self-Reported Insomnia and Poor Sleep Quality Are Associated with Self-Reported Cognitive Changes in Older Adults (Clocks & Sleep, Oct 2025) Cronin-Golomb and coauthors found that in older adults without dementia, subjective sleep complaints, such as poorer perceived sleep quality, shorter sleep duration, and greater insomnia symptoms, were linked to greater self-reported cognitive changes, while objective sleep measures (via actigraphy) showed no such association. The findings suggest that perceived sleep problems, rather than measured sleep disruptions, may signal early cognitive concerns or reflect worries about cognition that affect sleep quality.

Hyeouk Chris Hahm (SSW/Social Work & CISS Affiliate) Affirmative Body Positivity and Positive Intimacy as a Buffer of Suicide Ideation Associated With Gendered Racism Among Asian American Men (Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Sept, 2025) Hahm and coauthors examined how affirming experiences, such as body positivity and positive intimacy, might protect Asian American men from the mental health effects of gendered racism, which undermines their masculinity and desirability. Using data from 876 men, researchers found that gendered racism was linked to higher suicide ideation, but positive body and intimacy experiences could buffer this risk at lower levels of racism. The authors suggest developing culturally informed support systems and gendered racial socialization strategies to promote healthier outcomes for Asian American men.

Cathie Jo Martin (CAS/Political Science) Culture and the Study of Comparative Political Economies (Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, Aug, 2025) In this chapter, Martin reconsiders culture’s role in institutional change by reviewing dominant approaches and pitfalls, proposing a model of how cultural agents and structures shape policy, and exploring how new NLP tools can analyze cultural tropes and their strategic uses. It argues that studying cultural tropes opens a promising research path for comparative political economy, clarifying why policies persist through ruptures and why similar orientations span policy domains — even amid today’s culture wars that unsettle norms and democratic practices.

Cheryl D. Knott (CAS/Anthropology) A Case of Sibling Adoption in Wild Orangutans: Accelerated Development of Independence Following Maternal Loss  (Ethology, Sept, 2025) In this study, Knott and coauthors present the first detailed account of adoption in wild Bornean orangutans, documenting how an older sister’s alloparental care enabled her orphaned sibling’s survival and accelerated development in Gunung Palung National Park, Indonesia. Comparing the pair’s behavior with mother–offspring dyads, the findings show that adoption mitigated the costs of maternal loss without delaying the adoptive sister’s reproductive timeline, underscoring the importance of kinship, long-term data, and genetic analysis in understanding great ape social resilience.

Fallou Ngom (CAS/Anthropology) Beyond African Orality: The ‘Ajami Poetry of Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate (Oxford University Press, Sept, 2025) In this book, Ngom offers the first English translation and interpretation of sixty Wolof Ajami poems (Wolof written with an enriched form of the Arabic script) by Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate (c. 1876-1947), a follower of the Senegalese Muridiyya Sufi order founded by Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba Mbàkke (1853-1927). Sëriñ Mbay Jaxate was one of the greatest Sufi poets of Africa — a wise moralist and an astute social critic, he kept a sharp eye on his compatriots and the unfolding historical, cultural, and religious transformations in his society. His poems focused on praising the virtues of his Sufi master, Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba, and fostering the pursuit of spiritual and moral excellence, which he construed as the best investment to achieve success in this life and paradise in the hereafter.

Liah Greenfeld (CAS/Sociology) Towards the Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison: How Civilizations Work – Case 1: The Monotheistic Civilization (Comparative Civilizations Review, Sept 2025) Greenfeld outlines a framework for systematically comparing civilizations by analyzing their foundational principles and the ways these shape cognitive, moral, and emotional dimensions of individual and collective life. Using the monotheistic civilization as a case study, she demonstrates how first principles codified in language orient thought, values, emotions, and institutional developments, providing a blueprint for future comparative analyses of Sinic and Indic civilizations.

Jessica T. Simes (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Solitary confinement and post-release drug and alcohol test failure among formerly incarcerated men on parole in Pennsylvania (2010–2023) (International Journal of Drug Policy, Sept 2025) Simes and coauthors examine how exposure to solitary confinement during incarceration affects illicit drug and alcohol test outcomes among over 74,000 formerly incarcerated men on parole in Pennsylvania between 2010 and 2023. The findings show that solitary confinement is linked to higher odds of test failure, particularly among those with severe substance use disorders, underscoring its role in worsening reentry challenges and public health risks.

Christine M. Slaughter (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Not All Emotions are the Same: An Intersectional Analysis of Women’s Political Action Based on Emotive Responses (European Journal of Politics and Gender, Jan 2025) Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey, Slaughter and coauthors find that fear about race is associated with engagement in costlier political acts. Women’s anger about race leads to more frequent non-electoral political engagement once accounting for time, money, and civic skills.

Joanna Davidson (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) Pathos and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa, Past and Present (Ohio University Press, July 2025) The collected essays in Pathos and Power, coedited by Davidson, provide a critical exploration of widowhood in Africa through a series of historical and contemporary case studies. The book challenges a simplistic understanding of widowhood by highlighting how the experience varies according to age, class, race, religion, and geographic location. The contributors investigate how the category of widowhood can obscure or reveal various social dynamics while demonstrating the diversity of material, symbolic, and embodied circumstances faced by African widows.

Katherine Levine Einstein (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) and Maxwell Palmer (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Age and Homeownership Drive the Local Turnout Gap (Urban Affairs Review, Sept 2025) Einstein, Palmer, and their coauthors analyze turnout across more than 500 U.S. cities using national voter file data, comparing local, midterm, and general elections. It finds that turnout disparities in local elections are especially large by age and homeownership, far exceeding racial gaps and peaking in off-cycle contests.

Rachel E. Brulé (Pardee & CISS Affiliate) Inclusive Reforms as Levers for Social Exclusion: The Paradoxical Consequences of Quotas for Women in Rural India (World Development, Sept 2025) Brulé and coauthors investigate India’s landmark gender quota reforms, showing that while quotas brought unprecedented numbers of women into local office, they paradoxically entrenched inequality by limiting women’s real decision-making power and reinforcing the “proxy” narrative. Drawing on data from 600 villages, historical archives, and interviews, they argue that male elites designed reforms to appear radically egalitarian while embedding features that preserved elite dominance, producing what they term the “gender quota paradox.”

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Cognitive Function and Friendship Network Characteristics Among Older Couples (The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, Sept 2025) Carr and coauthors use dyadic analysis of nearly 3,000 older couples to examine how cognitive health shapes friendship networks. The authors find that higher cognitive function in both spouses predicts more frequent contact with friends—especially for wives when their husbands score higher—though it does not significantly affect the number of close friends or perceived support and strain, and no gender differences emerge.

Wade Campbell (CAS/Archaeology & CISS Affiliate) Questions Worth Asking: Un-disciplining Archaeology, Reclaiming Pasts for Better Futures (American Antiquity, Sept 2025) Campbell and his coauthors critically examine how historical reckoning, truth, and reconciliation should shape the future of American archaeology. Through dialogues on racism, colonialism, and systemic inequities, the contributors call for disciplinary transformation, collaborative practices with Indigenous and descendant communities, and reclamation of cultural heritage to ensure collective futures.

Timothy Callaghan (SPH/Health Law, Policy, and Management & CISS Affiliate) U.S. Public Opinion About Immigration Enforcement in Sensitive Locations (Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, Sept 2025) Callaghan and his coauthor conducted a national online survey of 3,563 American adults shortly after ICE rescinded its 2011 “sensitive locations” policy. Their findings suggest that the majority of Americans do not think that ICE’s sensitive locations policy should be rescinded and believe that rescinding this policy will deter undocumented immigrants from seeking needed medical care for themselves and their children.

Mary Elizabeth Collins (SSW/Social Welfare Policy & CISS Affiliate) Another Side of Waiver Federalism: Lessons from Federal Youth Workforce Policy (The Journal on Federalism, Sept 2025) Collins and her colleagues examines “small” waivers in a low-salience policy context: the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Youth Program. Content analysis of WIOA Youth waiver requests from 2020–2022 shows states primarily sought to increase services for in-school youth through expanded expenditures or individual training accounts.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) and Shinae Choi (CISS Visiting Scholar) Do Friend Support and Strain Moderate the Association Between Physical Limitations and Older Adults’ Depressive Symptoms?(Research on Aging, Sept 2025) Carr and Choi conclude the egalitarian nature of supportive friendships may make them particularly protective for older adults with physical limitations. Health problems may undermine equity in friendships, intensifying the psychological consequences of friend strain.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) and Sophie Arnold (GRS/Sociology) Population and Social Psychology: How Social Psychology Can Shed Light on Demographic Processes (Handbook of Social Psychology, Sept 2025) Carr and Arnold argue that an understanding of demographic phenomena necessitates an infusion of ideas and concepts from social psychology, including stress and coping, reference group, stigma, and cultural script theories.

Kristin Long (CAS/Physiological & Brain Sciences) and Mari-Lynn Drainoni (SPH & CAMED) Perspectives on Health-Related Social Needs Screening in Primary Care Among Black and Latine Patients (JAMA Open Network, Aug 2025) Long and Drainoni, along with their colleagues, characterize Black and Latine patients’ perspectives regarding (1) the suitability of HRSN screening and referral systems within primary care, (2) decision-making regarding HRSN disclosure, (3) contextual barriers and facilitators of equitable screening and referral, including processes underlying inequitable outcomes, and (4) implementation recommendations.

Tyler Fuller (GRS/Religion & CISS Affiliate) Approaches to Studying Religion and Public Health: A Narrative Review and Interdisciplinary Framework(Journal of Religion & Health, Aug 2025) Fuller identifies and critically analyzes three dominant approaches in public health scholarship: (1) religion as a quantifiable variable, (2) religious institutions as partners in health promotion, and (3) religion as a social force shaping public health.

Tyler Fuller (GRS/Religion & CISS Affiliate) Discourses of “religion” in public health research: Constructing religious facilitators, barriers, and subjects of health as exercises of power (SSM-Qualatative Research in Health, Aug 2025) Fuller draws on interpretive approaches and critical religious studies to interrogate how public health scholars conceptualize and operationalize “religion” in peer-reviewed literature. He uses ethnographic content analysis to analyze 271 research articles published between 2010 and 2022 in ten high-impact generalist public health journals.

Amanda Tarullo (CAS/Psychological and Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) Traditional Beliefs and Practices Surrounding Pregnancy Loss in Limpopo Province, South Africa (Social Science & Medicine, Aug 2025) Tarullo and her colleagues examine current beliefs and practices surrounding a traditional illness called Go wela in Limpopo, South Africa.

Joshua Robinson (CAS/Archaeology) New discoveries ofAustralopithecusandHomofrom Ledi-Geraru, Ethiopia (Nature, Aug 2025) Robinson and his colleagues describe the age, geologic context and dental morphology of new hominin fossils recovered from the Ledi-Geraru Research Project area, Ethiopia, which includes sediments from this critically underrepresented period, and report the presence of Homo at 2.78 and 2.59 million years ago and Australopithecus at 2.63 million years ago.

Joseph Harris (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Reimagine Aid, Don’t Destroy It (Studies in Comparative International Development, Aug 2025) Harris and his co-authors comment on issues of global health aid flaws with a particular focus on both the need for and the shortcomings of the current foreign aid system in the context of health aid. At the same time, we believe these global health issues can speak more broadly to discourse on foreign aid as well.

Pamela Zabala Ortiz (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) #PeroNoSomosRacistas: Examining Dominican (Anti)Blackness in a Time of Global Racial Reckoning (Ethnic and Racial Studies, July 2025) Zabala Ortiz examines how diasporic Dominicans in the U.S. and Dominicans in the Dominican Republic received, engaged with, and adapted the Black Lives Matter 2020 moment to address Dominican anti-Blackness.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Black and White Older Adults’ End-of-Life Experiences: Does Hospice Use Mitigate Racial Disparities? (The Journals of Gerontology, August 2025) Carr and her colleagues examine Black–White differences in two core dimensions of proxy-reported end-of-life experience: perceived death quality and perceived care concordance. We also assess whether hospice care moderates racial differences in death quality outcomes.

John M. Marston (CAS/Archaeology & CISS Affiliate) Politics of Resilience and Materialism in Archaeological Explanation (American Archeologist, July 2025) Marston explores why archeological forms of thinking fail as stand-alone explanatory frameworks and considers how they can be modified.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) and Kafayat Mahmoud (CAS/Center for Innovation in Social Science) Social Relationships and End-of-Life Quality among Older Adults in the United States: The Impacts of Marital, Kinship, and Network Ties (The Journals of Gerontology, July 2025) Carr and Mahmoud examine marital status differences in recent decedents’ end-of-life care and gender differences therein, and the role of other social ties (children, siblings, network members) in influencing the quality of end-of-life care.

Jessica T. Simes (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Neighborhood Incarceration Rates, Social Vulnerability, and Life Expectancy (JAMA Internal Medicine, July 2025) Simes and her co-athors hypothesized that neighborhood incarceration rates would be negatively associated with life expectancy even after accounting for neighborhood disadvantage, and that incarceration rates would modify the association between neighborhood disadvantage and life expectancy.

Carolyn Hodges-Simeon (CAS/Anthropology), Jessica Hlay (GRS/Anthropology), and Izabel Rodríguez James (The Utila Child Health Project) The Natural History of Child Signals of Need in Utila, Honduras (Human Nature, July 2025) Hodges-Simeon, Hlay, and Rodríguez James, along with their colleagues, collected mother and other primary caregiver reports of three common types of child signaling from 131 families with 263 children on Utila, a small island off the coast of Honduras finding that child signaling was common in both sexes and across all ages, although it decreased with age and neighborhood quality and increased with the frequency of conflict between children and caretakers.

Luke Glowacki (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework for Locating Nomadic Pastoralists to Strengthen Public Health Outreach (OpenReview.net, July 2025) Glowacki and his coauthors developed a computer vision-based approach to automatically locate active nomadic pastoralist settlements from satellite imagery.

Andrew Stokes (SPH/Global Health & CISS Affiliate) Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic (JAMA Health Forum, July 2025) Stokes and his co-authors assess trends in excess US deaths before (1980-2019), during (2020-2022), and after (2023) the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kathleen Corriveau (SED/Applied Human Development & CISS Affiliate) Between truth and trust: How young people make sense of information (Developmental Psychology, July 2025) Corriveau and her co-author discuss the current “infodemic”.

Nicholas J. Wagner (CAS/Psychological and Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate), Renata Botello (GRS/Psychological and Brain Sciences), Arti Gandhi (Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences), Gil Grunfeld (GRS/Psychological and Brain Sciences), Kim T. Mueser (CAS/Psychological and Brain Sciences) & Daniel Fulford (CAS/Neuroscience) Social adversity and loneliness in first episode psychosis (Social Psychiatry + Psychiatric Epidemiology, July 2025) and their co-authors evaluated their model of social adversity, then estimated a path model of its relationship with loneliness, accounting for age, diagnosis, gender, and degree of recent social involvement. Models were fit at both baseline and six-month timepoints.

Peter R. Blake (CAS/Psychological & Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) Children adjust behavior in novel social environment to reflect local prosocial norms inferred from brief exposure (PLOS One, July 2025) Blake and his co-researchers used questionnaires to measure children’s perceived pro- and antisocial descriptive norms in their Own Neighborhoods as well as in a novel “Neighborhood X,” to which they were introduced via a slideshow, showing results consistent with the hypothesis that humans have a propensity to rapidly infer and conform to local prosocial norms, thus maintaining group differences in prosocial behavior, and further indicate that this propensity is in operation by middle childhood.

Jonathan Mijs (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) How Does Exposure to Information on Ethnic Discrimination Inspire Belief Change? A Preregistered Population-Based Survey Experiment Testing Resonance and Dissonance Mechanisms (Political Psychology, July 2025) Mijs and his colleagues assess how exposure to information about ethnic discrimination inspires adult belief change, especially how it affects (a) perceptions of ethnic inequality, (b) meritocratic explanations of ethnic inequality, and (c) attitudes toward affirmative action.

Timothy Callaghan (SPH/Health Law, Policy, and Management & CISS Affiliate) and Matt Motta (SPH/Health Law, Policy, and Management & CISS Affiliate) Runaway Polarization Is Making Us Sick. Social Science Could Offer an Antidote (Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, July 2025) Callaghan and Motta detail the growing partisan polarization of public health over time, examining partisan polarization and its policy consequences, and propose a three-pronged path for better understanding and overcoming polarization in health and medicine.

Thomas Byrne (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Families Served During the First Decade of the Supportive Services for Veteran Families Program: A Descriptive Analysis (Front. Public Health, Sec. Life-Course Epidemiology and Social Inequalities in Health, July 2025) Byrne and his co-authors analyzed VA SSVF administrative data from 2014 to 2022, covering over 800,000 program entries from all SSVF beneficiaries in the U.S., to describe the sociodemographic profiles of SSVF veteran families-including children and adult family members of veterans.

Wade Campbell (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) and Isabel Beach (GRS/Anthropology) Dung Microremains as Archaeological Evidence of Early Navajo Sheepherding: A Low Impact Methodological Exploration of Incipient Indigenous Pastoralism in the U.S. Southwest (Journal of Field Archaeology, July 2025) Campbell, Beach and their co-authors reports a minimally invasive methodology for identifying Gobernador Phase (ca. a.d. 1625–1760) Navajo sheepherding sites in northwestern New Mexico through the identification of calcitic dung spherulites in archaeological soil samples associated with likely corral/pen enclosures.

Jane Pryma (CAS/Sociology) Trauma as a Workaround: Recognizing Chronic Pa0in as Disability Without Medical Documentation in the United States and France (Social Science & Medicine, July 2025) Pryma draws from interviews with doctors, chronic pain patient advocates, and disability service professionals to show how the biomedicalization of disability has stratified access to disability rights, privileging those who can comply with time-consuming and costly medical evaluation and treatment plans.

Erik Peinert (CAS/Political Science) Monopoly Politics: Competition and Learning in the Evolution of Policy Regimes (Oxford University Press, July 2025) Using original archival evidence from the United States and France, and borrowing insights from microeconomics, bureaucratic politics, sociology, psychology, and law, Peinert demonstrates how government policy towards competition and monopoly changes at key moments in the 20th century. Centrally, policy changes as a result of the interaction between staff turnover in policy circles and the diminishing returns to policy regimes.

Celeste Curington (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations: Revisioning Migrants and Mobilities through the Critique of Antiblackness (Contemporary Sociology, June 2025) Curington discusses migrants and mobilities through the critique of antiblackness.

Alya Guseva (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) On Bruce Carruthers, The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power and Credit in America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2022 (Socio-Economic Review, June 2025) Guseva and her colleagues discuss Bruce Carruthers’ piece and findings.

Martin Aucoin (GRS/Anthropology) Geolegal Distance: Success and Separation in Gambian Transnational Families (GeoJournal, June 2025) Aucoin and his co-author explore geolegal distance, specifically how legality and borders are entwined with how migrants and their families experience space–time and the relations of care when someone pursues “making it” abroad.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) and Leping Wang (CAS/Sociology & Graduate Affiliate) Do Social Security Benefits Rules Perpetuate Marital Status and Gender Inequalities? (The Gerontologist, June 2025) Carr, Leping and their co-author examine Social Security and household income, and poverty rates of white older adults based on marital categories aligned with Social Security benefits rules.

Rosella Cappella Zielinski (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War (Oxford University Press, June 2025) Capella Zielinski’s new book traces the Allied efforts at international economic institution creation, starting with then Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement (CIR) and the Joint Committee in the early war years, to the creation of the Wheat Executive itself, and then how the Wheat Executive was eventually extended to become the Allied Maritime Trade Council late in the war and explores how the isolationist streak that kept the Americans out of the League of Nations and a general desire on the part of the victors to return to business as usual after the war led the Allied powers to eventually pull back from their embrace of supranational management of global economic affairs.

David Carballo (CAS/Anthropology, Archaeology, & Latin American Studies & CISS Affiliate) Multiscalar Collectivities and Governance in Precolonial Mexico, from Neighborhoods to Confederations (Routlege, Understanding Early Large-Scale Collectives, June 2025) In this paper, Carballo and his co-author highlight the outsized role played by historical figures such as Moctezuma Xocoyotzin and the Mexica-Aztec as the dominant political force in Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish invasion has skewed perspectives on the diversity of forms of precolonial governance and the nested levels of factions and federations that provided the scaffolding for most polities.

Christine Slaughter (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Lessons Learned from Black Women’s Resilience and the 2024 Election (Politics & Gender, June 2025) In this essay, Slaughter highlights the resilience of Black women, evident in their political behavior and political attitudes in the 2024 presidential election campaign and aftermath. In Black women’s support for the Democratic Party, Democratic ticket, and Vice President Harris, we better understand how this pivotal base influences electoral politics and how race-gendered identities influence American politics overall.

Fallou Ngom (CAS/Anthropology) Music as Cultural Text: Performance Traditions in West Africa and its Diasporas (Springer, June 2025) Ngom and his co-editors explore elements of African music’s distinctive features,  and pay homage to the heterogeneity, memories, hope, pain, and humanity in the music of Africa and the black diaspora.

Jyoti Puri (CAS/Sociology & Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies & CISS Affiliate) In Plain Sight: Conversing Empires, Race, Sexuality, and Gender (ASA Online First, May 2025) In this conversation, Puri and her interviewer pivot around the ways that empires, race, sexuality, and gender are co-constituted, that is, mutually created and interdependent.

Ya-Ching Huang (GRS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) and Alya Guseva (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) The Moral Economy Of Severe Scarcity: How Considerations Of Deservingness Shape Cloth Mask Distribution Practices In The Midst Of A Global Health Crisis (Journal of Cultural Economy, September 2024) Based on the data from a private Facebook group dedicated to sewing and thirty-one in-depth interviews with mask-makers in Massachusetts, Huang and Guseva argue that in response to pandemic- induced scarcity, mask-makers created a distinct moral economy with numerous distributional practices ranging from gift-giving and altruistic donations to sales.

Phillipe Copeland (SSW & CISS Affiliate) “Sinners” Is a Film About Black Joy (TAP Magazine, May 2025) Copeland calls Sinners a cultural phenomenon on par with Coogler’s previous creation Black Panther and says that it reminds us that even in moments like this we cannot allow anyone to take our joy.

Celeste Curington (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) The Search for Interracial Love Online: Black Women’s Experiences (Routlege, The Routledge International Handbook of Interracial and Intercultural Relationships and Mental Health, May 2025) Curington and her co-author draw from an intersectional framework and explores Black women’s unique experiences as they search for interracial romance in the digital age.

James J. Cummings (COM/Emerging Media Studies & CISS Affiliate) Academic cheating with generative AI: Exploring a moral extension of the theory of planned behavior (Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, May 2025) Cummings and his colleagues aimed aimed to understand undergraduate students’ academic cheating behaviors using GenAI. The study conducted a mixed-method approach, utilizing focus groups and polls to gather insights from 25 undergraduate students enrolled in a course that incorporated GenAI into its pedagogical design in the United States.

Andrew Stokes (SPH/Global Health & CISS Affiliate) Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic (JAMA Health Forum, May 2025) Stokes and his co-authors trends in excess US deaths before (1980-2019), during (2020-2022), and after (2023) the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Childlessness and Mental Health Among US Older Adults: Do Associations Differ by Marital Status and Gender? (The Journals of Gerontology, May 2025) Carr and her co-author evaluate associations between parental status (childless, biological children, stepchildren only, no living children) and three dimensions of mental health (depressive symptoms, and social and emotional loneliness) and how these patterns differ by marital status and gender in this study.

Japonica Brown-Saracino (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Sociology, Housing, and Gender (Annual Review of Sociology, May 2025) In this article, Brown-Saracino and her co-author argue that the measurement of inequality at the city and neighborhood level stymies focus on gender, but that ociologists of housing are well-positioned to merge attention to the importance of gender identities, expectations, and roles with analyses of multiple overlapping levels and sites of inequality.

Nancy J. Smith-Hefner (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) Gender and Islam in Indonesian Studies, A Retrospective (STUDIA ISLAMIKA, May 2025) In this essay, Smith-Hefner considers continuities and discontinuities in the study of gender and Islam in Indonesia since the 1960s, tracing key themes that emerged early on and in many cases continue to animate contemporary scholarly discussion. Smith-Hefner focuses on the impact of the resurgent interest in Islam on Indonesian gender studies from the 1980s until today, emphasizing the evolving status and role of women in the context of recent social and political developments and the rise of a new Indonesian Muslim middle class. She argues for the continuing importance of local, on-the-ground case studies that speak to broader regional patterns but also to Indonesia’s impressive ethnic and regional diversity.

Heather Schoenfeld (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) & Chas Walker (GRS/Political Science & CISS Graduate Affiliate) Criminal Justice as Racialized Organizations: Evidence from Ethnographies of Police, Courts and Jails (Criminology, April 2025) Schoenfeld, Walker and their colleague build on past critiques of the criminal justice system and demonstrate how scholars of the criminal legal system can use mesolevel theories of race/racism to better explain their findings, develop new insights, and pose new research questions.

Spencer Piston (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) The Study of Racism and Policing in the United States (Annual Review of Political Science, April 2025) Piston and his co-authors begin this article by discussing two moments, in the late 1800s and late 1900s, in which the racist views of influential political scientists fundamentally shaped research on policing. In contrast, today’s scholarship, breaking sharply with research of the past, does not attempt to justify racist policing but to study it. The dominant approach today follows a racial disparities framework, which maps out the uneven allocation of police harms. As the authors discuss, these studies have made valuable contributions to the field and to real-world efforts to resist the damage done by police. At the same time, however, the racial disparities framework has limitations that make it difficult for scholars to understand racist police oppression. The authors conclude by arguing that, to take the next step forward, future scholarship should follow the lead of and expand upon work that centers the voices of the highly policed.

John M. Marston (CAS/Archaeology & CISS Affiliate) Climate, Political Economy and Agriculture In First and Second Millennia AD Anatolia (Antiquity, February 2025) Written accounts suggest there were major changes in agricultural practices in Anatolia as the region switched between Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Turkic control, yet archaeological evidence of these changes is offered only on a site-by-site basis. This article presents the first synthesis of archaeobotanical, palynological and zoo archaeological evidence for changes in plant and animal husbandry in Anatolia through the first and second millennia AD. Available data indicate a minimal role of climate change in agricultural shifts but offer evidence for substantial changes towards short-term-return agricultural strategies in response to declining personal security, changing patterns of military provisioning and distinct taxation regimes.

Luke Glowacki (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) Leveraging Deep Learning Models To Increase The Representation of Nomadic Pastoralists In Health Campaigns and Demographic Surveillance (PLOS Global Public Health, April 2025) Nomadic pastoralists are systematically underrepresented in the planning of health services and frequently missed by health campaigns due to their mobility. Previous studies have developed novel geospatial methods to address these challenges but rely on manual techniques that are too time and resource-intensive to scale on a national or regional level. To address this gap, Glowacki and his co-authors developed a computer vision-based approach to automatically locate active nomadic pastoralist settlements from satellite imagery.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS Director) Book Review: Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy (Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, April 2025) In this book review, Carr examines Teresa Ghilarducci’s understanding of how the “just work longer” approach might seem like a simple fix, it is anything but in a new economy shifting norms around retirement. Carr writes that “In the lively, compelling, and impeccably researched book Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy, author Teresa Ghilarducci argues forcefully and convincingly that working longer is not a solution to the impending Social Security crisis. Rather, the United States needs innovative solutions that enable older adults to retire at 65 or younger, if they choose to.”

Japonica Brown-Saracino (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) “Part 2: Discussion” in Gentrification and the Media: Building and Propagating Discourses on Exclusive Urban Change (Amsterdam University Press, April 2025) Brown-Saracino’s chapter in Gentrification and the Media begins with her assertion that the book chapters by Ella Howard and Nacima Baron raise pertinent questions about how those of us who study media coverage of gentrification operationalize “gentrification,” and, at the same time, about how the media represents and deploys “gentrification.” Together, the two chapters gesture to possible pathways for our future research on this subject, and implicitly engage enduring debates in gentrification studies about what “gentrification” is and how it relates to a set of proximate urban processes and dynamics.

Aarti Bodas (GRS/Psychological and Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) Water Woes: The Effects of Children’s Science Media On Conservation Knowledge, Self-Efficacy, and Environmental Worry In The United States of America(Journal of Children and Media, April 2025) Encouraging individuals, especially children, to decrease their use of natural resources is critical to creating sustainable communities. Bodas and her co-authors thus investigated whether children could learn conservation strategies from an educational TV show. They measured 4- and-5-year-olds’ (N = 110) knowledge, self-efficacy, and environmental worry before and after showing them an episode of the PBS show Nature Cat that either did or did not teach about water conservation. Their findings suggest that exposure to nature-related educational media has the potential to improve children’s understanding of environmentalism and increase children’s concern for the environment.

Christine Slaughter (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Black Women Are Supreme: An Empirical Examination of Black Women’s Evaluations of Ketanji Brown Jackson (ConLawNOW, March 2025) This article discusses research on the nomination of the first Black woman Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson. The study examines how emotions and feelings of connectedness to racial and gender groups shaped evaluations of the historic nomination. The research finds that Black women were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about Jackson’s nomination, but that enthusiasm was attenuated by a wide range of variables like interest in politics and the interplay between racial and gender identity. It analyzes how linked fate, a sense of connection to one’s racial group, is associated with the evaluations of the Jackson nomination. The study finds that Black women with increased linked fate to other Black women, and to a lesser extent Black people, are associated with increased pride and hope towards Justice Jackson’s nomination.

Mary Elizabeth Collins (SSW/Social Welfare Policy & CISS Affiliate) Bridging Success: How Institutional Adults Can Support System Involved Youth and Young Adults In Pursuing Post-Secondary Vocational Education and Career Pathways (Children and Youth Services Review, April 2025) Supportive relationships can facilitate educational and vocational goals for youth and young adults. Formal systems, such as child welfare, juvenile justice and mental health, acknowledge the importance of social support however limited research has been focused on the types of support youth and young adults receive from institutional adults when pursuing post-secondary vocational education (PSVE) and career pathways. Through qualitative interviews with 16 young adults formerly involved in the child welfare, juvenile justice and/or mental health system who are currently enrolled in PSVE programs, this study examined the type of support they received from institutional adults when pursuing PSVE.

Claudia Anderson (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) & Jessica T. Simes (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Solitary Confinement, Parole, and Criminalization (Journal of Criminal Justice, April 2025) Using prison administrative data for 2007 to 2020, Anderson, Simes, and their co-authors conduct a survival analysis to estimate the association between solitary confinement and reincarceration, accounting for parole status and other covariates. Survival analysis shows that the risk of reincarceration is about 6 % higher for those in solitary confinement, once parole is accounted for. Reincarceration rates are 15 to 25 % higher for those held in solitary confinement for 90 days or longer.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS director) The Impact of Cumulative Inequities on Older Adult Health (Generations Journal, Spring 2025). Older age can be the best of times, marked by health and happiness, or the worst of times, marred by disease and distress. This essay argues that late-life health disparities do not emerge suddenly on one’s 65th birthday; they can result from cumulative processes that span decades. Economic disadvantage and systems of racial oppression place individuals in health-depleting contexts over the life course. Healthcare institutions, policymakers, employers, community organizations, and providers of home- and community-based services (HCBS), need to understand the social and economic patterning of late-life well-being to improve the quality of life for all older adults.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS director) The New Sociology of Bereavement (Annual Review of Sociology, March 2025) Bereavement—the loss of a loved one through death—is a common and consequential life course experience. Although bereavement, and matters of death and dying more generally, have long remained on the margins of sociology, in the wake of contemporary mortality crises, sociological research on bereavement has flourished. This review synthesizes the new sociology of bereavement. Carr and her co-authors emphasize how bereavement experiences provide a microcosm for understanding social inequalities, and that a life course perspective can provide an integrative framework for a comprehensive sociology of bereavement.

Thomas Byrne (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Change in Outpatient Care Following Migration Among Veterans with Experience of Housing Instability (Journal of General Internal Medicine, April 2025) The present study extends a prior ­ analysis of services use among Veterans with experience of housing instability who migrate by examining changes in four types of outpatient care, offering insight into the complex association among mobility, homelessness, and healthcare access for this vulnerable population.

John M. Marston (CAS/Archaeology & CISS Affiliate) Wood Fuel Use in the Predynastic Upper Egypt Nile Valley (Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, April 2025) Predynastic cultures (4th millennium BCE) of the Nile Valley, especially the Naqada Culture of Upper Egypt, are documented mainly from excavated cemeteries, with few settlements excavated. Wood charcoal assemblages from two Naqada sites in the Nile Valley, Halfiah Gibli (HG) and Semaineh (SH), elucidate woodland ecology, economic strategies for fuel gathering and use, and human impacts on wood resource availability over time. Using traditional and dendroanthracological analyses to identify, quantify, and characterize these remains, Marston and his co-authors identify several lines of evidence that indicate that high-quality local fuel sources, mainly tamarisk and acacia, were abundant and low-effort gathering strategies were sufficient to meet local fuel needs.

Luke Glowacki  (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) The Meanings and Dividends of Man the Hunter (OSF Preprints, April 2025) The phrase Man the Hunter is associated with sexist theories of human evolution, but wildly disparate use of the phrase has led to unnecessary scientific disagreement and popular misunderstanding. In this paper, Glowacki and his co-authors ask: what does Man the Hunter mean? They distinguish three historical meanings of Man the Hunter and based on these disparate histories, they find that conflating the three meanings of Man the Hunter should be avoided. Finally, they offer suggestions for improving scientific and popular discourse regarding Man the Hunter.

Joshua R. Robinson (CAS/Archaeology) Dental Microwear of Bovids from the Pliocene-Pleistocene Transition in the Lower Awash Valley, Ethiopia (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, April 2025) Ethiopian fossil sites in the Lee Adoyta basin at Ledi-Geraru and the Maka’amitalu basin at Hadar straddle the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition and have both yielded fossil hominins attributed to early Homo. Dental microwear has been shown to separate grazing from browsing bovids and, because food choice reflects availability, can by extension provide insights into habitat. Robinson and his co-authors employ texture analysis to infer the diets of bovid individuals from the Lee Adoyta basin (n = 13) and Maka’amitalu (n = 6) that preserve antemortem microwear.

Raymond Fisman (CAS/Economics & CISS Affiliate) Working Paper: Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2025) Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding office. Firman and his co-authors study the consequences of revolving door laws for political selection in U.S. state legislatures, exploiting the staggered roll-out of laws across states over time. They find that fewer new candidates enter politics in treated states and that incumbent legislators are less likely to leave office, leading to an increase in uncontested elections.

Linh Tô (CAS/Economics & CISS Affiliate) Work Hours and Amenity Trade-Offs (AEA Papers and Proceedings, January 2025) Are workers who place a higher value on a specific amenity more likely to receive that amenity in exchange for lower wages? According to the classic compensating differentials model proposed by Rosen (1986), the answer would be yes. However, when considering a bundle of multiple amenities, the relationship becomes more complex. Tô and her co-authors present a compensating wage differentials model that incorporates complementarity and substitutability in firms’ provision of amenities and workers’ preferences for them.

Makarand Mody (SHA/Marketing & CISS Affiliate) Third-Party Social Support and the Sense of Not Feeling Alone, Coping and Healing: Healthcare Traveler Experiences in Hotels and Airbnbs (International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, March 2025) Both homestay providers and hotels are experiencing an increase in the number of bookings within healthcare traveler segments. In addition, social support research remains underrepresented in the hospitality and travel literature. This study aims to test third-party social support constructs in a model to provide a better understanding of how healthcare travelers’ sense of feeling alone is influenced as a guest within an Airbnb or hotel environment, and the extent to which positive emotions enhance coping and healing while receiving healthcare treatments.

Arjun Vishwanath (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) The Impact of Values on Issue Stances: Evidence from Panel Studies (British Journal of Political Science, February 2025) Which predispositions drive voters’ policy attitudes? This article tests the role of political values as a driver of attitudes relative to two commonly posited sources – partisanship and symbolic ideology. Past work has found correlations between values and issue attitudes, but these cross-sectional studies have limited causal purchases. Vishwanath tests the effects of traditionalist and egalitarian values on issue stances using six ANES and GSS panel surveys from 1992 to 2020. The author finds that values drive within-voter changes in policy attitudes under a variety of specifications.

Cathie Jo Martin (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Book Review: Reforming the Reform: Problems of Public Schooling in the American Welfare State (Political Science Quarterly, March 2025) According to Martin, Reforming the Reform asks fascinating and perplexing questions: Why do reportedly monumental reforms often lead to policies that have limited impact on the status quo? How do reforms contain the seeds of their own demise and create specific types of problems that will motivate future reforms? More broadly, what accounts for significant policy continuities within moments of institutional change? In short, what happens after reform?

Jyoti Puri (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Burning Bodies: Religion, Race, and Migrant Funerary Practices in the Early 20th-Century Pacific West (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, March 2025) This article explores the complex intersections of religion and bodies through the lens of Sikh migrant cremations in the early 20th century Pacific West. Sampling English-language from 1900 to 1920, it highlights how racial and civilizational biases shaped discourses on open-pyre migrant cremations, even as cremation was gaining acceptance among white settler groups in the United States and Canada. By examining Sikh cremations, the article emphasizes not only the importance of including migrant bodies and experiences but also the need to decolonize and diversify histories of cremation in the United States and Canada.

Deborah Kelemen (CAS/Psychological and Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) “The Earth is Alive”: Attributing Agency to the Earth Causes Moral Concern for the Environment and Biocentric Attitudes (Cognitive Science, March 2025) Do people need to attribute agency to nature to morally care for it? The answer to this question has significant implications for our understanding of social cognitive effects on moral judgment. Despite its relevance during an environmental crisis, surprisingly little is known about the answer. Across two studies, the authors explored whether attributing agency to nonhuman natural entities like the Earth has a causal influence on environmental moral concern and intrinsic valuing of nature (biocentrism).

Neha Gondal (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Professor-Writers and Machinist-Painter-Photographers: Investigating the Duality Between Occupational Categories and Artistic Hobbies (Poetics, March 2025) Even though participation in the arts (a.k.a. hobbies) of employed persons has risen steadily since the early twentieth century, research has not systematically explored the relationship between occupations and hobbies. Gondal and her co-author address this gap by investigating the intersection and cultural co-constitution of these two forms of engagement by drawing on Breiger’s influential work on duality.

James J. Cummings (COM/Emerging Media Studies & CISS Affiliate) Showing, Telling, and Collaborating: Investigating the Relative Benefits of Videoconferencing and Different Augmented Reality Embodiments for Remote Meetings (9th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications, January 2025) In the face of ”videoconferencing fatigue”, augmented reality (AR) presents new means for embodiment in remote meetings, including the use of holograms (stereoscopic projections of attendees) and avatars (wholly virtual representations of users). In this study, users reported that avatars—and not holograms—were significantly more useful than videoconferencing for object presentations. Further, though platform had no effect on perceived credibility of partners, social presence perceptions significantly differed across conditions.

Rosella Cappella Zielinski (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) “Global War Finance in the Twenty-First Century” in The Oxford Handbook of Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft (Oxford University Press, March 2025) This chapter explores the landscape of war finance in the twenty-first century, emphasizing the globalized nature of funding mechanisms that support military operations across the world. This comprehensive overview not only sheds light on the mechanisms of war financing in the modern era but also prompts a reevaluation of the implications for international security and economic policy.

Krishna Dasaratha (CAS/Economics & CISS Affiliate) Markets for Models (arXiv, March 2025) Motivated by the prevalence of prediction problems in the economy, Dasaratha and his co-authors study markets in which firms sell models to a consumer to help improve their prediction. They show that market structure can depend in subtle and nonmonotonic ways on the statistical properties of available models. Moreover, firms may choose inefficiently biased models to deter entry by competitors or to obtain larger profits.

Neha Gondal (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Rulenet: Mapping The Structure Of Cultural Preferences Using Association-Rules And Network Graphs (Poetics, March 2025) Sociologists have persuasively argued that cultural meaning can be interpreted by analyzing the systems of relations that measure the so-called ‘going together’ of cultural materials. Research investigating cultural tastes and preferences has used this approach to interpret consumption patterns as relational systems using a variety of techniques including multidimensional scaling, two-mode network analysis, and variable correlation networks. In this paper, Gondal contributes to this growing set of tools by describing and demonstrating the use of a datamining technique with scant history of use within sociology, called ‘association-rules.’

Thomas Byrne (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Exploring the Experiences of Participants in a School-Housing Partnership (Journal of Social Service Research, March 2025) Homelessness interferes with children’s development and access to school. Schools are, therefore, increasingly partnering with housing organizations to facilitate students’ access to preventive and supportive resources. In this study, analysis focused on the functioning and impacts of the program, including how families found out about vouchers, how they interacted with staff, their experiences accessing and using vouchers, and how housing stabilization affected family members. Participants appreciated that staff connected them with housing stability resources, but, in some cases, desired improved communication.

Thomas Byrne (SSW & CISS Affiliate) The Association Between Complementary and Integrative Health Service Use and Completion of a Residential Rehabilitation Program for Veterans Experiencing Homelessness (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, March 2025) Research has shown up to 25% of veterans do not complete Domiciliary Care for Homeless Veterans (DCHV) programs for a variety of reasons including substance use relapse, breaking programs rules, or leaving against medical advice. The benefits of complementary and integrative health (CIH) therapies, including a reduction in stress and anxiety and improvements in physical and mental health functioning, may be beneficial for veterans in DCHV programs. The aim of this study was to examine the association between CIH service use and DCHV program completion at one VA medical center.

Danielle Rousseau (MET/Criminal Justice & CISS Affiliate) Community-Level Characteristics Associated With Resilience After Adversity: A Scoping Review of Research in Urban Locales (Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, March 2025) The objective of this study was to document the current knowledge on characteristics measured at the community level and their relationship to individual or community well-being. The review specifically focuses on studies in urban locations. The main aim was to describe and organize evidence-based community strengths using a multidimensional portfolio approach to resilience.

Neha Gondal (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Modelling Predictors of Homophily on Perceived Oral Health Status Among Social Network Ties in a Population of Public Housing Residents (Community Dentistry and Oral Epidemiology, February 2025) Individual behaviours are often shared within social networks (homophily), suggesting network-level interventions hold promise for health promotion. Yet, little is known about oral health homophily. This study aimed to identify individual- and network-based predictors of oral health homophily among individual’s (ego) social networks of public housing residents.

Joseph Harris (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Learning to Lead at the WHO: Thailand’s Global Health Diplomacy at the World Health Assembly (Politics and Governance, January 2025) This article explores the development and growth of Thailand’s unique approach to global health diplomacy at the WHO, based on nearly 70 interviews with officials from the government, international organizations, non‐governmental organizations, and academics. The country’s growing prominence at the WHA was part of a deliberate investment strategy that required sustained political and economic resources which allowed the country to play credible leadership roles and begin to take a proactive (rather than reactive) approach to set the global health agenda, attaining status through its growing “epistemic power” in the process.

Luke Glowacki  (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) Robust Evidence That Mobile Hunter-Gatherers Participated In War: Comment On Fry (2025)(Evolution and Human Behavior, March 2025) Glowacki’s hope is that this commentary fosters consensus about the empirical claim that many mobile foraging groups sometimes killed individuals from other groups, and the rates varied across time and space. From this strongly supported empirical finding, we can turn to debating the inferences that can reasonably be drawn from it; for instance, whether intergroup violence shaped our psychology, how deep of a history it may have, and the factors that enable or prevent it. This comment is detailed, but it is not hair splitting. It aims to provide a solid empirically-based foundation for our field to move forward from.

Deborah Carr (CAS/Sociology & CISS director) Parent-Child Disconnectedness and Older European Adults’ Mental Health: Do Patterns Differ by Marital Status and Gender? (The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, February 2025) Disconnectedness from one’s adult child(ren) can undermine older adults’ well-being. However, the psychological consequences of disconnectedness may differ across marital contexts and by gender. Drawing on stress and normative violation frameworks, Carr and her co-author examine the association between parent-child disconnectedness and European older adults’ depressive symptoms, and the extent to which these patterns differ by marital status (married; remarried; cohabiting; divorced; widowed; and never married) and gender.

Thomas Byrne (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Experiencing Housing Instability in Rural North America and Access to Health Care and Supportive Services: A Scoping Review (Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, February 2025) Byrne and his co-authors sought gaps in literature related to geographically based health disparities among people experiencing housing instability and identify practices that may promote better health outcomes and offer practical implications for health care and service provision for people experiencing housing instability in rural areas.

John M. Marston (CAS/Archaeology & CISS Affiliate) Climate, Political Economy and Agriculture In First and Second Millennia AD Anatolia (Antiquity, February 2025) Marston and his co-author present the first synthesis of archaeobotanical, palynological and zoo archaeological evidence for changes in plant and animal husbandry in Anatolia through the first and second millennia AD. Available data indicate a minimal role of climate change in agricultural shifts but offer evidence for substantial changes towards short-term-return agricultural strategies in response to declining personal security, changing patterns of military provisioning and distinct taxation regimes.

Carolyn R. Hodges-Simeon (CAS/Anthropology) What Contributes to Masculine Perception of Voice Among Transmasculine People on Testosterone Therapy? (Journal of Voice, February 2025) In this study, Hodges-Simeon and her co-authors use unmodified voice samples from 30 transmasculine individuals undergoing testosterone therapy and utilized multivariate analysis to determine the relative and combined effects of four acoustic parameters on two measures of gender perception. The results show that transmasculine individuals’ speech is perceived as equally “masculine” as that of cisgender males, with both groups being statistically categorized as male at similar rates.

Randall P. Ellis (CAS/Economics & CISS Affiliate) Supporting Primary Care for Medically and Socially Complex Patients in Medicaid Managed Care (JAMA Network Open, February 2025) In this cross-sectional study using data from 1.1 million MassHealth members enrolled in 3602 primary care practices, a primary care activity level model achieved R2 of 69.6% and estimates within 10% of an observed measure of primary care spending need for high-risk populations and across racial and ethnic groups. This study shows how patient complexity can be used to allocate capitated payments among primary care practices.

Hyeouk Chris Hahm (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Differential Associations Between Race-Based Traumatic Stress and Major, Everyday, and Vicarious Racial Discrimination Among Young Adults Of Color (Journal of Traumatic Stress, February 2025) Race-based traumatic stress (RBTS) is a psychological response to racial discrimination among individuals with marginalized racial/ethnic identities, but the literature about how different forms of racial discrimination contribute to RBTS is lacking. The authors compared the effects of major, everyday, and vicarious racial discrimination on RBTS and evaluated the associations between ethnic-racial identity (ERI) and RBTS and found that vicarious racial discrimination was a similarly strong predictor of RBTS compared to everyday and major racial discrimination.

Christine Slaughter (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Sacred For Whom? Race Ideology and Reactions to January 6th (The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, January 2025) With the 2024 election cycle in swing, members of the Democratic Party are using January 6th as a rallying call for the need to protect democracy. Slaughter and her co-authors examine how voters of different races viewed the events of January 6th and how views on race relations impact their perceptions of January 6th. They find that White liberals are less angry about race relations in the aftermath of January 6th, and while they viewed January 6th as an insurrection and blamed Trump and Republicans in Congress for their role, they are less likely to say that racism and White Supremacy motivated the insurrectionists.

Andrew Stokes (SPH/Global Health & CISS Affiliate) Mortality Trends Among Early Adults in the United States, 1999-2023 (JAMA Network Open, January 2025) In this article, Stokes and his co-authors preface that mortality rate improvements have stalled or reversed for many US population groups since approximately 2010. Although these trends have been described,1-5 few studies have focused on early adulthood (ages 25-44 years) specifically—the period during which many health behaviors are established. A 2021 report documented increasing mortality at these ages across many causes of death from 2010 to 2017.6 The current study extends prior work by documenting trends in early adult mortality across the pre–COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic, and postpandemic periods.

Robert Grace (CAS/Political Science) International and Domestic Diplomacy with Disaster Aid in The Routledge Handbook of Disaster Response and Recovery (Routledge, January 2025) In this chapter, Grace offers an overview of various facets of disaster diplomacy, including humanitarian negotiations, the domestic politics of disaster response, geopolitical dynamics that influence international disaster response, and the role non-state armed groups play in this sphere.

Timothy Longman (Pardee & CISS Affiliate) Book Review: David Mwambari, Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Post-Genocide Rwanda (African Studies Review, January 2025) In this review, Longman acknowledges the significance of Mwanbari’s analysis of “important new ideas both for understanding Rwanda and exploring collective memory more generally. As Mwambari explains, he is both an insider and an outsider. As a Rwandan and native speaker of Kinyarwanda, he experienced the trauma of Rwanda’s terrible violence in the early 1990s. But he is also someone educated in Western schools who has lived in other parts of Africa and in Europe and Australia (xvi–xx).” Longman asks, what, specifically, does a Rwandan scholar who is trained in Western methods observe that scholars from outside Rwanda have overlooked?

Steven J. Sandage (STH/Psychology of Religion and Theology & CISS Affiliate) Culturally Humble Continuing Education: A Multicultural Orientation Perspective (Practice Innovations, January 2025) The present article draws on an integration of the multicultural orientation (MCO) framework and learning science to consider how to improve the field’s ability to serve marginalized groups. Sandage and his co-authors explore seven sources of leverage that might enhance the quality of training of psychologists throughout their careers. The co-authors envision a future where the field of psychology is better equipped to provide culturally humble and effective care for diverse populations.

Christine Slaughter (CAS/Political Science & CISS Affiliate) Not All Emotions Are The Same: An Intersectional Analysis Of Women’s Political Action Based On Emotive Responses (European Journal of Politics and Gender, January 2025) If there was ever a time in US history to understand women’s politics, that time is certainly now, as with the increase of women candidates, the rise of women’s political engagement, and women-led social movements, scholars have little intersectional insight into what motivates women’s political participation. Using the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Postelection Survey, Slaughter and her co-authors find that fear about race is associated with engagement in costlier political acts. Women’s anger about race leads to more frequent non-electoral political engagement once accounting for time, money, and civic skills. No one emotion has the same effect on women’s non-electoral political participation. Not all women are similar in their emotional responses to race, which impacts how women look to political systems to address racial issues.

Neha Gondal (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Chapter 19: Relational Meaning in Social Network Analysis(Handbook of Culture and Social Networks, Edward Elgar, January 2025) Attention to culture in scholarship on social network analysis has contributed to centering meaning along a variety of dimensions, including identity, tastes, preferences, status, values, and actions. With few exceptions, however, social network analysis has paid less attention to the meanings of ties in social networks. In this chapter, Gondal makes the case for making relational meaning more central to sociological studies of social networks.

Hyeouk Chris Hahm (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Asian American Children’s Psychological Well-Being and Health Behaviors—Advancing a Culturally Informed Perspective on the Role of Parenting (JAMA Network Open: Pediatrics, January 2025) The association between positive parenting practices and children’s psychological well-being and health behaviors is well established, particularly in studies focusing on White families in the US. However, there is a gap in understanding how this association functions within Asian American families, especially when considering differences across immigrant generations. Addressing this gap is critical given that Asian American groups are the fastest-growing population in the US, projected to represent 1 in 10 people in the US by 2060. Consequently, the well-being of Asian American children increasingly reflects the overall well-being of children in the US.

Jessica T. Simes (CAS/Sociology & CISS Affiliate) Examining Changes In Fatal Violence Against Women After Bail Reform In New Jersey (American Journal of Preventive Medicine, January 2025) Cash bail reforms that end pretrial detention due to the inability to afford bail have been highly debated across the US. A major concern cited by bail reform opponents is that reducing pretrial detention will increase community violence, particularly violence against women. The objective of this study was to assess if New Jersey’s cash bail reform was associated with changes in rates of fatal violence against women.

Kathleen Corriveau (SED/Applied Human Development & CISS Affiliate) The Development of Children’s Teaching Varies by Cultural Input: Evidence from China and the U.S. (Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, January 2025) This study compared the teaching strategies among 146 3-to 7-year-old children (81 females) from the U.S. (n = 52, White) and China (traditional preschool n = 49, Asian; “westernized” preschool n = 45, Asian). Children taught a board game to learners with varying knowledge levels. We measured children’s false belief and knowledge attribution and coded three teaching strategies: verbal, contrastive, and contingent. Results showed that children from traditional Chinese preschools were less likely to engage in verbal and contingent teaching than their U.S. and “westernized” Chinese counterparts.

Thomas Byrne (SSW & CISS Affiliate) Residential Migration Among Veterans With Experience of Housing Instability (Journal of Rural Studies, January 2025) The objective of the present study is to estimate the frequency of migration among Veterans with experience of homelessness, the characteristics of their migrations, and individual and community-level characteristics that may predict their migrations. Byrne and his co-authors used VA administrative data for 559,513 Veterans with an indicator of housing instability between January 1, 2014, and December 31, 2018, with up to a 5-year observation period.

Claudia Andersen (CAS/Sociology & Postdoctoral Affiliate) Testing Systems-Level Theories and Impacts of Supermax Prisons: A Macrolevel Longitudinal Analysis (Justice Quarterly, January 2025) Supermaximum security prisons (or, “supermax”) are assumed necessary for the safety and order of prison systems. The current paper used ten years of data on 19 prison facilities in Ohio to examine the longitudinal, macro-level associations between supermax transfers and future facility-level outcomes. The results suggest weak support for the idea that supermax transfers improve prison social order and no evidence of improvements in violence. Sending people to supermax might be linked to minor improvements in program completion. We do find evidence of an overlooked harm—the release of alleged security threat group members from supermax to the general population was associated with increased violence. These results suggest that supermax fails to achieve its theoretical goals and they advance an important policy conversation about whether potential benefits to facility normalization with no measurable change to violence are worth the fiscal and human costs of supermax incarceration.

Caterina Scaramelli (CAS/Anthropology & CISS Affiliate) Thocial Life of Environmental Expertise: Leveraging Scientific Knowledge for Remaking Bio-Cultural Communities in Turkish Wetlands (Bloomsbury Publishing, Material Politics in Turkey: Infrastructure, Science, and Expertise, January 2025) This book explores the role of material entities and processes in shaping political lives in Turkey. The unifying thread of its chapters is to challenge the rendering of the material world as a mere background to or object in politics, revealing the formative role of material entities and processes in political processes of infrastructure construction, knowledge production, and technical expertise in Turkey. Chapters explore the politics of material entities such as roads, canals, oilfields, and mines as well as less elaborated material sites, including military bases, soccer fields, and wetlands.

Timothy Callaghan (SPH/Health Law, Policy, and Management & CISS Affiliate)Evidence On Trends In Uptake Of Childhood Vaccines and Association With Covid-19 Vaccination Rates (Vaccine, January 2025) Callaghan study the extent to which local vaccination rates are below herd-immunity thresholds and used COVID-19 non-vaccination rates as a proxy for vaccine hesitancy and examined whether spillover effects are more pronounced in geographic areas more susceptible to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as rural counties and strongly Republican-leaning counties.

Amelia M. Stanton (CAS/Psychological & Brain Sciences & CISS Affiliate) Disparities in Depression and Anxiety at the Intersection of Race and Gender Identity in a Large Community Health Sample (Social Science & Medicine, January 2025) Using health record data from an urban US community health center in Massachusetts that primarily serves LGBTQIA + communities, Stanton and her co-authors organized patients (N = 29,988) into 24 race and gender identity categories, pairing four race groups with six gender identity groups. They found that depression and anxiety symptom severity differed within men and women; transgender men and women across races had higher severity than cisgender men and women. In nonbinary individuals, symptom severity was high and consistent across the race groups.