Social science researchers and higher-education personnel have begun to recognize the unique and unequal experiences of first-generation, low-income, and working-class students, but what of those from such backgrounds that manage to reach the professoriate? What can we learn from their mobility experiences? What obstacles do they and others perceive standing in their way? Using original data on faculty and graduate students collected between 2018 and 2022, we analyze how diverse faculty (including graduate students) reflect on the relevance of social class background for upward mobility and success in academia. Results point to a shared understanding of ways in which cultural, social, and economic resources and resource constraints are influential although we also find noteworthy interpretational divergences by social location and identity. We discuss our most central results in these regards as well as their implications for building greater equity in higher education.

Last-born adult children are disproportionately likely to be their mothers’ “favored child.” Although past research shows that birth order shapes children’s likelihood of being favored, little is known about whether or how it shapes the reasons a child is favored. Using qualitative interview data from 233 older mothers, we examine how mothers’ explanations for favoring an adult child are shaped by their favored child’s birth order. Findings show that last-born children were most commonly favored due to mothers’ perceptions of their empathetic understanding. First-born children were most commonly favored for social–structural and experiential similarities. Middle-borns were most commonly favored because mothers perceived them to need their support more. This article contributes to family sociology by showing that birth order shapes not only the likelihood, but also the reasons for later-life maternal favoritism. Mothers’ perceptions of last-borns as more understanding and empathetic help explain their advantage in securing their mothers’ favor.

Unique high Andean ecosystems in South America as the “páramos” have been the object of conservation plans in the last decade. In Colombia, this spurred heated discussions when their conservation was promoted through the cartographic demarcation of their boundaries: what counts as “páramo” and what kind of activities should be allowed there have been highly contested topics. As part of a multisited ethnography that studies the case of páramos conservation with biologists, geographers, and campesinos in the Sumapaz region of Colombia, I argue that the analysis of boundaries is a crucial matter in the unfolding of conservation. By analyzing how boundaries are configured, coordinated, and contested in the conservation of páramos in Colombia, I advance an ontological approach to boundary-making as practices embedded in the concrete transformation of environmental worlds through the involvement of multiple agents such as humans, plants, and technologies.

Memorials romanticizing the short-lived Confederate States of America remain scattered across public spaces. Yet, little research examines whether memorials are consequential for residents that live proximate to them. This study relies on insights from social stress theory to examine associations between the local presence of public Confederate memorials and the mental health of African American and Afro-Caribbean adults. Data for this study are merged from the National Survey of American Life (n=4,740) and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s census of Confederate memorials. We examine associations between counts of local Confederate memorials and depressive symptomatology, self-rated mental health, and substance use disorder. Results from gender-stratified generalized models show that logged memorial counts are curvilinearly associated with mental health among Black women such that psychological adjustment is typically poorest in counties with an average number of memorials. In these spaces, African American women experience significantly greater depressive symptoms than Afro-Caribbean women. Moreover, social cohesion—familial support, membership with a pro-Black organization, frequent contact with neighbors, and ethnic closeness—modifies associations between memorials and mental health such that women with high levels of cohesion typically experience buffered mental health impacts when residing proximal to memorials. This study highlights the importance of critically investigating stressors extending from white supremacy across social statuses and theorizing resourcefulness against antiblack racism.

This study proposes a framework combining economic improvement and the disruption within family interactions to disentangle the effect of parental migration on left-behind children’s development. We proposed a concept of parental capital, which refers to the cultivated interactions between the primary caregiver and the child. The disruption effect is theorized here as loss in parental capital, that the decrease in frequency and stability of interactions between children and the primary caregiver caused by parental migration. This research draws on the 2012 China Urbanization and Labor Migration Survey (CULMS), a nationally representative dataset including a substantial migrant population. Our results show that the loss in parental capital mediates almost all of the adverse effects of parental absence. In addition, parental capital doesn’t significantly mediate the effect of father migration on children’s cognitive development, but it has substantial explaining power in the disadvantage of children with dual-parent migration.

This article problematizes the concept of “Black Don’t Crack” and challenges the universal desirability of youthfulness. This study is driven by two research questions: (1) How does the perceived youthfulness of professional Black workers shape their subjective experience of workplace interactions? and (2) What strategies do Black workers use to assert their expertise and legitimacy when confronted with prejudicial attitudes and interactions based on perceptions about their age? Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews with professional Black women who are perceived as younger than they actually are, this article describes Black women’s experiences with ageism and their specific strategies for combating age bias in the workplace. The focus of this study diverges from most ageism studies focused on bias against older adults. Rather, this article contributes to our understanding of how gendered racism and ageism intersect when Black women’s chronological ages differ from how they are perceived.

Women are becoming the majority in China’s universities and colleges. This study examines gender differences in post-college plans of China’s college students under the new social context. Drawing on survey data from college students across 15 universities in Beijing, this study identifies a gendered post-college planning process. Descriptive findings show that the majority of students plan to go to graduate school, while women are less likely to have a graduate school plan and more likely to be unclear about their future than men. Multivariate analyses show that these gender gaps can be partly attributed to women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Moreover, family socioeconomic resources and anticipated parenthood timing are associated with post-college plans, and these associations are more pronounced among women. This paper discusses the implications of these findings for research on the formation of gender stratification in education and career in the global context of women’s progress in education.

As a racialized pan-ethnic group, Asian Americans exhibit ethnically heterogeneous structural and cultural characteristics, but such heterogeneity and its implications for Asian Americans’ pan-ethnic groupness were seldom explored empirically. Using the American Community Survey and the 2016 National Asian American Survey datasets, this paper examines intra-Asian symbolic and socioeconomic boundaries and boundary processes captured in Asian interethnic marriage. I find prominent intra-Asian boundaries distinguishing exceptionally disadvantaged refugee-origin Southeast Asians, yet intra-Asian marriages still occur across these boundaries. This mismatch between intra-Asian boundaries and marriage patterns reflects loose and often unstable interpretations of ethnic similarities and differences. Together, my findings reveal Asian Americans’ contextually salient interpretations of ethnic heterogeneity behind intra-Asian boundary processes, which further reinforce the socially constructed notion of Asian Americans as a racialized group.

Smartphones have become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, and attachment to these devices is a felt reality for many Americans. This paper describes the link between smartphone attachment and the pursuit of meaning and purpose in life. Analyses reveal meaning-seeking as a positive correlate of smartphone attachment. However, while interaction effects suggest that meaning-seeking through heavy social media and Internet use decreases the odds of smartphone attachment, meaning-seeking is strongly related to attachment at lower levels of daily media use. Also, having a satisfying life purpose decreases the odds of smartphone attachment, though this protective effect is not as strong as meaning-seeking in the final models. We conclude that smartphone attachment, within a context of latent anomie, could be anomigenic, inadvertently exacerbating feelings of despair while simultaneously promising to resolve them. Findings provide a sociological link between smartphone attachment and the negative psychosocial outcomes described in the literature.

This article analyzes how a formerly mocked policy idea became a widespread solution. Through content analysis of newspaper articles and legal documents, I develop a framework that extends timelines of social movement influence, expands the range of actors and locations of mobilization, and traces how activists frame policy ideas over time: the policy relay. This framework allows for an analysis of how opponents unintentionally advanced the reform process in 1993 by turning its originators into laughingstocks. Anti-rape advocates eventually reformulated the policy in 2014. This time, the origin was removed from the story, presenting a concise narrative that credited politicians and college administrators, rather than activists, for the reform. By tracing the ideas of a movement, rather than focusing on organizations or public protests, I uncover a complicated process of social change, where consequential actors work across different settings to ignite reforms and strategically remove controversial aspects from narratives of social change.