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ASMR (“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”) is commonly defined as an emotional experience of a tingling sensation in the head and neck. It is said to be triggered by certain auditory, visual, interpersonal, tactile, and often socially intimate stimuli. A great many people around the world reportedly experience ASMR regularly. However, it was not before the year 2007 that the phenomenon has been publicly noticed. Since then, ASMR has become a persistent globalized phenomenon receiving enormous attention. But sociology has remained silent about the phenomenon. Therefore, this paper aims at bringing ASMR to the attention of sociology. ASMR constitutes a unique case of the social construction of a new emotion within the past 15 years or so. The paper offers a first attempt to grasp ASMR sociologically by looking at situational triggers, physiological sensations, the cultural labelling, and the problem of expressive gestures. The paper also identifies several areas of sociology for which ASMR has relevance and outlines potential research avenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigrants need to constantly manage their legal status while straddling uncertain life circumstances and shifting policies. U.S. immigrant policies treat immigrants based on U.S. internal and international political needs. This practice is only further heightened during a global crisis such as the recent COVID‐19 pandemic. Immigrants' existing citizenship contributes to the constraints they experience. Using Chinese international students studying in graduate programs as an example, this paper studies the dual liminality highly skilled immigrants experience in sustaining their legal status and developing their careers. Adopting a life course perspective, this paper reveals that liminal legality constrains immigrants' career choices as they transition from students to full‐time professionals. Acquiring legal status takes precedence over their career goals. They may forfeit career opportunities to secure legal status. Moreover, their Chinese citizenship hinders their career advancement. In recent years, United States–China rivalry in international politics and intellectual competition has intensified. Combined with a racialized construction of U.S. citizenship, highly skilled Chinese immigrants experience a heightened sense of vulnerability vis‐a‐vis institutional scrutiny and mistreatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary focus of this paper is twofold: to demarcate the epistemic erasure of societal knowledge and narratives of Asian Americans as braided with other forms of anti‐Asian racism by tracing its historical roots in orientalism, colonialism, and imperialism; and to redress such erasure by foregrounding transnational perspectives and Asian American Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit). By attending to historical and ongoing experiences of migration and racialization, this paper highlights the transculturality of Asian American histories, epistemologies, and communities, along with the multi‐stranded connections that they share with diasporic Asians in other countries. It expands the dominant framing of racialized minorities in the United States that indexes and limits their experiences within the geopolitical boundaries of the nation‐state. By situating Asian Americans within critical historical and transnational contexts, this paper generates a fuller and more complex understanding of the past and present conditions of Asian Americans and anti‐Asian racism. It also deliberately highlights the agency of Asian American youth and their strategies in contesting anti‐Asian racism in schools and society at large. By amplifying Asian American youth voices and agency, this paper not only affirms their wealth of transnational funds of knowledge but also offers crucial interventions challenging the curricular violence that continues to marginalize and misrepresent Asian Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper reviews four dimensions of the climate change (CC) debate concerning perception, framing, and political and economic dimensions of CC. It attempts to address the question posed by sociological research as to what can be done to reduce the social forces driving CC. In doing so, it attempts to uncover mechanisms that delay or prevent the social change required to combat CC. Such mechanisms call into question the Ecological Modernization Theory's assumption that modern societies embrace environmental sustainability with no radical intervention to change the social, political, and economic order. It specifically considers how the representation of CC as a distant phenomenon, in both temporal and physical terms, might contribute to social disengagement. A reflection on the interdependencies among science, political economy, media, and individual perceptions guides this paper. All these social forces also shape the CC discourse in diverse ways according to the evolution of the phenomenon over time (in scientific, but also in political and economic terms) and in relation to its spatial dimension (global/national/local). The variety of climate discourses contributes to increasing political uncertainty; however, this is not the only factor that generates confusion around the CC. Multiple and contrasting information might trigger a "blaming/empowering game" that works at various levels. This mechanism simultaneously promotes the necessity for sustainable development and perpetuates "business as usual‐oriented" practices. Implementing sustainable development is therefore constantly undermined by a difficulty in identifying "heroes" and "devils" in the context of CC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rich body of literature has studied variances in motherhood wage penalties. Yet studies have not explored American rural–nonrural differences in this phenomenon. The spatial differences in women's experiences deserve exploration. Based on prior studies, rural mothers may experience greater wage penalties than nonrural mothers because of their high marriage rates, low educational levels, and the traditional gender attitudes and norms in rural communities. However, they may experience smaller penalties because rural job structures lack diversity and jobs there tend to be low‐paid. This paper uses fixed‐effects models to examine the rural–nonrural differences in motherhood wage penalties, with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). The results show that although rural women reported lower education levels and higher marriage rates than nonrural women, they experienced smaller motherhood wage penalties than nonrural women partially because they were more likely to work in low‐paid occupations and industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2020 U.S. survey, more Asian Indians than Chinese indicated that they were worried about post‐Covid‐19 hate crimes. Yet, post‐Covid violence against people of Asian background has been viewed as being directed against "Chinese‐looking" individuals. This is just one example of how South Asians are overlooked in discourses about Asian Americans. This theoretical paper provides an expansion of the racial formation framework to explain this exclusion. We demonstrate how global factors, including the foreign engagements of the United States shaped the development of the Asian American group and category, and why, even though Asian Americans can be brown, yellow, white, or black, an East Asian phenotype is viewed as denoting an "Asian" body in the United States. We also discuss how the racialization of religion shapes anti‐South Asian racism, a factor largely ignored in the literature on racial formation and Asian Americans. We end by calling for the inclusion of South Asians in Asian American literature to challenge many of the reigning paradigms regarding Asian America and anti‐Asian racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and geopolitical disruptions triggered by the COVID‐19 crisis have raised crucial questions about the shifting meaning of race, citizenship, and nationality for transborder migrants amidst receding globalization, hardening borders, and geopolitical tensions. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which Chinese international students have viewed and negotiated their ambiguous racial and ethnonational position between nations during the global pandemic. Drawing on 16 student interviews at one upstate New York campus between 2019 and 2021, we argue that Chinese international students have occupied a liminal space between nations that shapes their understanding of race and racism through a distinctly geopolitical lens. Double‐edged exclusion and discrimination from both the US and China during the global pandemic have heightened their sense of social dislocation and withdrawal from nationalist politics in both countries. In the process, they have not so much surrendered the cosmopolitan ideals that motivated their migration but rather, reimagined them while maintaining a delicate balance between global cosmopolitan ideals and ethnonationalist loyalties. Our findings provide insights into the future political trajectory of Chinese transborder migrants amid tense US–China relations and help to explain the contradictions of diasporic Chinese worldviews on current affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and geopolitical disruptions triggered by the COVID‐19 crisis have raised crucial questions about the shifting meaning of race, citizenship, and nationality for transborder migrants amidst receding globalization, hardening borders, and geopolitical tensions. The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which Chinese international students have viewed and negotiated their ambiguous racial and ethnonational position between nations during the global pandemic. Drawing on 16 student interviews at one upstate New York campus between 2019 and 2021, we argue that Chinese international students have occupied a liminal space between nations that shapes their understanding of race and racism through a distinctly geopolitical lens. Double‐edged exclusion and discrimination from both the US and China during the global pandemic have heightened their sense of social dislocation and withdrawal from nationalist politics in both countries. In the process, they have not so much surrendered the cosmopolitan ideals that motivated their migration but rather, reimagined them while maintaining a delicate balance between global cosmopolitan ideals and ethnonationalist loyalties. Our findings provide insights into the future political trajectory of Chinese transborder migrants amid tense US–China relations and help to explain the contradictions of diasporic Chinese worldviews on current affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the emerging field of men, masculinities, and disasters by drawing on narratives of men's accounts of the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, including how stories of the earthquake intersect with experiences and understandings of extreme weather and climate change. A qualitative methodology was employed, and semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 19 men who experienced the 7.8 magnitude earthquake. This article offers an examination of the complexity of disaster experiences and recovery, as well as how people make sense of hazards and risks. We argue that ongoing exposure to climate hazards informed participant's responses to other infrequent natural hazard events, such as the Kaikōura earthquake. The research identified that men construct their own understandings and responses to natural hazards through a hierarchy of risk perception and probability based on personal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings of qualitative analysis of female professors' views about the role of their parents' attitudes and family backgrounds in shaping their access to and participation in university education in Pakistan. Structural barriers in the form of lack of education, in particular, high education facilities and opportunities were linked to disadvantaged rural places of residence and geographical inequities, whereas parental values of believing in the importance of gaining professional education were commonly highlighted across the sample. Similarly, the family culture of encouraging and supporting children's education, and parental role in overcoming barriers in gaining access to university education were more likely reported than traditional gender role beliefs and gendered practices. Additionally, parents' positive and reinforcing attitudes toward their daughters' education played a mediating role in shaping study participants' academic dispositions and agencies that lead to their academic and career success. The analysis revealed that parents' positive educational values, encouraging attitudes, and supportive behaviors for their daughters were embedded in parents' personal histories and experiences of deprived status in education and occupational attainments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists define power as one party's capacity to influence another's action. Thus, power is a relational property of interpersonal interaction. However, its dynamics embed within institutions such as the church and the state. This paper explores power dynamics using a case study of the conflict between an Old Order Amish church and the civil law of Ohio. The church excommunicated a member for violating community rules. The member countered by suing the church in state court. We trace power within and across these spheres of influence, showing how each party defined the situation according to institutional vectors of power. While one might expect the state to possess greater power in this situation, we demonstrate that ultimately neither party had total power, and both lost to some extent. This case study identifies the importance of viewing power as interactional, dynamic, and contextual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and latent class analysis to assess the extent to which individuals integrate guns into broader health lifestyles. We also examine how these new health lifestyles differ for men and women. While men integrate guns with a variety of risk‐taking behaviors, including smoking, heavy drinking, risky sexual behavior, and fast‐food consumption, women do not. Our results are consistent with a gendered theory of gun ownership and health lifestyles. On the one hand, some men may use guns and other risky health behaviors to project hegemonic masculinity. On the other hand, some women may avoid guns and other elements of risky lifestyles to signify normative femininity. It is important for sociologists and public health scholars to focus more on how and why men are more likely to integrate guns into generally unhealthy lifestyles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]