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"Vulnerability" is now a widely used term in different settings—from politics and academia to everyday life. In response, a growing body of research has emerged critiquing and challenging the use of the concept in the social sciences. In this paper, we explore the use of the term vulnerability in research on children in out-of-home care and discuss the possible negative consequences of this—for the people involved and for the knowledge produced. Showing some of the problems involved in classifying these children as "particularly vulnerable", we argue that there is a need for more nuanced understandings of children growing up in out-of-home care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At this moment, humanity is confronting several global metacrises that demand a new image of science to deal with the complex problems associated with these crises. In addition to natural sciences and humanities, social sciences can become an equally efficient resource for use in this transformation if they succeed in constructing new frameworks congruent with the new reality. The purpose of this theoretical paper in the discourse of philosophy of science is to discern the features of the social sciences within a new paradigm of metamodernism. For the first time, the authors elaborate on the new principles of metamodernist philosophy and apply them to the ontology, epistemology, axiology, and methodology of the social sciences. The set of six transversal principles comprises the ontological principle of paradoxical simultaneity, caused by oscillation, epistemological principles of paradoxical understanding of truth and grand narratives, as well as metaxis-based thinking and dia/polylogue, axiological negotiation between rhizomatic and hierarchical social relations and values, and methodological pluralism. The last principle showcases the coexistence and interlinkage of previous stages of metamodernism. The application of these principles to the social sciences was designed from the perspectives of a specific discipline, inter/transdisciplinarity, and instrumental level of social practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of additional avenues for the development of metamodernism in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data analysis algorithms is complementary to theory-driven analysis approaches and becoming more popular also in social sciences. This paper describes the use of Big Data and computational approaches in social sciences by bibliometric analyses of articles indexed between 2015 and 2020 in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) of the Web of Science repository. We have analysed especially the recent research direction called Computational Social Sciences (CSS) that bridges computer analytical approaches with social science challenges, generating new methodologies of Big Data and AI analytics for social sciences. The results indicate that AI and Big Data practices are not confined to CSS only and are diffused in a wide variety of disciplines under Social Sciences and are made use of in many main research lines as well. Thus, the anticipated overlap between the Social Sciences & AI specialization and CSS has yet to be crystallised. Moreover, the impact of computational social science studies is not permeated to social science citation networks yet. Lastly, we demonstrate that the AI and Big Data publications that appear under the SSCI index are more oriented towards computational studies than addressing social science concepts, concerns, and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-environmental problems are some of the major concerns of today's society, and education is an essential area to raise awareness and mould future citizens who will be committed to sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how future primary and secondary education teachers in the area of social sciences perceive the socio-environmental problems that affect today's society, for their subsequent inclusion in the curriculum. To this end, a study was carried out by means of a questionnaire, which showed that trainee primary and secondary teachers have a high consideration of these environmental problems, with hardly any differences noted according to sex or type of degree studied. This perception is positive in terms of the subsequent inclusion of socio-environmental problems in the development of the curriculum by the participating trainee teachers, who largely prefer an autonomous model for curricular implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the manners in which Indigenous and allied non-Indigenous researchers, medical directors, and knowledge-keepers (among others) extend the ethical precepts and social justice commitments that are inherent in community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches to genomics. By means of a genealogical analysis of bioethical discourses, I examine the problem in which genomic science claims to offer potentially beneficial genetic screening tools to Indigenous and racialized peoples who have and continue to struggle with historical health inequity, exploitation, and exclusion by the very biomedical institutions which would be charged with the task of ethically introducing these biomedical tools. This investigation focuses on Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) as an approach established by Indigenous communities and scientists to gain access to the benefits of genomic health which, if the field's promises are true, aims to counter the historical neglect or exploitation by biomedical researchers and institutions. I chart the role of CBPR principals as it pertains to collective efforts by both Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous allies to create the social, biomedical, and institutional conditions to improve Indigenous health equity in the context of genomic science in two specific studies: the Silent Genome initiative (British Columbia) and the Aotearoa Variome (Aotearoa/New Zealand). This investigation contributes insights to social science literatures in health equity for racialized communities, biomedical ethics, Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, and decolonial biomedical and technoscience histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, discourse on quality, school effectiveness, autonomy, and accountability, among other topics, has been used to try to transform schools. This paper explores this situation from the teaching perspective of one of its authors. Using autoethnography as a research and formative strategy, a mixed category system is constructed by combining a central category ("Neoliberal school") theoretically and deductively with three other subcategories of an emergent and inductive nature according to the parameters of grounded theory. The results reflect different perceptions of neoliberal educational discourse that depend on the discursive field in question (policy framework, school, department, or classroom). The conclusions underline the potential of autoethnography for understanding the current school reality and teacher professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ROSSIO Infrastructure is developing a free and open-access platform for aggregating, organising, and connecting the digital resources in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities provided by Portuguese higher education and cultural institutions. This paper presents an overview of the ROSSIO Infrastructure, its main objectives, the institutions involved, and the services offered by the infrastructure's aims through its platform—namely, a discovery portal, digital exhibitions, collections, and a virtual research environment. These services rely on a metadata-aggregation solution for bringing the digital objects' metadata from the providing institutions into ROSSIO. The aggregated datasets are converted into linked data and undergo an enrichment process based on controlled vocabularies, which are developed and published by ROSSIO. The paper will describe this process, the applications involved, and how they interoperate. We will further reflect on how these services may enhance the dissemination of science, considering the FAIR principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to assess students' social representations of forced migration as a relevant social problem in the last year of primary education and the opportunity for its curricular inclusion. The study was carried out by means of a questionnaire, filled in by 6th-year primary education groups (11–12 years old) (n = 70), in a state-supported private school in the city of A Coruña (Galicia, Spain). The questionnaire was supported by three pictures of forced migrations from the media. In this case, the children had to interpret the pictures through a series of questions that sought to investigate their representations, the causes they identify in this social problem, their opinions, and possible solutions. Finally, the opportunity for the inclusion of social problems as curriculum content was addressed. The study shows that the students are in favor of migrants, that they use concepts from the social sciences in their arguments—albeit simple ones, and that they are in favor of the curricular inclusion of social problems, in which they develop representations through different sources of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers across the social sciences have long been interested in families. How people make decisions such as who to marry, when to have a baby, how big or small a family to have, or whether to stay with a partner or stray are questions that continue to interest economists, sociologists, demographers, and anthropologists. Human families vary across the globe; different cultures have different marriage practices, different ideas about who raises children, and even different notions of what a family is. Human behavioral ecology is a branch of anthropology that is particularly interested in cultural variation of family systems and how these differences impact upon the people that inhabit them; the children, parents, grandparents. It draws on evolutionary theory to direct research and generate testable hypotheses to uncover how different ecologies, including social contexts, can explain diversity in families. In this Special Issue on the behavioral ecology of the family, we have collated a selection of papers that showcase just how useful this framework is for understanding cultural variation in families, which we hope will convince other social scientists interested in family research to draw upon evolutionary and ecological insight in their own work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]