ABSTRACT Birth doulas provide services to those giving birth and their families during pregnancy, labor, and postpartum. A central part of their emotional labor consists of empathizing with their clients. Drawing on 40 in‐depth interviews with a diverse group of doulas practicing in a large metropolitan area of the US South, we examine empathy socialization among these workers. We identify three interrelated phases of empathy socialization: preparing for empathy, getting involved, and detaching from empathy. While these stages are interlinked, we consider detaching from empathy a crucial step in empathy socialization, given that doula work is physically and emotionally exhausting and that doula training programs and their peer support networks systematically encourage detachment. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of this research for birth workers, birthing people, and parents in the United States.

ABSTRACT Constructionist theorists emphasize that meanings are socially created and disseminated through symbolic communication, with media holding a vital role in these processes. This study examines how meanings regarding the life and crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, infamous American serial killer, have been repeatedly constructed and reconstructed in media since his crimes were discovered in 1991. Drawing on the concept of “looping,” it analyzes how decades of mediated representations—in a diverse array of media technologies and formats, ranging from news and documentaries to social media and consumer merchandise—have reformatted public memory and meanings regarding Dahmer and his crimes. Findings highlight how technology shifts, media logic, and cultural narratives fuel recurring representations that can alternately reinforce or revise existing frames and meanings. Potential implications for constructionist inquiry are discussed.

ABSTRACTThis study examines how protest episodes foster political efficacy among ordinary citizens. Based on 44 in‐depth interviews with participants in two major 2018 mobilizations in Spain—the feminist strike of International Women's Day and the pensioners' protests—the analysis identifies discursive expressions that reflect attitudinal change across three dimensions: cognitive, agentic, and collective. These include increased political attentiveness, feelings of empowerment, and renewed belief in collective action. Notably, these expressions often combine in participants' narratives, suggesting a dynamic interplay between efficacy dimensions that reinforces perceptions of political agency. The study highlights three key mechanisms behind these transformations—exposure to reliable information, vicarious learning, and shared mastery experiences—that nurture both individual and collective efficacy. The analysis shows that the specific forms of efficacy change are shaped by both the nature of the protest episode and participants' prior protest experience, with first‐time participants displaying the most varied changes. These findings underscore the transformative potential of emotionally resonant protest episodes. Far from being trivial or symbolic, even low‐cost protest episodes may function as socially embedded learning environments.

ABSTRACTSociology, a discipline that engages academia and the public, has been largely hindered by institutional barriers and disciplinary silos, especially in India. M. N. Srinivas, a pioneering Indian sociologist, played a significant role in bridging this gap through his ethnographic fieldwork and public discourse on caste, social mobility, and rural transformation. His theoretical contributions, particularly Sanskritization and Westernization, reshaped the understanding of caste dynamics and social change in India. This paper critically examines Srinivas's legacy in public sociology, assessing its relevance in contemporary debates on caste, identity politics, and social justice. The study highlights Srinivas's methodological innovations, emphasizing his “field view” approach, which prioritized empirical research over abstract theorization. The paper also sees Sanskritization as a transformative framework and looks into what implications it has for caste mobility and its critics among Dalit scholars. The paper calls for revitalizing public sociology through interdisciplinary research, greater public engagement, and inclusivity. By drawing lessons from Srinivas's work, contemporary Indian sociologists can reaffirm their role in shaping public discourse and social policy.

ABSTRACT The concept of social construction—i.e., the premise that something is created through social interactions, rather than being God‐given, natural, or otherwise inevitable—is foundational to gender studies and to the sociology of gender subfield. Through most of the twentieth century, when feminist scholars said that “gender is socially constructed,” they were disputing the idea that women's subordination was inevitable. Instead, they maintained that it was produced through childhood socialization and enforced by social institutions, laws, and through social interactions. Toward the end of the twentieth century, some scholars extended social construction arguments to our understanding of men and women as “opposite sexes” or the idea that there are two and only two sexes. Moderate constructionists limited their claims to ideas about, or categories concerning, sex. Radical constructionists denied that there was any pre‐discursive reality to sex. For some scholars, activists, and activist‐scholars, “assigning” any infant to the category of male or female at birth was not only arbitrary. It constituted an act of violence that enforced a harmful sex binary and denied people the right to self‐determination. Recently, some activists have taken up the assertion that sex “assignment” is socially constructed while also maintaining that gender identity (whether one knows oneself to be male, female, or nonbinary) is innate—thus repudiating earlier theories of gender identity as a blank slate. This paper traces this intellectual history and discusses how these distinct—and conflicting—understandings of what it means for gender to be socially constructed inform contemporary debates.

ABSTRACTThis work explores the ways autistic individuals describe and perceive their friendship relationships. Through qualitative analysis of participants' accounts, I discuss the importance that autistic adults attribute to values of “comfort,” “acceptance,” and “trust” in their relationships with the people they call “friends” and explain the centrality of these aspects to how they understand and define “friendship.” By conceptualizing friendship as relatedness, I argue that perceptions and practices of friendship among autistic people cannot be fully understood if not examined in the context of the intersection of personal difficulties, physical‐social environments, cultural attitudes, and lived experiences of autistic individuals. Accordingly, this study offers an analysis of how these intersecting aspects constitute a basis for the building of intersubjectivity among autistic persons and construct the shared moral values and expectations that underlie their understanding of, and approach to, friendship. Furthermore, by showing how friendship perceptions among autistic individuals stem in part from shared corporeal and perceptual experiences, this study offers insights into the perceptual foundations of social relationships. Through examining friendship and sociability, I tease out the intricate daily and social experiences of autistic people and elucidate the complexity of the category of friendship and its efficiency for understanding human experiences.

ABSTRACTFirst‐generation college students face systemic barriers to persistence, including lower campus engagement, delayed graduation, and higher departure rates compared to their continuing‐generation peers. While these disadvantages are well documented, less is known about how first‐generation students adapt to institutional contexts laden with inequality. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative interviews with 55 first‐generation students at a large public university—conducted at the start of their first and second years—we examine how they navigate their first year, a critical period marked by heightened attrition. Our findings show: (1) that first‐generation students enter college with cultural, social, and economic resources that higher education institutions often devalue and (2) many first‐generation students demonstrate resilience through two key forms of adaptation: capital conversion, or transforming one form of capital into another, and strategic repositioning, or shifting across majors or programs where their existing capital is more valued. These strategies unfold through peer networks, trial‐and‐error learning, and selective access to institutional support. By analyzing how first‐generation students adapt over time, our results contribute to literatures on educational inequality, social mobility, and first‐generation college students by highlighting how structural barriers shape both the obstacles that students encounter and the adaptive strategies at their disposal.