Social Science Scholars Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Lives (and Futures) of Black Children and Youth

Abstract As social science scholarship on Black children and youth continues to expand and to explore their experiences, there remains a need to investigate how families, communities, relationships, and social institutions impact their experiences. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by our consideration of Black children’s and youths’ present realities and their futures. The editors of this volume are interested in creating space to analyze and theorize the radical possibilities for Black children to flourish in a world that typically ignores, marginalizes, and dismisses their plights and their promise. Privileging the agency of Black youth, the articles in this special issue provide nuanced accounts of how they make sense of many aspects of their lives and futures.

Consubstantialities of resistance: Labor process, (bio)materialities, and pathogenicity

As social science scholarship has historically documented, social structure and clinical practice are more commonly as contradictory or incoherent as they are often framed. The increasing emphasis on the rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has drawn attention to how social realms of resistance are entrenched and interconnected through varied structural, political, clinical, biological, and ecological relations. In this study, set in São Paulo, Brazil, I sought to unpack relational consubstantialities of AMR within the healthcare labor process and their enfolded (bio)materialities and pathogenicity by drawing on a series of interviews with primary care-based health professionals, health services managers, and policymakers, completed between late 2021 and early 2023. Participants’ accounts reveal how the reproduction of the labor process in primary care foregrounds (bio)material relations in which antimicrobial resistance finds timely and proper coextensive social conditions of reproduction. In their turn, the study results highlight how work intensification relates to economies of scarcity, teamwork coerciveness, AMR virulence and pathogenicity, destabilizing ecological (bio)materialities amid structural and clinical practice interrelations. Building on renewed materialisms of the political economy of health, I propose an approach to complexify understandings of relational interconnectedness of resistance by instilling relational tension lines of objects against their pragmatic reification in health interventions and theory.

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Lives (and Futures) of Black Children and Youth

ABSTRACT As social science scholarship on Black children and youth continues to expand and explore their experiences, there still remains a need to investigate how families, communities, relationships, and social institutions impact their experiences. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by our considerations of Black children’s and youth’s present realities and their futures. The editors of this volume are interested in creating space to analyze and theorize the radical possibilities for Black children to flourish in a world that typically ignores, marginalizes, and dismisses their plights and their promise. Privileging the agency of Black youth, the articles in this special issue provide nuanced accounts of how they make sense of many aspects of their lives and futures.

Imperialist Multispecies Aspirations

Humanities and social science scholars have recently turned their attention to the embeddedness of microbes in human life as a potential way to decentre the human and thereby decolonise assumptions about the human conquest of the natural world. In this article, I argue that, before such claims can be made, careful historical, regional, and ethnographic analyses of human-microbe relations are needed. My case study of a Japanese sustainable development, agricultural, and environmental NGO shows that human attunement to microbes is not necessarily decolonial in the context of Japan’s modern history. In fact, discourses of human openness to microbial life find affinity with Japanese nationalism and imperialism. Through my analysis, I contribute to scholarship that reveals how environmental visions link up with conservative and right-wing politics.

Missed opportunities for AI governance: lessons from ELS programs in genomics, nanotechnology, and RRI

AbstractSince the beginning of the current hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI), governments, research institutions, and the industry invited ethical, legal, and social sciences (ELS) scholars to research AI’s societal challenges from various disciplinary viewpoints and perspectives. This approach builds upon the tradition of supporting research on the societal aspects of emerging sciences and technologies, which started with the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Program in the Human Genome Project (HGP) in the early 1990s. However, although a diverse ELS research community has formed since then, AI’s societal challenges came to be mostly understood under the narrow framing of ethics and disconnected from the insights and experiences of past ELS research. In this article, we make up for this gap and connect insights from past ELS researchers with current approaches to research the societal challenges of AI. We analyse and summarize the history of “ELS programs” (programs that emerged since the HGP to support ELS research in a given domain) as three distinct eras: a genomics era, a nano era, and an RRI era. Each of these eras comprises several achievements and challenges relevant to ELS programs in AI research, such as the setup of independent funding bodies, the engagement of the wider public in research practice, and the increasing importance of private actors. Based on these insights, we argue that AI research currently falls back on self-regulatory, less participatory, and industry-led approaches that trouble ELS programs’ past achievements and hinder opportunities to overcome the still-existing challenges.

Algorithms in the Margins: Organized Community Resistance to Port Automation in the Los Angeles Harbor Area

Public deliberations on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) provoke strong interest in automation, or the perceived displacement of human labor due to general technological advances. Social science scholarship on well-compensated technology workers and a growing global underclass suggests automation remains largely a myth, with emerging technologies generating new forms of computational and emotional work. But little research has examined automation from the vantage point of community members at perceived greatest risk of displacement, such as those sustained by generations of logistics labor and physically located in racialized, underserved areas. In the United States and around the globe, logistics work is directly targeted by “automation engineers” to reduce labor costs on behalf of industry interests, posing a severe threat to port workers and their respective communities. This article examines organized community resistance to automation within the Los Angeles Harbor Area, drawing on four public hearings following the Port of LA’s planned integration of autonomous vehicles for the movement of cargo (i.e., automated straddle carriers). We find community mobilizations widely sought to enlarge public consideration of AI/ML to encompass matters of societal well-being and the collective good. These include shifting from the legality of AI integration to underscore public morality in light of anticipated harm, in addition to emphasizing the invisible social arrangements surrounding the Port and nearby community life. Our research reveals how lay people may reassert their own importance when confronted by technoscientific injustice, such as by reframing the future of work toward an insistence on “the future of our communities.”

‘Types’ of Popular Musicians: From Musical to Professional Styles: Some Epistemological Reflections Based on the Case of French-Speaking Swiss Musicians

In academic research on popular music, the framing by musical genres and styles such as ‘Rock’, ‘Jazz’, and ‘Electro’ often seems obvious to social sciences scholars. The history, aesthetic features, and boundaries of musical idioms are major concerns for cultural studies, and the notion that musical styles shape the professional musical landscape is commonly accepted. This article is based on a survey involving 125 respondents in French-speaking Switzerland. It combines network analysis based on musical pairings during the year before the survey, with a typical socio-economic approach to understanding the features and resources of musicians. We demonstrate that the conventional approach of classifying musicians by ‘musical styles’ is not the most effective way to understand the structure of the musical occupational group. Instead, work pairings in music, and more broadly, sub-networks that emerge within our population, effectively group musicians according to their ‘professional style’ rather than their ‘musical style’. The focus is not on playing ‘Rock’, ‘Pop’, or ‘Jazz’, but rather on performing original compositions or covers, and whether one is a unique creative artist playing concerts or a service provider performing for entertainment gigs.

International Mobility and Knowledge Exchange Between China and the West: A Study of Chinese Humanities and Social Sciences Scholars

Purpose This study examines the impact of international academic mobility on knowledge exchange between China and the West, including its potential benefits and risks, specifically in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) fields. Design/Approach/Methods This study employed qualitative research methods; specifically, data were collected through interviews and analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings With increasing knowledge flows in global academia, Chinese HSS scholars are benefiting from international academic mobility. They engage in various activities, such as international visits, conferences, and research collaborations, and praise the role of mobility in building an understanding of Western culture and knowledge, including research dynamics, embodied and encultured knowledge, and location-specific textual materials. However, international mobility has inadvertently exacerbated global knowledge asymmetries, with some Chinese scholars uncritically adopting Western paradigms. Nonetheless, pioneering Chinese HSS scholars aim to promote a two-way knowledge exchange between China and the West by fostering cultural reflexivity and enhancing their global visibility. Originality/Value Chinese HSS scholars serve as an illuminating example in the context of global knowledge asymmetries dominated by the Anglo-American West. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for fostering equitable and inclusive knowledge exchange between Western and non-Western societies through international academic mobility.

Is gender equality in brain damage ‘progress’ for women and sport?

This commentary sits within a context of growing cultural concern over brain damage that occurs in many of the Western world's most popular, profitable and prized sports. After laying out evidence demonstrating this point, we discuss the increasing inclusion of women within sports which involve regular and routinised brain injuries. We problematise this apparent ‘progress’ with the title of our commentary. In particular, rather than offering some simplified yes/no answer, we argue that in light of the five decades of social scientific scholarship documenting the various harms produced by performance impact sports, working towards gender equality in brain damage is a nonsensical outcome. So, while there is clear evidence from academic gender studies that progress has been made towards tackling issues of exclusion and various forms of discrimination against women and girls in performance sport spaces, there has not been concomitant progress made in tackling the ways bodies and brains are often broken down, damaged and sometimes destroyed during participation in such sports. We do not suggest that consenting adults should be prohibited from enjoying impact sports and our aim with this commentary is not driven by a paternalistic, patriarchal belief which reflects historical notions around sportswomen being the ‘fairer’ sex, nor that responses to sport-acquired brain injury should be sex- or gender-specific. Rather, we conclude by suggesting that the emerging science on sport-acquired brain injuries should serve as an important inflection point to those leaders, organisers, practitioners and scholars working in this area to reconsider how we imagine, promote and structure sport – for everyone.

How do they become globally high achieving? Trajectories, struggles, and achievements of ethnic Chinese humanities and social sciences scholars

On the world stage of the humanities and social sciences (HSS), ethnic Chinese scholars and their scholarship as a whole are arguably not yet considered mainstream. However, a growing number of ethnic Chinese HSS scholars have become internationally recognized in their respective fields, producing scholarship of global and lasting influence. These scholars are referred to in this study as globally high-achieving scholars. Enquiring into how certain ethnic Chinese HSS scholars become globally high achieving, this study aims to unravel the trajectories, struggles, and achievements of these scholars; contribute to the literature on scholars’ academic development and on Chinese scholars; and provide recommendations for scholarly training in higher education in and beyond Greater China. It uses a narrative research design to explore the life and academic trajectories of globally high-achieving scholars, and reveals reasons associated with their achievements. In particular, the article highlights the scholars’ possession of strong resilience, engagement with Chinese traditional cultures and knowledges, development of multiple lenses, and realization of the state of ‘zide (自得)’, meaning staying true to oneself. This study is one of the first empirical attempts to explore this topic, and it makes both conceptual and practical contributions to the field.

The time of cure: hepatitis C treatment and the matter of reinfection among people who inject drugs

ABSTRACT Australia has made considerable progress towards the public-health ‘elimination’ of the hepatitis C virus. Nonetheless, reinfection remains a key challenge, with little understanding regarding the lived complexities of post-cure life among people who inject drugs. Our analysis examines reinfection through the lens of ‘time’, a largely overlooked and under-utilised analytical concept within the field of hepatitis C. Drawing on qualitative data from a study examining treatment outcomes and reinfection, our analysis concentrates on three participant accounts or ‘cases’. Working within a new materialist framework, we combine recent social science scholarship which, firstly, posits cure as a socio-material ‘gathering’, and secondly, proposes a ‘futurology’ of hepatitis C and its treatment. We found participant accounts troubled the neat binary of pre- and post-treatment life, instead detailing the challenges of remaining virologically safe while navigating complex, local life-worlds. Rather than a singular, post-treatment future instantiated by cure, participants described the fluid, emergent nature of what we might describe as ‘lived’ or ‘embodied’ time, including multiplicities of becoming in a perpetual present. We conclude that our understanding of reinfection needs to move beyond its current, narrow biomedical conception and organising temporal logic to honour and incorporate complexity in practice.

“Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” Panel, at Congress, January 12, 2023

This summary introduces a series of excerpts that appear intermittently throughout the issue. These excerpts are transcriptions from a moderated panel on the topic of the pluriverse, held on 31 May 2023 at Congress, Canada’s largest annual conference of humanities and social science scholars.

Is the COVID-19 Pandemic a Critical Juncture? Insight from the Study of “New” Multilingual Governance Techniques

AbstractIs the COVID-19 pandemic a critical juncture? An emerging social scientific scholarship on the COVID-19 pandemic has set out to study its effects on a range of social, political, and economic phenomena. Some of this scholarship theorizes that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of those rarest and most impactful moments in time, what historical institutionalists would call a “critical juncture”. This article tests a COVID-19 critical juncture hypothesis by conducting a theory-infirming case study of recent multilingual developments in the United States. Process tracing of federal and state multilingual trajectories reveal that two of the hypothesis’ observable implications are absent: there is no evidence of radical institutional change and ostensibly “new” multilingual pathways were in fact established prior to the pandemic. In light of this evidence, the article concludes by discussing alternative understandings of COVID-19’s effects and this might mean for the study of the pandemic moving forward.

Global Intellectual Trend of Corpus Linguistics Studies Among Scholars in Social Sciences from September 2013 – September 2021

Global Intellectual Trend of Corpus Linguistics Studies Among Scholars in Social Sciences from September 2013 – September 2021

Reflections on Bordering, Micropolitics and Everyday Life in Peacebuilding Processes: Revisiting the Lingering Legacy of the 1949 Armistice Agreements

This article analyzes the United Nations mediated 1949 Armistice Agreements that initially drew the borders of the state of Israel and continue to be at the center of contentions concerning those boundaries. We highlight the potential of a micropolitics of peace that engages with the material effects of conflict and bordering in everyday life. We argue that while such interventions alone may not be sufficient to address the complex dimensions of an ongoing conflict comprehensively, they are a tool for challenging the manifestations of state power continuously reinforcing identities sustaining discord, especially around borders, and a necessary step for building peace. We review the diplomatic process that led to the 1949 Agreements to acknowledge their abiding significance as well as their limits. We employ the contributions of the local turn in peacebuilding scholarship and the borderlands and borderscapes literature to explore how strategies of peace-making may occur through everyday engagements. We focus particularly on how autoethnography has explored such encounters along conflict borders in East Jerusalem. We conclude by highlighting emerging quantum social science scholarship and Massumi’s affect theory to underscore the abiding political relevance of micro-practices of emotional recognition and narrative shifting for building peace (Barad 2007; brown 2017; Massumi 2002; Zanotti 2018).

A bibliometric and multi-disciplinary quasi-systematic analysis of social robots: Past, future, and insights of human-robot interaction

Social robots and their novel applications are slowly emerging to become an indispensable part of society and businesses. While the field of social robotics has been very multidisciplinary since its inception, currently, there is a scarcity of reviews that takes stock of all the past and present literature to critically, comprehensively, and holistically understand how business and management and social science scholars can develop scholarship and contribute to social robotics research. To fill this gap in the literature, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 4211 articles gathered from Web of Science and SCOPUS databases from all disciplines contributing to understanding social robots area to describe the intellectual and conceptual structures of research in social robots. This is followed by a quasi-systematic review of themes identified in bibliometric analysis to critically analyze the knowledge gaps in existing research and develop research questions that will help in the diffusion and adoption of this technology within the consumer and business space, irrespective of the application sector. Our findings show that better conceptualization of social robots (what they are), acceptance studies in the approximation phase of adoption, and developing measures for cyber resilience and human-centric design will shape societal and organizational perception.

On the Different Criteria of Global and Local Success for Scholars in Peripheral Social Sciences

On the Different Criteria of Global and Local Success for Scholars in Peripheral Social Sciences

Digital Identity and Promotion of Research Works Case Study of Social Science Researchers at Taiwanese Institutions

This study explores the intricate domain of digital identity, elucidating the mechanisms involved in its formation within the digital landscape. It underscores the paramount significance of digital identity as a catalyst for disseminating scientific content, especially in an era where researchers must cultivate a prominent online presence to reflect their scholarly engagements across diverse digital arenas, often constrained by the algorithms governing search engines. The study critically assesses the nature and attributes of digital identities among social science scholars affiliated with Taiwanese universities, scrutinizing their overall effectiveness and level of engagement. Comprising both theoretical and practical dimensions, the research first delves into the theoretical underpinnings of digital identity. It then shifts its focus to an empirical analysis of the digital activities undertaken by social science researchers within Taiwanese academic institutions across four prominent platforms: Research Gate, Google Scholar, ORCID, and Twitter.

Does personal relative deprivation mediate the relationship between passive social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories? Cross‐sectional correlational and experimental evidence

AbstractSocial media use occupies a prominent space in social sciences scholarship and beyond. However, the distinction between active and passive use of social media, although important in explaining a variety of users’ behaviours, has been overlooked in terms of its potential to predict key socially relevant outcomes like beliefs in conspiracy theories. In three studies (N = 1388, in total), we provide evidence on (a) the role of passive social media use in believing in conspiracy theories via personal relative deprivation; (b) the interaction effect between social media use and personal relative deprivation on beliefs in conspiracy theories. The results showed that passive social media use is linked to, and increases, beliefs in conspiracy theories and this relationship is partially mediated via increased personal relative deprivation (Studies 1 and 2). In Study 3, personal relative deprivation was also manipulated experimentally in the context of a ʻmoderation‐of‐process' design, yielding a significant interaction with social media use. The results are discussed in the light of their social and media psychological contribution and implications in the digital era, when misinformation often becomes prevalent.

Hospitality Work as Social Reproduction: Embodied and Emotional Labour during COVID-19.

This article focuses on how the imaginary of a 'safe' environment was visualised and conveyed within the hospitality sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on diaries and interviews with 21 workers in the UK. Our findings show increased workloads for hospitality staff, compounded by anxieties of risk and individualised COVID-19 regulation work. This includes workers' negotiations of corporeal boundaries and distancing from customers, the visible cleaning of communal areas and recuperation and care work for their own bodies and others in shared living spaces. We draw on conceptualisations of embodied and emotional labour to understand these experiences, reflecting on the importance of the actions performed by workers in maintaining community spaces and creating customer confidence in safely enjoying a 'hospitable' environment. This article contributes to social science scholarship of embodied and emotional labour, hospitality and social reproduction.