Abstract
Special skills, financial theatrics, and parental profiteering: A snapshot of new research.
Fire flight
In January 2025, wildfires tore through Los Angeles County, reducing entire communities to ashes and displacing tens of thousands of residents. While the immediate impacts on city infrastructure and displaced residents are well-documented, a research study in Nature Communications highlights a less recognized consequence of wildfires like these: their growing influence on migration patterns across the United States.
To understand how wildfires affect migration, an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by sociologist Kathryn McConnell analyzed the top 10% of the most destructive U.S. wildfires from 1999 to 2019. They found that while most wildfires do not significantly alter migration patterns, rare, highly destructive wildfires do. With structure loss serving as the key indicator of devastation, out-migration appears to increase for at least a year following severe events in which more than 250 structures are destroyed. Somewhat surprisingly, though, the study found little evidence that wildfires deterred in-migration to affected regions.
Having destroyed over 10,000 structures, the 2025 Los Angeles fires now stand as the costliest wildfire event in U.S. history. As climate change accelerates the rate and intensity of destructive fires, residents and communities increasingly face the wrenching choice between rebuilding and relocating. This study suggests that for many, relocation may become the more likely outcome, underscoring the urgent need for policies that address housing, recovery, and climate adaptation in vulnerable areas in an integrated way.
Affected areas can see out-migration for over a year following rare, highly destructive wildfires.
iStockPhoto // VladTeodor
listing addiction on your resume
One man’s stigma is another man’s... professional asset? Recent research in the Journal of Applied Social Sciences explores how firsthand experiences with drug use and recovery—widely perceived as stigmatizing—can yield social and professional advantages in the emerging field of “Recovery Coaching.”
Joseph W. Silcox and Evan Stewart, the study’s authors, draw on interviews with 22 people in long-term recovery from drug use, including 15 working as certified recovery coaches. Their conversations revealed a striking contrast in how people managed their drug use history. Some respondents employed conventional stigma management techniques, such as attempting to conceal their past substance use. But others, typically coaches who had been in the business for a long time, talked about their past differently. This group described their past with drugs as a credential and an asset in the profession. Recovery coaches explained that their firsthand knowledge surrounding drug use and recovery helped them know where to refer clients, fostered connections with current drug users, and offered a compelling personal narrative to invoke empathy from law enforcement. This process represents what Silcox and Stewart call the “professionalization of stigma,” a novel stigma management strategy that can emerge when institutional and market forces reward rather than punish the disclosure of traditionally stigmatizing characteristics.
Many of those in the burgeoning field of recovery coaching find that their own past drug use can become an asset in helping others overcome addiction.
iStockPhoto // Jacob Wackerhausen
defining discrimination changes policy preferences
There’s widespread consensus that racism, sexism, and classism are pervasive social problems requiring consensus and coordination to address. However, a recent study in the American Journal of Sociology suggests that Americans understand these problems in very different terms.
Using a mixed-methods approach combining interviews with a nationally representative survey, sociologists Lauren Valentino and Evangeline Warren discover that Americans define instances of race-, sex-, and class-based discrimination using three interpretive criteria: the intentionality of the act, whether the act led to equal or unequal outcomes, and the balance of power between the perpetrator and victim. Importantly, though, Americans do not weigh these criteria equally. Conservatives and men tend to emphasize intentionality and individual acts while liberals, women, and racial minorities are more likely to define discrimination based on unequal outcomes and systemic power imbalances. Most striking, this variation in definitional criteria strongly predicts policy attitudes, much more so than socio-demographic attributes alone. Those who emphasize outcomes and power structures in their definitions are much more likely to support policies of redress, like affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws.
By shedding light on the deep cultural and cognitive divides in how Americans interpret social problems, this research offers a crucial insight: meaningful progress in addressing racism, sexism, and classism may require bridging not just political divides, but also fundamental differences in how we perceive and define discrimination.
Americans understand social problems like racism, sexism, and classism in very different terms.
iStockPhoto // Devonyu
financial theatrics
Pseudo-formal loan arrangements can reduce the awkwardness of borrowing money from family.
iStockPhoto // Koldunov
Why do families sometimes create detailed loan agreements when providing financial help to relatives, even though these documents are not legally binding and typically come with an implicit understanding of flexibility? Adam Hayes’s research in Social Forces uncovers the hidden social function of these “pseudo-formal” arrangements: they enable familial support while maintaining the dignity of the receiver—thus alleviating discomfort for both parties.
Through a series of vignette experiments, Hayes examined how people evaluated different forms of financial assistance among family members. Experiment participants read scenarios depicting exchanges between parents and children or between siblings, using different financial assistance structures: pseudo-formal arrangements with written terms but mutually understood flexibility; legal contracts; informal agreements; and outright gifts. He learned that participants consistently preferred the pseudo-formal arrangements, which were perceived as respectful to the recipient’s autonomy and as a way for them to save face.
While his experiments focused specifically on financial loans, Hayes also discusses other cases of pseudo-formality, such as formalized rent agreements for adult children living with parents or “token employment” offered to unemployed relatives. The fact that the participants know they are performing does not diminish the performance’s power; pseudo-formality provides a script that allows both parties to separate their personal from their financial relationships.
good lawyer, bad lawyer
Progressive young adults have a heightened awareness of systemic inequalities, so how do they reconcile their ideals with reality when they enter professions they see as perpetuating injustice? In Socio-Economic Review, Matthew Clair and Sophia Hunt explore this tension through a longitudinal study of 74 predominantly liberal law students who critiqued the legal system for its role in perpetuating violence and inequality yet aspired to complete law degrees.
Through surveys and in-depth interviews, Clair and Hunt identified three distinct moral justifications these aspiring legal professionals used to defend their career paths. In the “lifting up” narrative, students envisioned themselves as exceptional agents of systemic change, drawing clear distinctions between “good” and “bad” legal practice and emphasizing their intentions to foster positive social change. In the second narrative, “leveraging out,” students presented law school as a stepping-stone to careers not in the law, but in academia or politics. The final narrative, “leaning in,” found students justifying their choice to pursue the law along practical or material lines; they noted, for instance, the need to pay off student debt, sometimes also emphasizing the potential for doing good within career constraints.
These findings illuminate how individuals navigate moral conflicts in career choices, revealing both how ideals shape professional aspirations and, paradoxically, how people reconcile career paths that seemingly conflict with their values.
Young, mostly liberal law students in this study navigated the ethical conflicts of their career paths through a series of moral justifications.
iStockPhoto // PeopleImages
aging with imagination
How does artificial intelligence reshape the experience of aging—and what can we do about it? In their article, published in Big Data & Society, authors Juliane Jarke and Helen Manchester consider how aging populations may come to imagine a future beyond the influence of data-fueled regimes and the ageist assumptions often coupled with addressing demographic aging.
Aging often comes with externally imposed expectations, but participatory futuring workshops appear to help aging people expand their visions of their own futures.
iStockPhoto // PeopleImages
The researchers used participatory futuring workshops—a research method that involves unblocking imaginaries, decision-making, and actions—in Austria, Germany, and the UK to examine how older adults envision what it means to age in a data-driven society. Through a series of prompts related to health technology and critical discussions about participants’ anticipations about getting older, the team shed light on unrealistic expectations about what the future holds. The findings include that the dual forces of policy and AI-driven tech and social media form expectations around aging, often framed around physical and mental decline, dependency, and lowered efficiency. The research team revealed, however, that engagement in group work allows for critical assessments and tempering of these datafied artificial imaginations, bringing people back into the reality of their bodies and everyday lives. In short, participatory workshops allow individuals to collectively imagine futures that they actively create, rather than ones filtered through a regime’s digital daydreams.
Aging isn’t as natural as it seems at first glance—it’s impacted by data-driven predictions sifted through algorithms, policies, and health-based digital tools that inform us what our futures should look like. This study shows how regimes of anticipation can, alternately, limit possibilities or allow people to imagine growing old on their own terms. In doing so, it becomes a call to resist one-size-fits-all frames of aging and allow people to envision what their own future holds.
parental profiteering
Children have become a not-so-hidden workforce of fame and fortune on social media platforms. In their article “Children as Concealed Commodities: Ethnographic Nuances and Legal Implications of Kidfluencers’ Monetisation on TikTok,” researchers Tom Divon, Taylor Annabell, and Catalina Goanta expose the ways child-based videos can double as parental profit machines. Published in New Media and Society, this study brings focus to the blurred lines between childhood fun and digital exploitation.
Is that just a kid having fun, or a kidfluencer subtly selling sunglasses and headphones?
iStockPhoto // junce
The research team draws upon 215 TikTok videos from 23 kidfluencers across Israel, New Zealand, and the United States to examine how children’s video content blends play and adorable qualities with monetized interests. Beyond these online ethnographic observations, the researchers conducted a legal analysis, comparing TikTok’s governance of child-related content to the European Union’s Digital Service Act to identify gaps in online monetization regulations and child labor laws. Together, their findings show parents using a variety of practices to build child-focused business models, such as integrating creative, fun, and engaging child-centered content with sponsored and paid product placements. Frequently, parents displayed children as props; when children interacted with the sponsored products, their playful curiosity was leveraged to gain monetized views. Kidfluencers’ parents also developed two idealized images of youth to attract viewers. One cohort framed child life as playful and fun while the second embedded childhood in religious, cultural, and traditional values. These findings set the stage for a discussion of the gaps between governmental policy and organizational regulations that allow parents to exploit their kids for profit.
Indeed, the use of kidfluencers on TikTok highlights a legal and ethical oversight: child labor laws lag behind as ever-changing digital platforms forge ahead. As the digital economy evolves, it is worth asking how policy can balance innovation with the obligation to protect the vulnerable from exploitation?
medicalizing maternity
In “Psychiatric Gaslighting: The Surveillance of Mental Illness during Pregnancy,” published in Social Problems, authors Charlotte Abel and Stefan Timmermans grapple with a critical issue: the heightened surveillance and social regulation faced by pregnant women with mental health symptoms.
Coupling two years of ethnographic observations with 17 interviews, the researchers found that psychiatrists often treated pregnant women with mental health symptoms as objects of control rather than people deserving support. As patients actively sought autonomy over their pregnancies by managing their use of psychotropic medications, medical practitioners invalidated their concerns regarding their own and their babies’ health by linking “good mothering” with increased medication use. This approach created an imbalance between resistant pregnant patients, who were often viewed as noncompliant and sicker when they pushed back against prescriptions, and compliant pregnant patients, who more willingly accepted the influence of practitioners’ medicalization of their mental health challenges.
Women’s bodies are too often treated as sites of control. In “Psychiatric Gaslighting,” Abel and Timmermans make clear that some psychiatrists leverage their practice to dominate rather than care for pregnant women.
Maternity patients with mental health symptoms receive disparate healthcare when they choose to push back against psychotropic prescriptions.
iStockPhoto // Sofiia Petrova
