New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development

This study analyzes public discourse on the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment through online interactions in a community Facebook group. Using a critical discourse analysis framework, we explore how residents framed the disaster, engaged with competing narratives, and navigated scientific and political information. Our findings challenge the assumptions of moral panic and risk society perspectives, which often depict the public as irrational or apathetic. While conspiracy theories appeared, they were not dominant; instead, discourse centered on information sharing, community support, and credible inquiry. Contrary to predictions of public resignation, residents actively participated in citizen science and demanded accountability. However, political alienation—driven by perceived elite indifference and corporate influence—shaped discourse, fueling frustration and distrust. These findings highlight the public’s capacity for reasoned engagement while emphasizing the challenges posed by declining trust in institutions. A nuanced approach is needed to understand claims-making processes in crisis communication.

Drawing on 26 semi-structured interviews with white mothers and mothers of color in New York City, this paper examines how racialized neoliberalism codifies the structure and operationalization of parent organizations like the parent association (PA) and the parent–teacher association (PTA) across varying public schools at the nexus of race, class, and gender. Deploying racialized neoliberalism as a theoretical framework, this paper argues parent organizations are an inherent mechanism of the racialized neoliberal landscape of schooling that enables the continued capital accumulation and decision-making power of white middle-class mothers while relationally disempowering and economically dispossessing working-class mothers and mothers of color.

In US higher education, the category ‘first-generation college student’ has become ubiquitous. Students without parents who graduated from college are categorized as such, programs are designed for them, and researchers study them. Used as a proxy for socioeconomic status, this category offers a way for colleges and universities to acknowledge vast resource differences among students while evading direct discussion of social class itself. Research on first-generation college students often positions the category as the starting point of the analysis, measuring, for example, gaps in academic performance between first-generation and continuing-generation students. Here, I call for the first-generation college student category itself to be positioned as the object of critical analysis. I draw on the critical tradition in the sociology of education to reveal the category’s ideological dimensions. Specifically, I argue that the first-generation college student category reflects and supports two pillars of neoliberalism in higher education: meritocracy and diversity.

Examined here is a recent and interesting contribution to the decline thesis, based on a comparative study of the Roman Empire and the modern West. Its argument is that in each instance, the periphery has come to dominate the core, the former supplanting the latter economically. In a conceptual framework shared with 1960s development theory, migration is regarded as negative in the case of ancient Rome but making a positive contribution to economic growth in the modern West. Downplayed, however, is the role of labour market competition and populism in the unfolding crisis of present-day capitalism.

Focusing on the agency and empowerment of Turk women in the Azerbaijani region of Iran, this study critiques the liberal framing of Muslim women’s resistance and advocates for a more nuanced, intersectional approach. The study reveals how Turk women navigate the complexities of intersecting identities—facing both ethnic discrimination and patriarchal oppression—and actively challenge these stereotypes. Highlighting the importance of understanding agency as context-dependent and shaped by factors such as ethnicity, gender, and class, the study draws on case studies of three Turk women to show how agency manifests in different forms, from political activism to economic survival, offering a localized interpretation of empowerment. Central to this analysis is Saba Mahmood’s framework, which emphasizes that agency operates within cultural constraints yet challenges them in meaningful ways.

This article shows that different manifestations of precarity often interact and mutually reinforce each other. Drawing on a research project on precarious housing in two cities in Germany and Switzerland and focusing on migratised individuals, we show that people frequently encounter precarity not only in terms of housing but also in terms of legal status. We argue that narrowly concentrating on isolated areas of people’s lives may overlook the overall severity of their situation. We introduce the concept of ‘intersecting precarities’ to highlight how different uncertain, instable and unpredictable conditions across distinct domains of life interact in a multidirectional way and create complex situations that trap individuals in Catch-22 situations. Our approach therefore advances the literature on precarity and brings together studies on migration, welfare and housing, while also suggesting that exploring the interaction of different manifestations of precarity can benefit fields of study beyond housing and legal status.

The subimperial formation of ‘South’ Korea, articulated within US imperialism, first emerged in Jeju amid the genocidal violence against Jeju natives since March 1947. While the South Korean state recognized the mass-murdered as citizens following the transitional justice programs in the 2000s, I question whether the recognition of citizenship conferred by the state – the perpetrator – constitutes the sovereign subjectivity that the bereaved Jeju natives have truly sought. To reflect on the possibility of sovereignty of the dead, I think with Indigenous studies scholarship to debate with Agamben and Mbembe. I argue that the sovereignty of the dead is contingent on the extent to which their historical subjectivities are honored through mourning practices. Drawing on photographs and archival materials concerning mourning practices, I illustrate the ways survivors and bereaved families in Jeju sought indigenous sovereignty for the mass-murdered.

This contribution highlights the methodological and theoretical aspects at the basis of Bourdieu’s work The Weight of the World, regarded as an exceptionally significant text, rich in intellectual, political, and methodological insights and provocations. Recently rediscovered, particularly in Italy, it has demonstrated its enduring relevance more than 30 years after its initial publication. The paper is organized in two parts. In the first part, the methodological challenges raised by the book are presented, and in the second part, the social theory is analyzed in order to show how relevant this book is in our current age. In conclusion, a short comparison between Bourdieu’s work and his relationship with Marx is made.

In Turkey, legal strikes have been on the decline since the mid-1990s. This is a trend that has accelerated since the mid-2010s under the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi as the government increasingly resorted to banning legal strikes against a backdrop of increasing autocratisation. Nevertheless, the country has witnessed non-legal strikes that are neither formally recognised nor documented. The data collated here through a protest event analysis methodology sheds light on these non-legal strikes, revealing a substantial, arguably historic strike wave in 2015. This study delves into the trajectory, dynamics and outcomes of this strike wave. The fact that workers managed to organise such a significant strike wave demonstrates the continuing relevance of working-class agency in today’s world. Particularly noteworthy is that it is primarily the workers themselves, without union support, who organised this strike wave. This working-class agency proved to be effective to a certain extent, demonstrating that its efforts were not in vain. Together with other social movements, the strike wave formed Turkey’s rising tide of dissent in the mid-2010s, prompting the regime to resort to further autocratisation to suppress it.

What can world-systems analysis of the role of Africa in the creation of the capitalist world-economy tell us about Amazon’s model of control of global supply chains in the 21st century? How did patterns established by European imperialism and enslavement of Africans create long-lasting continuities of racial capitalism and migration that are used by Amazon to profit in the contemporary era? We argue that the analyses of imperialism and racialized labor in Africa that underlay the creation of the capitalist world-system presented by Wallerstein, Rodney, and others, most notably Cedric Robinson, help us understand the continuity of racism and racialized labor over the longue durée. Our analysis of raw materialist lengthened global commodity chains reveals critical continuities and parallels in the central role of racialized exploitation of labor at crucial eras of the modern world-system, including to the enormous rise of Amazon and e-logistics in the contemporary United States.