Humanity currently navigates an era defined by the Anthropocene and the “polycrisis”—a complex, destabilizing web of interconnected ecological, social, and political emergencies. Concurrently, our primary mode of processing, debating, and governing these existential threats is mediated through the algorithmic infrastructure of digital platforms. This said, this paper synthesizes five distinct but deeply interconnected domains of contemporary scholarship to propose a novel theoretical framework: Digital Anthropocene Studies. By integrating theories of algorithmic curatorial assemblages, the interactive synopticon of live media, affective media practices in networked feminism, the macro-political sustainability trilemma, and the literary conceptualization of transcorporeality in the Anthropocene, this study argues that contemporary digital and political infrastructures attempt to address the polycrisis using the exact neoliberal and anthropocentric logics that created it. Digital platforms function as curatorial assemblages that commodify human affect, ranging from feminist outrage to deviant public disruption, into engagement metrics. This interactive synopticon traps public discourse in a reinforcement-amplification loop, characterized by lagged accountability and Eurocentric geopolitical realism. To transcend this metacrisis, we need to look beyond algorithmic feeds toward “trans-corporeal” narratives that reimagine the human condition not as a dominant, world-ending force (anthropos), but as a deeply entangled, ecological participant (homo). The present work offers a comprehensive paradigm for understanding how digital visibility, affective governance, and postcolonial intersectionality should evolve to foster genuine planetary survival.

Whether nationally distinctive regulatory arrangements can survive global liberalization pressure remains unsettled. The comparative financialization literature establishes that national trajectories hold out but says little about the internal political process that produces such divergence. This paper explains South Korea’s contestation over the institutional arrangement of Geum-San Bunri (GSB)—the statutory separation of industrial and financial capitals—over four decades. Using explaining-outcome process-tracing, the analysis reconstructs socio-political coalitions, resources, and framing strategies at work in each of the five key phases. Two findings emerge. Substantively, GSB’s regulatory reach has narrowed through accumulated exceptions—a trajectory that layering describes accurately in broad outline. However, this path has not been monotonic; the industrial-capital ownership ceiling rose in 2009 and returned to its prior level in 2013. Formally, its status has remained unresolved for forty-four years, the principle continuing to organize every liberalization debate without ever being settled in either direction. The paper theorizes this combination as contested adaptation, a trajectory-level pattern specifying the political conditions under which layering fails to cumulate into displacement. It argues that Korea’s developmental state legacy persists not as inertia but as a heterogeneous configuration of moral, epistemic, and mobilizational resources actively reproduced in institutional changes.

Faculty workload inequities are common, with women faculty reporting high levels of service, mentoring, and teaching-related activities, even though this work is often devalued in faculty evaluations. We describe insights developed through a National Science Foundation ADVANCE-funded project, “Faculty Workload & Rewards,” aimed at ensuring equity in how teaching and service are taken up, assigned, and rewarded. We identify concrete strategies that improve transparency, enhance perceived fairness, allow for crediting, address accountability, and attend to context to strengthen workload equity. We also identify key challenges to revising workload, including denial, fear, the need for control, and lack of creativity, as well as approaches to addressing these forms of resistance.

Peer influence has long been established as a robust correlate of offending, yet debate persists over whether such associations reflect a causal socialization process or merely the sorting of already delinquent individuals into like-minded friendship groups. Drawing on a nationally representative panel of Korean adolescents (the Korean Youth Panel Survey), this study examines the impact of delinquent peer associations on offending, comparing early and non-early starters of delinquency through socialization, selection, and typological (dual taxonomy) approaches. Using propensity score matching on covariates measured prior to treatment, the analysis balances adolescents with and without delinquent peers at age 15 and tracks their offending from ages 16 to 18. Results show that delinquent peers significantly impact offending across both groups, with no significant difference in effects based on the age of onset, though the influence of delinquent peers is consistently stronger among younger adolescents. Theoretical implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The current study examines the relationship between social media consumption and fear of violent crime. The goal of our study is to make three contributions to the literature. One is to provide further evidence about social media consumption and the fear of violent crime, as previous research has yet to find a link between the two. A second is to provide evidence on various types of media consumption and their association with fear of violent crime, specifically. While research has evaluated the relationship between multiple types of media consumption and fear of crime in general, little research on fear of violent crime as an outcome variable has been conducted. The third contribution of our study is to provide evidence on the impact of mass communication on fear of violent crime, using samples from several regions. Most existing studies that measured fear of crime as a dependent variable have relied upon young adult samples from one or two schools. All these studies have suggested that future research should use larger, more diverse samples to replicate previous findings. Addressing these gaps in the extant research, the current study empirically builds on research on media consumption and fear of crime by examining a national sample of 1,014 U.S. adults from the American Fears survey.

The COVID-19 pandemic created a racialized social crisis in which Asians and Asian Americans in the United States faced heightened discrimination and concern about hate crime victimization. Using online survey data collected from Korean community members in the United States during summer 2021, this study examines direct and indirect anti-Asian hate crime/discrimination victimization before and after COVID-19 and identifies factors associated with fear of anti-Asian hate crime/discrimination. Contrary to broader national evidence documenting increased anti-Asian hate during the pandemic, the findings indicate that both direct and indirect victimization experiences decreased after COVID-19 within this sample. Multiple regression results further show that income was negatively associated with fear of anti-Asian hate crime/discrimination, while media exposure was positively associated with fear. The findings suggest that the relatively high-income composition of the sample may have reduced exposure to public victimization opportunities during the pandemic, potentially through greater access to remote work and other protective resources. These results highlight the importance of socioeconomic vulnerability and exposure patterns in shaping victimization experiences and fear of anti-Asian hate crime/discrimination among Korean community members during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study also discusses policy-relevant information based on the results.

How does seemingly spontaneous communal violence become politically organized, and how does state response shape this process as violence unfolds? This article uses event-structure analysis to examine the 2008 anti-Kurdish riots in Altınova, Turkey. Drawing on reports on the Altınova riots produced by human rights organizations and twenty news articles drawn from mainstream, nationalist, Islamist, and left-wing newspapers, the analysis reconstructs the temporal and causal relationships among mass mobilization, extreme-right political intervention, and state response across successive attack cycles. The findings distinguish between the conversion and re-production of collective violence. In initial attack cycles, extreme-right actors did not create mass mobilization from scratch but seized opportunities generated by triggering events and collective gatherings to convert already mobilized crowds into targeted violence. In subsequent cycles, as broader mass mobilization subsided, organized actors became more directly involved in gathering participants, directing mobilization, and reproducing violence. State response also changed across the sequence, combining non-intervention during larger crowd mobilizations with selective repression of organized actors. These findings show that spontaneity, political organization, and state response are not fixed characteristics of riots but become consequential in different combinations at different stages of communal violence.

This study systematically reviews literature on U.S. police responses to intimate partner violence (IPV) to identify how police actions were measured, types of police interventions, and consequences of police responses. A comprehensive keyword search was conducted across 12 databases to identify relevant studies. It used predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria aligned with PRISMA-P guidelines. Ultimately, 16 articles were coded according to a pre-developed coding scheme. It finds that 43.7% of the studies investigated the impact of police responses on IPV victims or offenders, while 31.0% aimed to identify the factors associated with those responses. When police responses were used as an independent variable, the most commonly measured interventions included whether the incident was reported to the police and whether arrests were made (62.5%). Victim-related variables, such as leaving an abusive partner, mental health status, repeat victimization, and perceived safety, were frequently examined in relation to police responses. Notably, only 37.5% of the studies provided policy implications, which often focused on recommending additional training or educational programs for law enforcement professionals. This review advances the IPV literature by examining pre-COVID-19 research on police responses, emphasizing theoretical grounding, outcome diversity, and policy relevance. It outlines directions for evidence-based policing research.

This paper explores the development of computational social science (CSS) in China via the model of contested field formation. This model highlights that Chinese CSS emerges amid tensions between institutionalization-driven structural forces and entrenched epistemological traditions, defying both the Western diffusion and the top-down dominance models. The model highlights that three external structural pressures fuel CSS's expansion in Chinese universities: the state's New Liberal Arts (xinwenke) policy, a central-government’s higher education reform that pushes humanities and social sciences toward interdisciplinary, digital, and now AI+ transformation; a graduate labor market crisis that renders CSS training a career credential for humanities and social sciences students; and growing platform data and computational infrastructure enabling innovative research designs. These pressures face two internal constraints: a faculty shortage hindering effective New Liberal Arts implementation on the one hand and, on the other, the epistemological pushback from indigenization-oriented and autonomous-knowledge-system discussions that pivot on whether CSS can generate signature Chinese concepts or merely import universalist categories.

In the United States, school mobility is relatively common and often linked to negative academic outcomes, yet little is known about its role in non-Western contexts with more standardized educational systems. Does the relationship between school mobility and academic achievement differ in contexts where schools are more uniform in curriculum, instruction, and academic expectations? This study addresses this question by examining the determinants and consequences of school mobility in South Korea, a country characterized by a highly standardized education system. Using nationally representative longitudinal data on fifth-grade students, this study finds that only 3.2% of students transferred schools between Grades 5 and 6—the final two years of elementary school in South Korea—including 0.7% who transferred for strategic reasons and 2.5% for nonstrategic reasons. Students from non-intact families were more likely to transfer for non-strategic reasons, whereas socioeconomically advantaged students were more likely to move strategically. However, school mobility had no significant association with achievement gains after accounting for covariates, regardless of transfer motivation. These findings suggest that while the motivations underlying school mobility may be similar across countries, its academic consequences are shaped by institutional contexts rather than representing a universal pattern.

Social class and cohort are widely recognized as two key factors that shape parenting attitudes. Yet studies rarely examine them together or assess their relative importance. This study investigates how these two factors jointly influence parenting attitudes. Using data from the 2021 Taiwan Social Change Survey (Family Module), the study examines four measures of parenting attitudes related to parent–child interactions: joint decision-making, preference fulfillment, rule enforcement, and nonintervention. The results show that class is positively associated with joint decision-making and negatively associated with nonintervention, whereas cohort is not significantly associated with any of the four measures. Furthermore, class-based differences are consistently negligible across cohorts. By highlighting the central role of social class, this study shows that parenting attitudes constitute an important domain through which social inequality is reproduced.

While a growing body of research has emphasized the role of state-granted legitimacy in shaping public acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), less is known about why public views of CAM may remain heterogeneous even when it receives official endorsement. We address this question by highlighting the importance of user experience, using Chinese mainland as a case study. Chinese medicine (CM) is a well-known form of CAM that is deeply embedded in China’s healthcare system, supported by extensive infrastructure and strong policy backing. Drawing on in-depth interviews about people’s use of CM for self-treatment and rehabilitation after COVID-19, we find that “lived efficacy”, a subjective evaluation of effectiveness grounded in personal experience, plays a salient role in health-related decision-making. Individuals with positive prior experiences of CM tend to rely less on external information and often differentiate among various forms of CM, including state-endorsed products and folk practices. By contrast, those without such lived efficacy are more likely to adopt state-endorsed CM remedies based on trusted health information sources, such as government messaging. This study contributes to the literature by showing that the effects of state-granted legitimacy and institutional trust on CAM adoption are conditional and mediated by a multidimensional decision-making process. Lived efficacy and information trust constitute two key mechanisms through which respondents interpret the efficacy-based legitimacy of CM.

This article analyzes how local political contexts at the municipal and intra-ethnic community levels shape the participation of immigrant place entrepreneurs in local growth politics and their pathways of entry into it. Based on in-depth interviews in Koreatown and Monterey Park in Los Angeles, the paper illustrates how immigrant involvement in local development evolves in response to differences in governance arrangements, electoral influence, and spatial scale. The findings show that the composition and organization of immigrant leadership, along with its position within the regional configuration of ethnoburbs, not only shape the strength of immigrant influence in land use outcomes but also how that influence is recognized, brokered, and constrained by public officials and neighboring growth regimes. Furthermore, political empowerment for immigrant and racial minority communities is often connected to place-based interests, as ethnic identity can shape how neighborhoods and commercial districts are valued, defended, and governed. The comparison highlights contrasting models of immigrant-led development politics: Koreatown operates as an auxiliary to Los Angeles’s dominant growth regime, concentrating leverage among a narrow set of well-positioned actors in a vertical and institutionally centralized political system, while Monterey Park exhibits a more autonomous, horizontally oriented model shaped by majority-representation governance and regional competition and cooperation. Across both cases, immigrant growth politics reflects coalitions in which place-based identity and capital-driven strategies interact in shaping development outcomes.

This article examines the temporal structure of state-seeking nationalist mobilization in the modern world-system. Scholars of nationalism have long debated whether nationalism expands with modernization, declines after reaching a historical peak, recurs in successive waves, or remains contingent on specific political conjunctures. Yet these competing temporal assumptions are rarely examined systematically. This article introduces polynomial regression analysis as a post-positivist heuristic method for making such assumptions visible and comparable. Rather than treating polynomial regression as a device for mechanically confirming or falsifying theories, it uses it as a diagnostic tool that clarifies how different interpretations become plausible under different specifications of time, geography, and periodization. Using the State-Seeking Nationalist Movements dataset, which tracks mobilization by stateless nations from 1492 to 2013, the article compares linear, quadratic, and cubic specifications across historical and geographical scopes. The findings show that linear, arc-shaped, and cyclical interpretations each capture partial dimensions of the historical trajectory. In the Global North after 1800, state-seeking nationalism appears as a secular increase, postwar decline, and renewed wave depending on model specification. At the world-systemic level, however, the inclusion of the Global South shifts the timing and form of decline.

How does educational modality shape the social organization of student life? While the structural consequences of face-to-face versus screen-to-screen instruction have attracted scholarly attention, direct evidence on how this transition reshapes student social networks remains limited. Drawing on complete transcript records and network data from Korea University in 2019 (N=21,607) and 2020 (N=21,572), this paper analyzes co-enrollment networks before and after the shift to online education. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a rare quasi-natural experiment. Despite this disruption, the macrolevel architecture of co-enrollment networks proved resilient, preserving small-world properties with similar connectivity, clustering, and degree assortativity. Beneath this stability, however, online learning reorganized network formation; residential proximity and academic performance became stronger bases of assortative sorting, while disciplinary and cohort boundaries remained largely unchanged. Most strikingly, GPA-based assortativity increased even when self-evaluation-based assortativity declined, suggesting that online learning amplifies institutional measures of academic standing while eroding the social salience of students' subjective academic identities as an axis of sorting. These findings reveal a fundamental paradox. Rather than dissolving social boundaries, online education appears to have reinforced stratification along residential and performance lines.