🌐 Other Social Sciences

As social life moves online, so must ethnography. But digital fieldwork is not simply traditional ethnography conducted on a laptop. Recent work examines how classic concepts—participant observation, rapport, thick description—must be adapted for platforms where presence is a login and the field site has terms of service.

South Korea, Japan, and China face among the fastest demographic transitions in history. Their pension systems—designed for younger populations with different dependency ratios—are approaching structural limits. Recent policy analyses from all three countries reveal converging challenges and diverging reform strategies.

AI systems perpetuate gender bias through training data, design assumptions, and deployment contexts. Feminist scholars argue that technical debiasing is necessary but insufficient—the deeper problem is whose experiences and values shape AI development in the first place.

Sustainability research in the Global South is shaped by gender, colonial legacies, and local knowledge systems. A new five-pillar framework argues that situated knowledge—knowledge produced from specific social positions—is essential for addressing climate change and inequality simultaneously.

Predictive algorithms now sort people into risk categories across criminal justice, welfare, and immigration. Sociological analysis reveals how these systems reproduce existing inequalities while creating new forms of algorithmic governance that operate below the threshold of public awareness.

A diagnostic review reveals that smart city governance theory suffers from deep theoretical weaknesses — and innovation management research may hold the prescriptions.

TikTok's algorithm doesn't just show you content—it shapes how you feel and express emotion. Recent studies document how platform curation creates 'algorithmic intimacy,' cultivating emotional states, FOMO, and new linguistic forms among Generation Z users.

Women remain underrepresented in STEM worldwide, but the barriers vary significantly by context. Studies from South Africa, Pakistan, and Nigeria reveal how socio-cultural norms, institutional structures, and early educational experiences interact to sustain the gap—and where interventions show promise.

Platform companies promise workers flexibility and autonomy. Ethnographic studies from Indonesia and the US reveal a different reality: algorithmic management that controls pace, routes, and earnings while shifting risk to workers. Some gig workers are developing creative forms of resistance.

Global higher education faces a paradox: accreditation systems designed to ensure quality also constrain innovation and reproduce inequities. Recent analyses integrate institutional theory, postcolonial perspectives, and AI to navigate these tensions.

Climate change is displacing millions—through floods, droughts, coastal erosion, and agricultural collapse. Spatial analysis from Colombia, India, Africa, and Iraq reveals how climate disasters interact with conflict, poverty, and governance to produce forced migration.

Community-based participatory research places communities as equal partners in the research process, not passive subjects. Recent work on institutional assessment, arts-based methods, and ethical reflection reveals both the power and the persistent challenges of truly equitable research partnerships.

Trust in electoral systems is foundational to democracy. Blockchain technology promises tamper-proof, transparent electronic voting, but the gap between cryptographic potential and electoral reality is vast. Recent research examines the architectures, security models, and practical challenges.

Research has consistently shown that misinformation spreads significantly faster and wider than true information on social media. AI-powered detection systems using transformer models, multi-modal fusion, and attention mechanisms are the front line of defense, but the arms race between generators and detectors is intensifying.

The gender wage gap persists globally, but its drivers vary dramatically across contexts. Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition studies from Morocco, Senegal, and Indonesia reveal that 'unexplained' discrimination accounts for the majority of wage gaps, even where women are better educated.

Indigenous land sovereignty movements are challenging the foundations of settler colonial governance worldwide. Recent scholarship connects land rights to housing, food sovereignty, health outcomes, and the tension between state sovereignty over natural resources and indigenous self-determination.

AI is transforming journalism from content creation to distribution, raising fundamental questions about accountability, bias, and trust. Research from Indonesia, Bangladesh, and cross-cultural contexts reveals how algorithmic news systems challenge established journalistic ethics frameworks.

The open access movement aims to make research freely available to all. Two decades in, the movement has reshaped scholarly publishing but faces tensions between commercial gold OA (author-pays) and community-driven diamond OA (no fees for authors or readers). Library science professionals are at the center of this transformation.

Wearable sensors now capture over 1,000 data points per second from athletes in training and competition. Combined with AI, this data revolution is transforming how coaches train, how teams strategize, and how injuries are predicted before they happen.

One in three women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence. Prevention has shifted from solely supporting survivors to systemic approaches: bystander training, data-driven risk prediction, economic empowerment, and culturally tailored programs that challenge the norms enabling violence.

Rural communities worldwide face population decline, aging workforces, and economic marginalization. Smart village initiatives—deploying digital infrastructure, e-commerce platforms, and precision agriculture—aim to make rural life viable and attractive again.

A language dies every two weeks. Heritage languages—minority languages maintained by immigrant or indigenous communities within dominant-language societies—face relentless pressure from assimilation, media dominance, and educational monolingualism. Preserving them requires deliberate family, community, and institutional effort.

Online platforms have become the primary vectors for radicalization, from far-right gaming communities to religious extremist networks. Research on counter-narratives, deradicalization programs, and platform-level interventions reveals both progress and persistent challenges in preventing violent extremism.

COVID-19 exposed the brutal inequity of global vaccine distribution: wealthy nations hoarded doses while low-income countries waited. The political economy of vaccine access reveals how geopolitics, market structures, and institutional design determine who lives and who dies in pandemics.

An estimated 1 billion people live in informal settlements—communities that exist outside formal planning, tenure, and service provision systems. They are simultaneously the world's most vulnerable urban populations and its most innovative problem-solvers.

Nonprofits depend on volunteers—an estimated 1 billion people volunteer globally—but managing volunteers effectively is fundamentally different from managing employees. Digital tools are transforming recruitment and coordination, while the shift to online volunteering creates new challenges for motivation and retention.

Philanthropic giving represents hundreds of billions of dollars annually, yet most donors give based on emotional appeals rather than evidence of effectiveness. The evidence-based giving movement asks an uncomfortable question: are you helping, or just feeling good about helping?

Social entrepreneurs navigate the dual imperative of financial viability and social mission. Recent research on dynamic capabilities, value creation pedagogy, and partnership-based impact measurement reveals how social enterprises create, sustain, and demonstrate social value.

By 2050, one in four workers in developed nations will be over 55. Age stereotypes paint older workers as slow, resistant to technology, and blocking younger talent—yet research consistently shows that experience, reliability, and institutional knowledge make age diversity a competitive advantage.

The pandemic reset how millions think about work and leisure. Research consistently shows that leisure satisfaction—not income, not career status—is the strongest predictor of overall life satisfaction. Yet modern work cultures systematically devalue and erode leisure time.

The creative economy—encompassing art, design, media, gaming, fashion, music, and publishing—contributes trillions to global GDP. Digital platforms have democratized creation and distribution, but also concentrated power in algorithms and platform companies that determine what culture gets seen.

When governments adopt AI, the real transformation is not technological—it is institutional. Criado, Sandoval-Almazán, and Gil-Garcia (2025) propose a macro-meso-micro framework that treats public sector AI adoption as a question of governance restructuring rather than software procurement.

A family fleeing a flood that was worsened by climate change, in a region already destabilized by armed conflict, does not fit neatly into any single category of displacement. See, Opdyke, and Banki (2025) argue that climate, disaster, and conflict interact as compound triggers—and that existing humanitarian frameworks are not built for this reality.

The dominant narrative frames population aging as a crisis of dependency ratios and shrinking workforces. Warner, Zhang, and Guillemot (2025) argue for a fundamentally different framing: aging as an active restructuring opportunity requiring adaptive social responses in economic, policy, and regional planning domains.

Many governments now recognize Indigenous knowledge in environmental policy documents. Far fewer have figured out how to integrate it into actual land-use decisions. Howlett et al. (2025) synthesize multinational dialogue on the gap between recognition and operationalization—and find that the hardest problems are not technical but political.