Digital Commons Network^™

The State Of The Unions 2026: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

The 2026 State of the Unions report finds that while union density remains strong in New York, membership rates remain largely unchanged, despite renewed organizing, successful strikes and strong public support for labor. Union density stands at 20.5 percent in New York City and 20.9 percent statewide, more than double the national rate of 10 percent, yet well below levels recorded two decades ago. The report also examines the persistent divide between public- and private-sector unionization, the industries and workers sustaining organized labor, and the forces limiting growth. A special section considers Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s labor-friendly record and the opportunities …

Artificial Intelligence And Social Equities: Navigating The Intersectionalities In A Digital Age (Editorial), Daisuke Akiba, Julie Albright

Publications and Research

This editorial article introduces and synthesizes the Special Issue, “Artificial intelligence and social equities: navigating the intersectionalities in a digital age,” which examines how AI systems intersect with race, ethnicity, and interconnected identity dimensions across global contexts. The eight contributions span healthcare, digital media, higher education, organizational communication, and speculative futures, addressing anti-racist psychiatric algorithms, AI-generated visual disinformation, epistemic injustice between the Global North and South, algorithmically mediated rural–urban divides, culturally untranslated technology transfer, accessibility auditing across the AI lifecycle, and the tension between mechanical objectivity and empathic understanding. Read together, they show that AI is neither inherently …

‘Passing’ The Baton Of Trauma: Queer Failure Of The Women’S Sport Policy Working Group’S Anti-Trans ‘Position’, Meredith M. Bagley, Mary Anne Taylor, Sarah F. Price

Publications and Research

Engaging in critical rhetorical theory and methodology, we interrogate the contemporary landscape of anti-trans backlash in women’s sport. Specifically, we read the ‘TERF wars’ (Pearce et al.) across critiques of biofeminism (Pape) and whiteness (Fischer) while drawing upon critical social science research into trauma-bonding, bullying, and the structural impacts of gender verification policies. Our analysis focuses on the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group (WSPWG), offering a trauma-informed reading of the WSPWG’s ‘Position’ statement to illuminate how lesbian female athletes who were previously slandered for failing to meet femininity norms in sport are unable to overcome that trauma to recognize and …

Signal And Substance: Why Methodological Sophistication Fails To Guarantee Inference, Aamir Rashid, Rizwana Rasheed

Publications and Research

Despite increasing analytical sophistication, empirical research in organization studies continues to suffer from fragile inference, uneven theoretical accumulation, and contested credibility. This paper seeks to explain why these problems persist by shifting attention from authors’ methodological choices to the evaluative dynamics of peer review. Adopting a conceptual and theory-analytic approach, the paper theorizes peer review as an inferential gatekeeping system. Drawing on research design, theory evaluation, and philosophy-of-science literatures, this study develops an analytical framework to examine how evaluative routines shape what constitutes empirical rigor during the review process. The analysis identifies five recurring reviewer blind spots: inferential scope inflation, …

The Parent Trip, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This one-hour solo show propels the audience from 1970s Texas to 1990s New York City. In this hilarious and heartbreaking story, Jessie Daniels tells what it means to be raised to become a 'nice white lady.' When she rejects that to embrace the magic of queerness under a disco ball, she decides to write about it, and nearly loses everything.

Socioeconomic Inequalities In Health-Related Quality Of Life During The Covid-19 Pandemic: A Six-Country Comparison Using The Eq-5d-5 L, Joëlle Eijkens, Joshua M. Bonsel, You-Shan Feng, M. F. Bas Janssen, Erica I. Lubetkin, Juanita A. Haagsma

Publications and Research

Purpose

Despite the growing attention to health inequalities, there is no global consensus on how to measure socio-economic status. This study examined inequalities in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic across six countries—China, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US)—using three SES indicators: education level, income, and work status.

Methods

Between April and June 2020, individuals aged 18–75 years old completed a web-based survey. HRQoL was measured using the EQ-5D-5L Level Sum Score (LSS), where higher scores indicate poorer health. Country-specific differences in LSS across SES groups …

Percentile‑Based Grouping In Scf Analysis: Introducing The Percentile Cut Function, Joseph N. Cohen

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Climate Anxiety Shapes Career And Parenthood Decisions In College Students, Minha Hossain, Patrycja Sleboda-Sobolev

Publications and Research

This study examined how climate anxiety influences future-oriented decision-making among college students, with particular attention to four decision-making domains: career planning, parenthood decisions, sustainability behaviors, and geographic mobility. Although climate anxiety has become increasingly common among young adults, less research has explored how it shapes long-term life decisions within diverse U.S. college populations or how psychological and contextual factors influence these relationships. A sample of 257 undergraduate students from Baruch College completed a Qualtrics survey measuring climate anxiety, climate-related emotions, hope, self-efficacy, migration background, and future-oriented decision-making domains. Results indicated that climate anxiety significantly predicted career and parenthood decision-making, but …

Fascism Usa: Class And Identity Politics In The Age Of Trump, Marc Edelman

Publications and Research

This essay argues that Trump’s triumph in the 2024 presidential contest represents the consolidation of an oligarchical authoritarian project, backed by a multi-class and (surprisingly, for some) multi-racial electorate. It brought intensified state and freelance attacks on immigrants, labor unions, women, LGBTQ+ people, journalists, civil servants, assorted “political enemies,” and other groups that the MAGA movement targets. It is institutionalizing authoritarian governance structures in ways that will be exceedingly difficult to undo. The paper first addresses the experience of growing up in the shadow of fascism. It analyzes various sectors that supported Trump and the impacts of inflation, incumbency, economic …

Analyzing The Survey Of Consumer Finances With `Scf`: Methodology, User Guide, And Package Validation, Joseph N. Cohen

Publications and Research

The R package `scf` streamlines analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances' (SCF) public-use microdata. The package encodes best practices for handling the Survey's complex sampling scheme and imputed missing data, such that analysts can produce valid population estimates with simple function calls. This article reviews the SCF structure, details the design and logic of the `scf` package, and demonstrates these functions' ability to replicate official statistics.

Resurrecting Natures With Charlotte Smith And Ebony G. Patterson, Leila Walker

Publications and Research

Recent scholarship on the botanically influenced poetry of the early Romantic period, particularly that of Charlotte Smith, has emphasized the genre’s formal engagement with the herbarium, treating botanical poetry as a non-extractive alternative to the violence of specimen collection. Yet such readings isolate the act of specimen collection and poetic return from the larger systems of extraction, translocation, and violence in which they participate. In this article, I read Smith’s Beachy Head alongside Ebony G. Patterson’s recent installation at the New York Botanical Garden, which artistically resurrected extinct species from herbarium specimens and “planted” them among living flora, in order …

Opportunities, Challenges, And Conspicuous Absences: An Integrative Review Of The Social Work Literature On Artificial Intelligence, Michael J. Massey, Ian G. Williams, Grace C. Polistina, Eathan A. Breaux

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION: Social work discourse regarding artificial intelligence (AI) in practice, research, and education has proliferated over the last 5 years, reflecting both excitement over its potential and ambivalence about its ethical challenges. However, the extent to which social work is fully engaging with the structure of AI and its enormous impacts on the environment, labour, and distribution of power remains unclear.

METHODS: An integrative review of social work literature from 2020–2024 was conducted to address two research questions: 1) What is the nature of the social work discourse related to AI? 2) To what extent is the discourse …

Academic Freedom And Collective Bargaining: A Joint Report By The National Center For The Study Of Collective Bargaining In Higher Education And The Professions And The Aaup’S Center For The Defense Of Academic Freedom, William A. Herbert, Isaac A. Kamola, Timothy R. Cain, Erin Ward, Anita Levy, Kathryn Ritchie, Ariana Gonzalez

Publications and Research

This is a joint report by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College (National Center) and the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) at the American Association of University Professors. It presents excerpts from forty-five collective bargaining agreements in higher education to demonstrate the wide range of ways academic freedom is defined in contracts, or not, and how the negotiated definitions incorporate, quote, follow, mirror, or deviate from the principles set forth in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure (hereinafter 1940 Statement).

Why We Must Commune: Rethinking The Role Of Marketing Communications In Turbulent Times, Javier Garcia

Publications and Research

“Communications” is often thought of as a noun, representing the messages we receive on a daily basis from people, brands, and institutions alike. 

"Communications" is also often associated with an industry that exists to produce such messaging in service of capitalism, with a commercial or otherwise actionable outcome desired from its receiving audience. 

This presentation, hosted by two-time CCNY graduate and senior marketing communications professional and Assistant Professor Javier Garcia, will examine the urgency and opportunity in rethinking the value and study of marketing and communications. 

In his presentation, Professor Garcia will offer suggestions on how to guide students towards …

Micromobility In Nyc: 2025, Mike Owen Benediktsson Phd, Xuemeng Li Phd

Publications and Research

This report offers a statistical snapshot of micromobility across the city over a three-week period in late 2025. Our team of trained researchers systematically observed over 1,700 micromobility vehicles at 155 separate intersections across the five boroughs of New York City. Our primary findings describe overall patterns in the demographics of micromobility and vehicle behavior at city intersections, and show how this behavior is shaped by variations in infrastructure as well as individual-level attributes.

Becoming Tricky In Measure For Measure: Isabella's Silences Revisited, Laura Kolb

Publications and Research

At Measure for Measure’s start, Isabella is presented as radically self-same, possessed of “no tongue but one.” By its end, she has helped orchestrate a bed trick and publicly lied about her sexual history. Measure for Measure presents trickery as a vehicle for truth-telling in the face of injustice that is both situationally specific—created by Angelo’s hypocrisy—and utterly mundane: a feature of being a woman in the world. Ultimately, the play suggests that trickery is woven into the fabric of femininity itself: into the repertoire of linguistic, embodied, and behavioral strategies women like Isabella develop in navigating masculinist systems, …

Livestreaming A Doitocracy: Platform-Jumping Participatory Practices In Modular Synthesis Gear Cultures, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Earth Modular Society (EMS) is a cross-platform community dedicated to live hardware modular synthesis, with their primary efforts going into a 24/7 modular “radio station” that livestreams on Twitch and YouTube, and a supporting Discord chat server. Although part of the broader modular synthesis gear culture (a large-scale social formation that coalesces around specific classes of fetishized technical objects), EMS represents a new development in gear cultures as it foregrounds live performance and minimizes the accrual of status via conspicuous consumption. The normative governance structures of platform-specific gear culture communities preclude all but one or a handful of users from …

Resilience For Whom? A Study In Pathways And Production Of Unequal Risk In The Rockaways, Aaryan M. Nair

Publications and Research

This paper investigates how climate adaptation policies in the Rockaway Peninsula of New York City produce unequal outcomes despite their ostensibly neutral design, framing resilience as an environmental and climate justice problem. Situated within a landscape marked by stark socioeconomic disparities, aging housing stock, and high exposure to coastal flooding, the study demonstrates that existing adaptation strategies—centered on uniform technical standards, insurance frameworks, and large-scale coastal infrastructure—systematically advantage actors with greater financial and institutional capacity while leaving low-income residents, particularly renters, disproportionately vulnerable.

The analysis identifies three core dynamics underlying this “unequal-by-design” resilience regime: (1) the stratified feasibility of compliance …

Assessing The Relationship Between Treatment Quality, Matching And Dosage And Juvenile Justice Outcomes Among Youth With Co-Occurring Substance Abuse And Mental Health Disorders, Kevin T. Wolff, Michael T. Baglivio, Joshua A. Lang

Publications and Research

This study examined differences among youth in deep-end juvenile justice residential placement who did, and did not, present with co-occurring disorders. The prevalence of cooccurring mental health and substance use/abuse issues was found to be 19%, far lower than that of prior work. Researchers demonstrated more similarities than differences between youth with and without co-occurring disorders, both in terms of their criminal histories and the prevalence of their criminogenic needs. Additionally, the residential programs across Florida appear to provide treatment at similarly high levels of integrity, as measured by 1) matching treatment services to the highest three dynamic risk assessed …

Place: Dwelling Within The Built And Natural Environments, Christine Gratia

Publications and Research

This study argues that “place” is not simply physical, it is actualized by the relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit. This research will spotlight various philosophical theories that pertain to where humans do human activities, the ever evolving containers of socialization and how the external environment informs self-concept. This research narrows in on Edward Relph’s phenomenology of “place” and Martin Heidegger's concept of dwelling. Both concepts are defined as foundational structures of human existence which create an interdependent relationship between humans and the places we inhabit. From that relationship stems a responsibility of caretaking. Through a conceptual …

Editorial: Migration And Health: A Human Rights Perspective - Conference Insights And Beyond, Noemi Rodriguez, Mira Goral, Justine Mcgovern, Allison Squires, María Isabel Roldos

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Engagement By Design: Belongingness, Cultural Value Orientations, And Pathways Into Emerging Technologies, Daisuke Akiba, Michael Perrone, Caterina Almendral, Rebecca Garte

Publications and Research

This theoretical article examines how belongingness, defined as the sense that one’s participation is legitimate and valued, interacts with cultural value orientations to help explain persistent disparities in U.S. technology engagement, including emerging technologies, across racial and ethnic groups. While structural barriers (e.g., racism, poverty, linguistic bias, etc.) remain essential to understanding such inequity, we argue that engagement patterns in technology also reflect how different cultural communities may define and experience belongingness in relation to digital domains. Drawing on Triandis and Gelfand’s framework, and focusing specifically on educational contexts, we propose the Belongingness through Cultural Value Alignment (BCVA) model, whereby …

Covid-19 Asian American Oral History Project: Reflecting On Identity And Oral History At A Community College, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

In this article, I share narrators’ stories from the Covid-19 Asian American Oral History Project based at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, to illustrate how Covid-19 and increased anti-Asian hate during the pandemic shaped Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) identities in Queens, New York. Narrators’ stories shed light on how Black Lives Matter impacted their own understanding of race and racialization, particularly as AAPI identity and race relate to the Model Minority Myth. This project also laid the groundwork to develop a broader oral history culture at the college, developing faculty pedagogy to incorporate oral history interviews and interviewing into …

The Case For Racial Literacy, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

Racial literacy is widespread in America, and as adult literacy educators our mission is to address illiteracy in all its manifestations. We teach literacies in reading and writing, numeracy, computer, speaking, listening, visual, health, and media, each vital to making sense of our world and functioning effectively in it. Racial literacy is just as vital and should be taught as well. I argue that racial literacy is critical to a meaningful civic and community life. Some scholars believe it is critical to the perseverance of democracy. At the very least, many adult learners do not possess an understanding of what …

A Few Millimeters Of Bone: How Male Supremacists Leverage Scientific Sexism To Reinforce Misogynistic Ideologies, Robin O'Hanlon

Publications and Research

In recent years, male supremacist actors have reinforced their misogynistic worldviews by using narrative strategies centered on authoritative “common sense” and scientific “fact.” This paper presents a thematic narrative analysis of The Incel Wiki and the Wiki4Men, representing the first formal analysis of the wiki for the men’s rights organization A Voice for Men. The analysis indicates male supremacists use techniques including misappropriation of scientific information, manipulation of statistics, and leveraging pseudoscientific information to develop their narrative strategies of supremacy. The most consistent narrative strategies of scientific sexism on the wikis are male victimhood, denial of inequality between men and …

Disaster Resilience And Normalization: Facing Facts, Naomi Zack Phd

Publications and Research

Disaster resilience requires acknowledgment and preparation to be normalized or integrated into normal life. But denial without preparation normalizes disaster by  leaving it out of normal life. In Disaster Resilience and Normalization: Facing Facts, Naomi Zack explores the normative and factual dimensions of a Climate Change Paradigm, through a global scope. Apart from the normative issues of who is responsible and who should pay for mitigation, the facts of Rising Average Earth Temperatures and more Intense and Frequent Disasters must still be faced.

But facing those facts has always been voluntary for powerful signatories to the 2015 Paris Climate …

From Weberian Rationalization To Javascript Components: Modularism In Academic Library Software, Mark E. Eaton

Publications and Research

This paper considers modular approaches to building library software and situates these practices within the context of the rationalizing logics of modern programming. It briefly traces modularism through its elaboration in the social sciences, in computer science and ultimately describes it as it is deployed in contemporary academic libraries. Using the methodology of a case study, we consider some of the very tangible and pragmatic benefits of a modular approach, while also touching upon some of the broader implications. We find that the modularism is deeply integrated into modern software practice, and that it can help support the work of …

An Exploration Of Temporally Differentiated Associations Between Alcohol Outlets, Social Disorganization, And Assaults: A Multilevel Approach, Jinuk Jeong, Yunho Yeom

Publications and Research

A substantial body of research consistently shows that the concentration of alcohol outlets is positively associated with violent crimes, such as assaults. While recent studies have incorporated both spatial and temporal dimensions of this relationship, particularly within-day variations, how this temporally differentiated association of alcohol outlets with violent crimes varies depending on the broader context, such as social disorganization, remains underexplored. This study addresses this research gap by investigating whether the relationship between alcohol outlets and assaults in New York City from 2017 to 2019 differs by time of the day, while accounting for neighborhood structures in terms of their …

The State Of The Unions 2025: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

Organized labor has taken center stage in the 2020s, with workers leading successful organizing drives at Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and across a range of industries from health care to higher education. Public approval of unions has reached its highest level in decades, and a new generation of workers is stepping forward as leaders in the movement. The State of the Unions 2025 provides the most comprehensive profile of organized labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, highlighting where unions are growing, who is leading the charge, and how labor is shaping the future of work …

Minor Role Iv: Violent Crime More Of An Adult Problem Today, Jeffrey A. Butts, Gina Moreno

Publications and Research

Using national and New York City arrest data, the John Jay College Research and Evaluation Center presents a report that shows juvenile arrests for violent crimes have significantly decreased since the 1990s, while adult crime rates have fallen at a slower pace. Despite these trends, some continue to blame youth for crime spikes, often disregarding research that supports the effectiveness of juvenile justice reforms. The findings suggest that, rather than contributing to crime, these reforms align with adolescent development science and have not led to an increase in violent offenses.