Sociology Commons^™

Smu Launches Resilient Workforces Institute To Strengthen Singapore’S Workforce In The Age Of Ai, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases and News

Singapore Management University (SMU) announced the launch of the Resilient Workforces Institute (ResWORK), a new university-level research institute advancing workforce resilience and lifelong learning amid accelerating technological change. It is among the first institutes in Singapore and the region to jointly study adult-learning and the future of work through an integrated, interdisciplinary lens spanning economics, management, behavioural science and technology.

Languages Of Marginalization: Educational Inequality And Identity Formation Among Rohingya Refugees In Bangladesh, Md Khalid Rahman

Sustainability and Social Justice

This research paper investigates how language-of-instruction policies shape educational inequality and identity formation among Rohingya refugee children living in protracted displacement in Cox’ Bazar, Bangladesh. Analyzed from a human right–based framework, the study examines whether existing educational policies align with international legal standards on the right to education, including the UDHR, ICESCR, Child Convention and SDG 4. While these frameworks guarantee non-discriminatory and inclusive access to education, the reality in Cox’s Bazar reveals a persistent gap between normative commitments and policy implementation. Moreover, the study explores how the exclusion of both the host language (Bangla) and the native Rohingya language …

Eat With Understanding: A Um Student Guide To Food Systems, James Deacon, Cora Johnson, Lucas Dymit, Kaeli Rackham, Elsie Danyo

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The industrialized food system creates environmental harm, reduces food sovereignty, and contributes to growing food insecurity. These problems oftentimes are overlooked in higher education. To address this gap, our project examines how access to sustainable food education and campus-community partnerships can improve well-being and informed decision-making amongst University of Montana students. This collaborative project connects partners within UM Wellness, PEAS Farm, the Missoula Food Bank and Community Center, and the Big Sky Culinary Institute. Our research includes applied learning with these organizations by hosting a variety of speaker series presentations and coordinating a cooking workshop. We collected quantitative and qualitative …

Toward A World History Of Pre-Modern Coin Imitations, Niv Horesh

Comparative Civilizations Review

Among historians, it has become axiomatic that coinage over three millennia served three purposes: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of account. The communicative aspects of coinage, i.e. the imagery it carries often by way of issuer propaganda, have been of less interest even if it remains the mainstay of numismatists. But in the world of numismatics, globally framed studies of imagery or iconography are rare. This article is aimed at correcting this imbalance, at least provisionally. It will explore the main archetypes of coinage imitation by way of inferring commonalities or …

An Academic Civilization?, Inbar Gotlib-Rivkin, Uri Cohen

Comparative Civilizations Review

Can institutions of higher education be defined as constituting a civilization that has emerged from modern civilization? This theoretical study defines a new concept of academic civilization and demonstrates how prominent characteristics that define the collective identity of modern civilization are manifested in institutions of higher education. The study focuses on six specific characteristics: expansion, flexibility and diversification, center-periphery relations, academic culture, autonomy and academic freedom, and the monopolization of professional training and the professional middle class. The conceptual analysis presented here provides a significant addition to sociological discourse, offering a refined conceptualization of civilizations. The goal is to expand …

Artificial Intelligence And African Studies, Gloria Emeagwali

Comparative Civilizations Review

African Studies is a conglomerate of multidisciplinary academic fields that include paleontology, history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, African Traditional Religion and theology, art, and Afrofuturism, as well as African Indigenous Knowledge Systems. This paper focuses on the latter, namely African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), and African Studies, in general, from the viewpoint of two chatbots, namely, ChatGPT-4, and DeepSeek v.3. Do these models make a break with Eurocentrism and prevent unbiased information on AIKS? Are the underlying conceptual issues underpinning AIKS fully grasped, and if so, what are some relevant examples of this accomplishment? How do these programs respond to specialized …

Table Of Contents

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Civilizational Nationalism And The Rise Of The Civilization State: A Response To Stephen Satkiewicz, Nicholas Morieson

Comparative Civilizations Review

The previous issue of this journal discussed the phenomenon of civilization-states. As several authors observed, over the past two decades leaders from Beijing to Moscow, from New Delhi to Ankara, have increasingly portrayed the nations they govern as civilization states, or heirs to and continuations of great civilizations (Greenfeld 2025; Cross and Okunev 2025; Alalykin-Izvekov 2025; Satkiewicz 2025). In doing this, they often summon deep time, speaking of thousands of years of cultural continuity, and present their states as guardians of cultural traditions in an age of immense social change.

Books Of Interest Spring 2026

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

End Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Extending Norbert Elias: Adjacency And The Dynamics Of Civilizations, Arthur Michelino

Comparative Civilizations Review

Civilizations have rarely been approached as systems of interdependence and strain. Most modern theories have oscillated between cyclical visions of rise and fall and static conceptions of blocs defined by cultural essence. Both perspectives have offered sweeping interpretations, but both also detached civilizations from the environments of pressure and interaction in which they have always existed. To reframe civilizations as relational processes requires both recognition of their internal dynamics and attention to the external conditions that compel their transformation.

Internationalization Struggles And Student Mobility: Ethnic Exclusion And Racism In Philippine Higher Education, Yasmin Y. Ortiga

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There is an extensive literature on student mobility that seeks to understand the nature of, rationales for and consequences of internationalisation in higher education. This scholarship primarily focusses on students studying in the ‘west’. This paper shows how ‘atypical’ student destinations also illuminate the contradictions of internationalisation, revealing the challenges faced by higher education settings beyond academic centres in the west. Drawing on the case of the Philippines, I discuss how private universities actively recruited international students to maximise profits from student tuition. Yet, these efforts led to a backlash among Filipino educators and students, prompting administrators to institute policies …

The Future Of U.S. Higher Education: Equity Implications Of Shifting Immigration Policies, Research Institute For Social Equity Rise

Research Institute for Social Equity

This report examines the impact of U.S. immigration policies on higher education and international students from 2000 to 2025. It traces five major policy eras, from the post- 9/11 security overhaul and Obama-era expansion to the restrictive turns of 2017–2020 and 2025, and analyzes how shifting regulations have influenced enrollment patterns, economic contributions, and student well-being. Despite hosting more than 1.1 million international students in 2023–2024, the U.S. share of the global student market has fallen from 20% to 16%, underscoring how policy volatility and restrictive measures weaken national competitiveness. Drawing on federal data, scholarly research, and institutional reports, this …

Gender As The Moral Framework Of War: Religious Discourse In Wartime Russia, Olga Vlasova Dr., Ulviyya Khalilova

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article explores how wartime religious discourse constructs the moral framework of war through gender rhetoric. Based on the critical discourse analysis of wartime public statements by Russian Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders (2022-2026), the study shows how gender can be used as a framework through which violence becomes meaningful and tolerable. It highlights that the discourse of masculinity provides precisely those moral categories (duty, sacrifice, and protection) which depict participation in war as a moral obligation. At the same time, femininity is primarily associated with the reproduction of social order through care, support, and motherhood, while remaining outside the …

Examining The Results Of Revolutions In The Third World: A Case Study Of The Iranian, Libyan, And Nicaraguan Revolutions, Noah A. Mohammedelamien

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This thesis examines the post-revolutionary trajectories of Libya, Iran, and Nicaragua to explain why some Third World revolutionary projects preserve and use elements of their founding ideology while others fragment, personalize, or diffuse over time. Rather than focusing on the causes of revolution alone, it analyzes the durability of religious-socialist ideological continuity after revolutionary upheaval. Using a (MDSD) comparative historical and institutional approach grounded in primary and secondary sources, the study evaluates five key dimensions across the cases: religious-socialist ideological fusion, religious elite loyalty, popular religious mobilization, institutional embedding of ideology, and external pressure. The findings suggest ideological continuity is …

Making Sense Of Membership: Organizational Socialization Of African Immigrant Employees In U.S. Workplaces, Ikeola J. Bodunde

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

This dissertation examines how African immigrant employees make sense of organizational socialization in U.S. workplaces. As global mobility reshapes the labor force, nearly one in five U.S. workers is foreign-born, making organizational socialization an increasingly complex communicative process. Classic socialization models assume linear, uniform adjustment, yet international employees often face ambiguity, cultural mismatch, and racialized expectations that complicate early workplace experiences. Guided by sensemaking theory, this study conceptualizes socialization as an ongoing, nonlinear process through which newcomers notice cues, construct interpretations, act on provisional understandings, and revise meanings as contexts shift. Using a qualitative, interpretive design, I conducted semi-structured interviews …

Mystics, Oracles, And Bones: Spiritual Resistance For Justice, Healing, And Resolution, Leah Hollis

Comparative Civilizations Review

This conceptual essay examines the enduring human impulse to seek meaning, justice, and healing through mystical traditions in response to suffering and harm. When traditional solutions through grievance, the law, or mediation fails, some individuals may turn to spiritual practices not as superstition, but as embodied strategies of survival, reclamation, and clarity. Comparing diverse traditions from a variety of cultures, including oracle bone divination in ancient China, the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, West African Ifá, Benin’s Voudou, diasporic Hoodoo, Celtic Druidic law, and Sufi mysticism, this paper explores how mystics have long served as interpreters of suffering and perceived …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

East To West: Cultural Attitudes And The Perceptions Of Death, Hannah F. Ahmed

UROP Posters

Death is a universal human experience, but cultures teach people to interpret it in different ways. These interpretations influence how individuals understand dying, how they cope with loss, what support looks like, and what meaning death makes in their lives. Eastern, spiritual, and religious traditions emphasize death as a natural transition or return to divinity rather than an endpoint, and as something one must prepare for. In these contexts, people often grow up hearing stories, prayers, and teachings that situate death within a broader journey. Because of this, death becomes something familiar and speakable rather than distant or frightening (Naderi-Afif …

Hosts, Scouts, And Female Indentured Sexual Servitude In Contemporary Japan, Caroline Norma, Seiya Morita

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

This article sweeps away glossy abstractions obscuring the indenturing of women in sexual servitude in Japan. These abstractions were generated by anthropologists writing in English in the first two decades of the 21^st century who inverted the relationship between perpetrator and victim to suggest that female customers exploited hosts. To overturn this view and expose the ‘gendered reality that [i]s really going on’ in Japan, this article differently explains from a feminist perspective how present-day host and scout businesses indenture Japanese women in sexual servitude. This role is one of both procuring victims as well as keeping young women …

“Durable Solutions” Revisited: Italy’S Train-To-Hire Pathway Under The Cutro Decree As Alternative Refugee Protection, Tim Streit

Human Rights Brief

I. Introduction

If the average person were asked to imagine a refugee, they might conjure the image of a migrant fleeing war or persecution, showing up at the border of a new country with a few belongings in hand, and asking not to be sent back to the dangerous place from which they came. In fact, it is not only the hypothetical “average person” who pictures this scenario. The international refugee protection system, developed after World War II through the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee Convention) and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees …

Stability And Accountability In Nagorno-Karabakh And The Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict, Callum Heath

Human Rights Brief

I. Introduction

On August 8, 2025, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia were hosted at the White House by U.S. President Donald Trump to announce the Agreement on Establishment of Peace and Inter-State Relations (the Agreement) in a Joint Declaration. The Agreement sets out to end the decades-long conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Armenian ethnic enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan, and the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, which is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan by Armenia. While the White House hails the Agreement as a “historic peace deal,” the reality is more …

Puff, Puff, Pass? Examining Cannabis Use Among Black American Adults, Christopher B. Walker

Graduate Studies Theses and Dissertations 2026

In the United States, cannabis has become one of the most widely used controlled substances due to its increase in social acceptance, the growing number of states legalizing it for medical and non-medical purposes, and the expansion of consumption methods.  However, little is known about the modes of cannabis use chosen by Black American adults.  This population is of importance due to existing research suggesting their increased risk of developing cannabis use disorder compared to their White counterparts and their underrepresentation in existing literature.  The goal of this study is to examine cannabis use among Black adults in the U.S., …

Embedded Paradox : The Integration Of Internationalization And Localization In Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities, Jiaxin Guo

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

With the rapid development of Sino-foreign cooperative universities and their growing prominence in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), existing research has begun to focus on this niche sector. While prior studies have examined the tensions of global integration and local responsiveness in such institutions at a macro level, limited attention has been paid to students and faculty—the primary agents of educational practice. To address this gap, this study conducts fieldwork at CUHK-Shenzhen, a cross-border collaborative university in the GBA. This study adopted a qualitative research method and collected field data over six months, including teaching activities and campus …

Engaging Stakeholders To Build, Sustain, And Grow Responsible Business: Some Frameworks, Meena Raghunathan, Kara Li Liu

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This is a follow-up Dialogue commentary to the MGDR publication:

Raghunathan, Meena and Liu, Kara Li (2024) "Moving from ‘Managing Stakeholders’ to ‘Managing for Stakeholders’: The Imperative for Responsible Business," Markets, Globalization & Development Review: Vol. 9: No. 3, Article 4.
DOI: 10.23860/MGDR-2024-09-03-04
Available at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol9/iss3/4.

In this commentary, the concepts of stakeholder approach to management is expanded and deepened.

Import Substitution Industrialization In Africa: Guinea's Experience, Mamadou Saliou Diallo

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Import substitution industrialization (ISI) is such a template that many countries lagging behind in terms of development considered as an essential phase. The process of adopting ISI by these countries, however, displays contrasts in many aspects. The more apparent cases of differences in ISI adoption emanate from the East-Asian and Sub-Saharan African (SSA) models. These two regions are both latecomers in that industrial revolution, compared to Latin American countries being pioneers, was a chronologically later undertaking. Despite constraining factors, the East-Asian model thrives to become a successful experience. Meanwhile, SSA and Latin American countries still strive to achieve this ambition. …

Best Integrated Writing Fall 2025 - Complete Edition, Wright State University School Of Humanities And Cultural Studies, Tracy Smith, Kristie Mckiernan

Best Integrated Writing

Best Integrated Writing includes excellent student writing from Integrated Writing courses taught at Wright State University.

How Armenia And Azerbaijan Are Lobbying For Influence In D.C., Gibran C. Boyce, Dawn Kikel

Capstones

In the wake of President Trump taking office, foreign government agencies and U.S.-based non-profits serving Armenian and Azerbaijani interests have been hiring lobbyists in Washington, D.C. as part of their concerted efforts to curry favor, gain influence, and seek policy changes that would benefit the rival post-Soviet nations.

A World Between Worlds: The Hidden Disconnect Of Chinese Autistic Individuals, Joy Lu

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This paper examines the complex challenges faced by Chinese autistic individuals navigating both Western autism communities and broader Chinese cultural contexts. Drawing on personal experience, community observation, and cultural analysis, it explores how language barriers, cultural stigma, and differing values create a unique form of disconnection for the Chinese autistic community. This paper argues that current neurodiversity discourse is dominated by Western frameworks that often fail to account for this disconnect, resulting in the exclusion of entire groups. By centring Chinese perspectives, it calls for a more culturally responsive approach to autism advocacy: one that bridges linguistic, cultural, and historical …

Public Perceptions Of Leadership Effectiveness In Ethiopia Over The Last Decade, Fikadu Reta Alemayehu

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

Ethiopia is one of the largest countries in Africa, with a fast-growing economy, rich history, diverse agroecology, more than 70 languages, and a population exceeding 130 million. However, the country continues to face serious internal conflict, high malnutrition, and economic hardship, while the study of leadership effectiveness remains limited and lacks consistent longitudinal research. To help fill this gap, this study examined how public perceptions of leadership effectiveness and development outcomes changed in Ethiopia between 2013 and 2023, using Afrobarometer survey data. The analysis explored how citizens’ views about governance, wellbeing, and access to services evolved during a decade of …