Annual Review of Sociology - Early Publication

Because all human activity occurs at least partially in physical space, explaining sociological outcomes often benefits from modeling spatial patterns of social activity. This article reviews methods that sociologists may wish to use to analyze sociological phenomena based on three different types of data indexed to space in three ways: areal data indexed to polygons on the Earth's surface, point data indexed to latitudes and longitudes, and spatial ties data that measure relationships between people and place. Issues common to all three types of data, including privacy, changing between types of data, and model assumptions, deserve careful consideration, particularly to understand how those issues introduce systematic biases into analyses of spatially indexed data. The plethora of existing methods offer the chance to improve sociological explanations of spatial patterns of social life. The thoughtful collection of spatially indexed data and the construction of innovative variables that test ideas about how space influences social outcomes offer the best opportunity to improve sociological explanations for the influence of spatial processes in social life.

Word embeddings are language models that represent words as positions in an abstract many-dimensional meaning space. Despite a growing range of applications demonstrating their utility for sociology, there is little conceptual clarity regarding what exactly embeddings measure and whether this matches what we need them to measure. Here, we fill this theoretical gap by clarifying how cultural meaning can be understood in spatial terms. We argue that embeddings operationalize context spaces, where words’ positions can reflect any regularity in usage. We then examine sociologists' embeddings-based measurements to argue that most sociologists are instead implicitly interested in capturing concept spaces, where positions strictly indicate meaningful conceptual features (e.g., femininity or status). Because meaningful features yield regularities in usage, context spaces can proxy for concept spaces. However, context spaces also reflect surface regularities in language—e.g., syntax, morphology, dialect, and phraseology—which are irrelevant to most sociological investigations and can bias cultural measurement. We draw on our framework to propose best practices for measuring meaning with embeddings.

Bereavement—the loss of a loved one through death—is a common and consequential life course experience. Although bereavement, and matters of death and dying more generally, have long remained on the margins of sociology, in the wake of contemporary mortality crises, sociological research on bereavement has flourished. This review synthesizes the new sociology of bereavement. To contextualize contemporary advancements, we first describe the earlier dominance of psychopathology perspectives on the topic. We then review recent sociological contributions, describing recognition of the structural systems that underpin bereavement and shape its wide-ranging and long-lasting consequences for individuals, families, and communities. We emphasize how bereavement experiences provide a microcosm for understanding social inequalities, and that a life course perspective can provide an integrative framework for a comprehensive sociology of bereavement. We conclude by identifying promising areas for future advancements in this emerging field.

Scholarship on finance has flourished in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While the sociology of finance typically centers developments since the financial turn of the 1970s, a burgeoning body of interdisciplinary scholarship sheds new light on the evolution of financial practices, institutions, and relations in earlier years. This review explores key contributions and themes from the new histories of finance, focusing on works published in the past decade that offer valuable insights for sociologists. We first review new contributions on ancient, medieval, and early modern finance, which illuminate the origins of money and credit, the development of financial thinking, and the relationship between finance and imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. Second, we survey new work on the development of modern financial markets in the long road to the financial turn of the 1970s. Together, these studies reveal how money, credit, and finance are embedded in political and legal institutions, and how financial systems act as tools of social policy, economic growth, war, and racial subjugation. Finally, long-run perspectives on finance provide an important reminder that borrowing, lending, and the management of attendant risks are not new phenomena unique to our neoliberal era.

This article discusses how my lived experiences led me to become a sociologist studying the civil rights movement and the sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. It explains my rejection of dominant movement theories and the formulation of my own social movement framework to explain the civil rights movement. It proceeds with my transition to studying the sociology of Du Bois. I cover the origins and substance of Du Boisian sociology. Finally, I conclude by addressing an attempted coup on Du Boisian sociology and defend the viability of this new sociological approach.

This review explores research on the sources of Black and White wealth and debt differentials and how these differentials recreate inequalities in both wealth and nonwealth outcomes. We discuss how the relationship between wealth and life outcomes is bidirectional, yet studies of racial wealth inequality overwhelmingly focus on wealth as an outcome. We suggest that studies that examine the relationship from wealth to life outcomes are necessary to enable full understanding of the mechanisms that underlie the production and reproduction of racial wealth inequality and to identify policies in the United States to reduce racial inequality. We highlight research on entrepreneurship, race, and wealth to illustrate these dynamics. We conclude with a call for scholars to focus on community-level wealth, given scholarly and policy interests in closing the racial wealth gap.

Research on Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) populations in the United States has been shaped by a fundamental paradox: MENAs are statistically invisible in the administrative data infrastructure yet socially hypervisible in other domains. This review outlines key demographic characteristics of the MENA American population and argues that by addressing the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox through innovative research questions and methods, previous scholarship has advanced sociology in three areas: identity, racialization, and integration. As upcoming changes to federal race and ethnicity standards take effect, the invisibility/hypervisibility paradox may shift as sociologists more easily collect and analyze data about MENA Americans. However, this information may be misused, misinterpreted, or handled unethically without sufficient background context and responsibility to community members. Future research will require data disaggregation to explore intersectional and intragroup minority issues, examination of the evolving content and meaning of MENA panethnicity, and ongoing assessment of the MENA group's relative racial position.

Why has India, the world's largest liberal democracy, joined the global turn toward authoritarianism? Drawing on the sociological literature on Indian politics, we argue that India's authoritarian turn emerges from the difficulty of sustaining democracy within an unequal society. The Indian state historically managed this difficulty by balancing the interests of opposed social groups: responding favorably to underprivileged groups’ demands for welfare and rights while simultaneously maintaining elite power and privilege. This approach ensured that everyone enjoyed some wins but also faced some disappointments. For decades, the Indian state's ability to sustain this juggling act was credited for the success of India's liberal democracy. Over time, however, the Indian state's attempt to appease opposed social groups became perilous for democracy. The more the state catered to elite and nonelite demands, the more empowered both groups became to express their dissatisfaction and demand more. Elites, resentful that their privilege was being chipped away to make room for nonelites, and nonelites, frustrated with continued poverty and marginalization at the hands of elites, both began seeking solutions from an alternative, authoritarian-style regime. Recent events suggest that one ray of hope for a more just future in India resides in the social movements that emerged from India's democracy and have recently tried to hold its increasingly authoritarian regime in check. By tracing the social basis of India's democratic fluctuations, sociological literature on India provides important insights for other unequal democracies, where similar elite resentments and nonelite frustrations are fueling authoritarianism.

Survey experiments are an underutilized but powerful tool for sociologists interested in studying causal research questions. Survey experiments can yield insights into the breadth of causal relationships, by studying treatment effects in population samples or across subgroups, and can yield a deeper understanding of causal processes that are not readily observed with other social science methodologies. In this article, we begin by considering the conditions under which survey experiments are a uniquely useful method and highlight emblematic examples of recent sociological research. We then discuss some of the challenges and limitations of survey experiments as a research method before offering a brief practical guide to sociologists interested in conducting survey experiments. We conclude with reflections on the future of survey experimental research in sociology.