“She’s Surrounded by Loved Ones, but Feeling Alone”: A Relational Approach to Loneliness

Loneliness poses one of the significant problems of our modern post‐industrial societies. Current research on loneliness has been developed primarily by psychology, biomedicine, nursing, and other health‐related disciplines, showing a surprising number of variables and risk factors involved in the experience of loneliness, along with positive correlations with premature mortality and morbidity. However, most of these analyses overlook the social interactions and context in which loneliness is experienced. Drawing on a subsample (N = 24) of Spanish “mothers” from impoverished families, the article proposes a mixed‐method approach (both relational and interpretative) that may potentially complement quantitative approaches, showing relational and contextual factors that may contribute to a better understanding of the subjective dimension of loneliness.

Vernacular Patterns in Portugal and Brazil: Evolution and Adaptations

Traditional towns in Portugal and Brazil have evolved a finely tuned coordination between, on the one hand, modular dimensions for street widths and lot sizes, and on the other, a typology of room shapes and layouts within houses. Despite being well documented in urban history, this coordination was in the last century often interpreted as contingent, a result of the limited material means of pre-industrial societies. But the continued application and gradual adaptation of these urban and architectural patterns through periods of industrialization and economic development suggests that they respond both to enduring housing requirements and to piecemeal urban growth. This article surveys the persistence of urban and architectural patterns up to the early 20th century, showing their resilience in addressing modern housing and urbanization requirements.

Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution

What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history? In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity.

AN ONLINE WORK IS STILL WORK: VIRTUAL LABORS OF PROFESSIONAL WRESTLERS

The COVID pandemic’s impact on professional wrestling has come in many forms. Like other forms of sports and entertainment, professional wrestling is very dependent on physical interactions to produce content. So, what happens when wrestlers, who work as independent contractors, cannot engage in such physical labor? Fortunately, many had already been utilizing existing social media platforms as additional sources of income to supplement what they receive from their wrestling, trading on their characters and brands under neoliberal approaches to revenue generation. Their online work often aligns with their physical work, as the actual wrestling they perform is only a small fraction of their revenue-generating labor. From selling merchandise to selling themselves, the panel explores how professional wrestling uses these technologies to further their physical businesses and practices. The panel will critically explore these online activities to understand how such technologies mediate the relationship between promotions, wrestlers, and fans while also reflecting late-stage capitalist and neoliberal ideological perspectives on the Internet. This panel considers how these independent contractors have turned to neoliberal platforms and practices, even before the pandemic, to maintain a living, and the extent to which what they have done to survive operates as a template for more people in post-industrial societies operating under similar conditions.

Classificatory disputes and scientific controversies: society, nature, and culture in the Anthropocene

In general, the idea of Anthropocene refers to the set of socio-historical, ecological, economic, and technological transformations responsible for configuring a new stage of regulation and evolution of the planetary geological system. From its original proposition in the 2000s, this notion gained increasing repercussion, mobilizing different positions in multiple fields of scientific knowledge. This article aims to develop a critical analysis of some of the main concepts found in such debates, from the mobilization of three fundamental analytical categories: the concepts of Society, Nature, and Culture. In methodological terms, this is a literature review article based on qualitative and non-systematic bibliographic research. The analysis undertaken here indicates how the different approaches mobilized by the driving idea of Anthropocene result in theoretical movements that redefine the relationships between agency, structure, and social change in the historical context of modern industrial societies.

“There is a Time for Departure Even when There’s no Certain Place to Go”: the Twisting Path to Selfhood and Adulthood

In today’s post-industrial societies, young people, compared to previous generations, experience longer and more complex processes of creating professional identity, developing a career or finding “one’s vocation”. They also face difficulties in achieving financial independence, starting a family, and leaving parental homes, which altogether define the status of an adult person. Based on the overview of sociological and psychological scholarly literature, the complexity of young people’s identity formation in the context of a passage towards social maturity is analysed. The most significant tensions related to the question of “who am I and what do I want” are emphasized in the article, together with the circumstances of contemporary society that stimulate them. (Non-)applicability of the concept of the quarter-life crisis is finally highlighted in order to summarise, reflect, and explain some of the experiences and life events of young people. The title of the article is a famous quotation of Tennessee Williams.

The Globalization of Superheroes: Diffusion, Genre, and Cultural Adaptations

Superheroes are a global phenomenon. The superhero genre has been proliferated through modern industrial societies by way of movies, television, comics, and other forms of popular media. Although virtually every nation in the world has heroic myths, the modern superhero, as marked by the inception of recent American comics heroes in 1929, is a uniquely Western invention. Superheroes are “Western” insofar as they embody and exhibit Western civic values, such as democracy, humanism, and retributive justice. These characters have been communicatively incorporated into globalization processes by means of diffusion and thereby enact aspects of cultural imperialism. Even so, superhero figures have been in high demand across many populations for their entertainment value. As superheroes have diffused in non-Western cultures, they have not only been absorbed by new cultures but also refigured and adapted. These non-Western adaptations have had a recursive influence, such as the global popularity of Japanese manga. The recursive relationship between Western superheroes and their non-Western adaptations implies superheroes are an important aspect of cultural fusion in global popular culture.

Social inclusion and collective skill formation systems: policy and politics

This thematic review essay focuses on the relationship between social inclusion and collective skill formation systems. It briefly surveys foundational literature in comparative political economy and comparative social policy that documented and explained the traditionally socially inclusive nature of these systems. It reviews how the literature conceptualized the current challenges faced by collective skill formation systems in upholding their inclusive nature in the context of the transition to post-industrial societies. It then discusses in detail a recent strand of literature that investigates the policy responses that have been deployed across countries to deal with these challenges. It concludes by providing heuristics that may be useful for researchers who seek to advance the study of the policy and politics of social inclusion in collective skill formation systems.