The Gap-Closing Estimand: A Causal Approach to Study Interventions That Close Disparities Across Social Categories

Disparities across race, gender, and class are important targets of descriptive research. But rather than only describe disparities, research would ideally inform interventions to close those gaps. The gap-closing estimand quantifies how much a gap (e.g., incomes by race) would close if we intervened to equalize a treatment (e.g., access to college). Drawing on causal decomposition analyses, this type of research question yields several benefits. First, gap-closing estimands place categories like race in a causal framework without making them play the role of the treatment (which is philosophically fraught for non-manipulable variables). Second, gap-closing estimands empower researchers to study disparities using new statistical and machine learning estimators designed for causal effects. Third, gap-closing estimands can directly inform policy: if we sampled from the population and actually changed treatment assignments, how much could we close gaps in outcomes? I provide open-source software (the R package gapclosing) to support these methods.

Rethinking the Methodological Foundation of Historical Political Science

The basis of a methodology determines whether a research method can fit the core characteristics of a particular academic tradition, and thus, it is crucial to explore this foundation. Keeping in mind the controversy and progress of the philosophy of social sciences, this paper aims to elaborate on four aspects including the cognitive model, the view of causality, research methods, and analysis techniques, and to establish a more solid methodological basis for historical political science. With respect to the “upstream knowledge” of methodology, both positivism and critical realism underestimate the tremendous difference between the natural world and the social world. This leads to inherent flaws in controlled comparison and causal mechanism analysis. Given the constructiveness of social categories and the complexity of historical circumstances, the cognitive model of constructivism makes it more suitable for researchers to engage in macro-political and social analysis. From the perspective of constructivism, the causality in “storytelling,” i.e., the traditional narrative analysis, is placed as the basis of the regularity theory of causality in this paper, thus forming the historical–causal narrative. The historical–causal narrative focuses on how a research object is shaped and self-shaped in the ontological historical process, and thus ideally suits the disciplinary characteristics of historical political science. Researchers can complete theoretical dialogues, test hypotheses, and further explore the law of causality in logic and evidence, thereby achieving the purpose of “learning from history” in historical political science.

А template for establishment of a unified occupational safety and health system for the Russian Federation military personnel

This article is devoted to occupational safety issues with regard to members of the services and civilian staff in the course of army and navy normal activity in terms of creation possibility justification of a unified occupational safety and health system for all the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The legislative and other statutory and regulatory acts of the Russian Federation, which determine the security procedure for different social categories, incoming and incumbent employees in military units (on boards), were studied. The research found that active service conditions and civilian staff working conditions, as well as corresponding military service and labor security systems in military units (on boards), differ substantially thus creating obstacles for military authorities. The authors propose to create a unified occupational safety and health system for all the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which will be based on the principles applicable to the modern occupational health management system, and will account for work factors of the both social categories.

Intimate Eating

In Intimate Eating Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.” These spaces—whether established in online communities or through eating along in a restaurant—blur the line between public and private. In analyses of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and The Great British Bake Off, Mannur focuses on how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics. In this way, the culinary becomes central to discourses of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating how cooking, eating, and distributing food shapes and sustains social worlds, Mannur reconfigures how we think about networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Facial Stereotyping Drives Judgments of Perceptually Ambiguous Social Groups

When seeing a face, people form judgments of perceptually ambiguous social categories (PASCs), for example, gun-owners, gay people, or alcoholics. Previous research has assumed that PASC judgments arise from the statistical learning of facial features in social encounters. We propose, instead, that perceivers associate facial features with traits (e.g., extroverted) and then infer PASC membership via learned stereotype associations with those traits. Across three studies, we show that when any PASC is more stereotypically associated with a trait (e.g., alcoholics = extroverted), perceivers are more likely to infer PASC membership from faces conveying that trait (Study 1). Furthermore, we demonstrate that individual differences in trait–PASC stereotypes predict face-based judgments of PASC membership (Study 2) and have a causal role in these judgments (Study 3). Together, our findings imply that people can form any number of PASC judgments from facial appearance alone by drawing on their learned social–conceptual associations.

The Role of Supervision in Preventing Burnout among Professionals Working with People in Difficulty

The value of people in their various dimensions is a priority in the postmodern era. In this respect, programs are being implemented for disadvantaged social categories to compensate for differences, reduce discrepancies, and integrate marginalized people into society. This, however, is not easy, and the work of professionals with people in difficulty is frequently difficult, consuming multiple resources and, sometimes, leading to burnout. The professions involved in the recovery work of people in difficulty provide social, medical, psychological, and spiritual assistance services in order to restore or increase the well-being of disadvantaged people or social groups. This study presents an analysis of burnout among social workers and clerics and the effect of supervision on burnout. In support of this, a sociological survey (n = 502) was conducted on a convenience sample of Romanian social workers and clerics in June 2018. The main conclusion of the study is that supervising professionals working with people in difficulty significantly reduces the risk of burnout.

Networks Amongst Syrians: Situated Migrant Positionalities and the Impact on Relational Embedding

This article employs Yuval‐Davis concept of situated intersectionality to explore processes of relational embedding amongst Syrian migrants in the UK. By drawing on in‐depth interview data from 31 men and women living in North East England, we explore how varying social categories—or positionalities—intersect and shape personal networks and feelings of attachment amongst Syrians. We show how wider structural contexts and systems of social relations shape migrants’ sense of belonging and attachment which can serve to enhance or weaken opportunities for social and economic inclusion. The findings reveal how, for Syrian migrants, wider macro level contexts determine immigration and asylum routes which in turn shape place‐specific opportunity structures that impact on micro individual level processes of relational embedding. We develop the term “migrant positionalities” as a social category to capture the multiple experiences of migration and asylum and the power dynamics that determine opportunity structures and processes of embedding. We contribute to the debates in this field by demonstrating how the wider structural context can lead to a multiplicity of immigration and asylum experiences for individuals, resulting in differences in support and rights that go on to shape processes of embedding and personal networks. By employing a situated intersectional lens, we also demonstrate how and why processes of relational embedding differ amongst migrants of the same nationality on the basis of social positionings such as ethnicity, class, and religion, that are situated in context, time, and space.