Cultural trauma refers to how past experiences of harm can fundamentally transform a community’s shared identity, potentially generating feelings of solidarity and providing communities with a sense of common purpose. This article examines the role of cultural trauma in motivating and guiding ongoing efforts to preserve historic Chinatowns in Canada and the United States in the face of contemporary challenges such as gentrification. We demonstrate how activists understand themselves to be continuing a struggle against anti-Chinese racism that extends back to the nineteenth century. Explaining the contemporary salience of trauma, we conceptualize Chinatowns as “cultural reservoirs” that have accumulated physical traces of past harms. These traces serve as iconic representations of trauma: haunting reminders of the tenuous place of Chinatowns in North American cities. We identify three types of icons produced by distinct material processes: stubborn, entropic, and remedial. By identifying the importance of the physical environment in the trauma process, we reconcile a realist focus on historical events themselves with a constructivist account of their subsequent incorporation into collective memory. Cultural reservoirs do not determine how contemporary communities will remember their past, but the physical traces they preserve create experiences and situations in which trauma narratives seem intuitive and salient to contemporary communities.

This article introduces treatment effect on the association between outcomes (TEA), a new causal estimand that measures how a treatment influences the covariance between two post-treatment variables. TEA enables researchers to estimate how interventions affect associations that characterize social inequalities. I define TEA, provide identification results under standard causal inference assumptions, and outline estimation strategies including regression-imputation, weighting, and double machine learning estimators. I compare and contrast TEA with other common estimands in similar research settings, highlighting its unique use. I demonstrate the use of TEA through two applications: the effect of college completion on income gradient in health and the effect of college completion on issue alignment, using NLSY97 and GSS, respectively. By exploring how treatments modify associations between outcomes, TEA offers a valuable tool for sociological research on inequality, stratification, and public opinion, providing insights into the mechanisms sustaining social inequalities and informing policy interventions.

This paper argues for a paradigm shift in demography, moving beyond the alarmist and deterministic narratives fixated on “lowest‐low fertility (LLF)” (total fertility rate ≤ 1.3). Initially a useful heuristic, the LLF concept now obscures more than it reveals, as it conflates vastly different demographic trajectories across an increasingly heterogeneous global landscape. We demonstrate that factors like international migration, mortality reduction, and human capital are powerful mediators of population futures, often more impactful than fertility rates alone. Using comparative cases, we show that similar LLF classifications can lead to starkly divergent outcomes. Consequently, we propose retiring the LLF framework in favor of a multidimensional demography that situates fertility within an integrated system of demographic and socioeconomic factors, enabling more nuanced and effective policy responses to contemporary population change.

The concept of super‐diversity posits that waves of immigration over several decades expand population heterogeneity on multiple social, demographic, economic, political, and legal dimensions, creating a mosaic of social and cultural life in immigrant‐rich spaces. This concept raises important demographic and sociological questions as to how this has happened, particularly in view of the long history of assimilation and integration theories, in which immigrant groups are hypothesized to become more similar to host society populations over time. In this study, we provide a demographic perspective, positioning immigration and integration as forces that influence population heterogeneity. We utilize a detailed dataset of population stocks and flows between 2011 and 2021 from Australia and develop a multiregional demographic model to quantify the contributions of immigration and integration to contemporary diversity. The results show how immigration drives diversification, giving rise to migrant and multidimensional diversity. Integration in terms of citizenship, language proficiency, occupational attainment, and homeownership is strongly evidenced and helps to shift the socioeconomic characteristics of foreign‐born populations and their children, though they do not have substantial impacts on measures of population diversity. These findings provide insights for theorizing and measuring the relationships between immigration and diversity, and their long‐term societal implications.

This article revisits and revises the secularization paradigm in light of late-stage secularization. Whereas secularization theory, influenced by Peter Berger, holds that structural differentiation, rationalization, pluralism, and individualization erode religious authority, we argue that these same processes facilitated the emergence of a secular sacred canopy. Drawing from recent developments in cultural sociology, we demonstrate how scientific empiricism, naturalism, and a romantic liberal imaginary collectively function as a secular equivalent to a religious cosmology. By theorizing secularization in cultural sociological terms, we are able to explain the rise and resilience of cradle nonreligion, the shift from “religion” to “spirituality,” the ascendance of right-wing “religious” populisms, and the paradoxical nature of the heretical imperative in highly secular societies (and contexts). We conclude by outlining the methodological, theoretical, and explanatory implications of our paradigm revision.

Amid novel infectious disease epidemics, societal norms regarding when or whether women should or should not have children are highly prone to change as social life is severely disrupted. We argue that, in periods of exacerbated uncertainty such as during the emerging months of a novel infectious disease pandemic, women use memory of another recent epidemic as an anchor to define how to go about their lives. We combine unique experimental data from a population-representative sample of 3,860 women with qualitative data from fifty-six semi-structured interviews in Pernambuco, Brazil to examine childbearing attitudes during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic among women of reproductive age, who less than three years before the start of the pandemic faced another novel infectious disease outbreak, the Zika epidemic. This mixed-method study underscores how epidemics can leave lasting imprints, which emerge as a frame of reference for navigating future epidemics, even in a different disease context. These scarring effects get activated and re-activated to shape attitudes during the emergence of a subsequent equally uncertain public health crisis, and fade as the current epidemic unfolds. Combined, this mixed-method experimental study contributes to the understanding and empirical works of the sociology of epidemics by problematizing the scarring effects of successive novel infectious disease crises.

The study examines children’s school performance in the years before and after parental separation, adopting a process-oriented approach. In addition, the study explores heterogeneous effects based on children’s socioeconomic background and gender. Existing research on the effect of family transitions on educational outcomes typically compares outcomes before and after parental separation. However, this approach overlooks that parental separation is often preceded by a longer-term process of family decline and neglects children’s ability to adapt to the new family structure. Using Norwegian register data from 2007 to 2017, this study uses fixed-effects regressions to analyse the math and reading scores of 11,299 children aged 9–15 years, 3 years before and after parental separation. Children’s school performance shows a slight decline even before their parents separate, with an additional decline in the years after separation. This pattern is mainly driven by boys and, to a lower extent, by children living in a family with a low socioeconomic status. The findings emphasize the need to consider parental separation as a gradual process rather than a discrete event, highlighting the early emergence of separation effects on children’s educational outcomes and the importance of considering heterogeneous effects.