Search Results (204)

This article examines the sociological dimensions of non-traditional adult students’ integration into Portuguese higher education through a critical analysis of the O23 access regime at a Portuguese university, Iscte-IUL. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of cultural capital and institutional habitus, the study critically analyses how alternative pathways such as the “Over 23” Access Regime both challenge and reproduce educational inequalities. Using a quantitative research design that analyzes longitudinal institutional and national data (2012–2025), the research explores the interaction between institutional mechanisms, sociodemographic characteristics, and the academic trajectories of adult students. Special attention is given to the 2020 reforms and their impact on selection criteria and student outcomes. The findings reveal tensions between democratization imperatives and academic standards, underlining how institutional practices mediate access to academic capital for non-traditional students while mapping both opportunities and barriers to their integration. The study enhances sociological debates on educational inequalities and offers insights for higher education policy and social inclusion practices in European contexts. Full article

Decentralization reforms are reshaping contemporary public management and are often presented as innovations capable of improving efficiency, accountability, and responsiveness to the citizens’ demands. Yet their implications for governance arrangements remain highly contested. This paper critically analyzes the process of educational decentralization in Portugal to explore whether it represents a genuine administrative innovation or a broader reconfiguration of state governance. The study draws on a critical interpretative policy approach informed by post-structuralist policy analysis and the sociology of public policy instruments. Based on a qualitative analysis of legislation, policy documents, planning instruments, institutional reports, and governance arrangements, it applies a threefold analytical framework—Promise, Reality, and Transformation—linking policy discourse, instruments, and governance transformation. The findings suggest that while decentralization is discursively justified by narratives of modernization and local empowerment, it is operationalized through dense regulatory architectures, policy instruments, accountability mechanisms, and digital governance infrastructures. This leads to a paradoxical decentralized centralism, in which expanded local responsibilities coexist with strengthened capacities for central coordination, evaluation, and multilevel regulation. The study contributes to debates on public management and governance transformation by showing how decentralization may reconfigure rather than diminish state power in the context of contemporary multilevel governance. Full article

Navayāna Buddhism emerged from B. R. Ambedkar’s effort to make Buddhism a path of liberation from caste oppression. Its emphasis on equality, dignity, compassion, and the refusal of humiliation gave it considerable emancipatory power. Yet Buddhism in modern India has remained regionally concentrated rather than broadly expansive. This article argues that this uneven consolidation cannot be explained by external constraints alone, although administrative barriers, anti-conversion laws, reservation policy, and Hindu nationalist pressures have shaped the conditions of Navayāna affiliation. It also reflects the religious form produced by Ambedkar’s founding reinterpretation of Buddhism. Shaped by the urgency of anti-caste struggle, Navayāna developed strong resources for public ritual, collective memory, and moral–political assertion, while devotional, contemplative, and ritually mediated forms of everyday practice were not institutionalized to the same degree. Drawing on Ambedkar’s writings, census data, and historical, sociological, and ethnographic scholarship, this article examines the relationship between conversion, anti-caste emancipation, and religious continuity. It suggests that the features that make a religious movement politically potent are not always the same as those that sustain it as a living tradition across generations. Full article

This multi-site ethnographic study focuses on the utility of using student growth data generated from teacher evaluations as a data-use intervention. Findings suggest that teachers developed a common perspective about evaluation but organizational contexts shaped teacher responses at the three sites differently. At two of the schools, teachers were responsible for administering their own assessments, organizing results, and presenting these results to the principal. In both schools, the data-use process was similar. Teachers administered a variety of assessments, chose from among the results, constructed artifacts metrics, and presented these metrics to the principal. At the third school, student achievement was calculated using an externally developed assessment and student growth scores were calculated at the district level. At this school, teachers maintained a unified front that disestablished the link between their performance and their students’ assessment results. The teachers maintained this stance in their interactions with colleagues and with the principal. Full article

Background: Private and community hosting have emerged as important community-based responses to forced displacement, through which host-country citizens provide accommodation, practical support, and relational care to refugees in domestic and community settings. These hosting arrangements extend hospitality beyond commercial and tourism contexts into everyday spaces of welcome, co-living, and social support. Existing literature has examined a range of hosting experiences, including reasons citizens choose to host, ways hospitality is practiced, challenges arising from hosting, and the impacts of hosting on hosts, refugees, and communities. However, the evidence remains fragmented across disciplines, including migration studies, social work, sociology, public health, and hospitality scholarship. Objective: This scoping review aims to map and synthesize the existing literature on why host-country residents and local hosting actors host refugees, with a focus on hosting motivations, hospitality practices, challenges, and impacts in private and community hosting. Methods: This review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews and be reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Guided by the Population–Concept–Context framework, the review will include studies involving host-country residents and local hosting actors, engaged in refugee hosting. Literature published in English from 2010 onward will be identified through searches in MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science, Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, and selected grey literature sources. Two reviewers will independently screen records and extract data, which will be analyzed descriptively and thematically to map motivations, hospitality practices, challenges, and impacts in private and community hosting. Results: The review will generate a comprehensive map of the literature on refugee hosting in private and community settings. It will identify how hosting is conceptualized and practiced, the motivations driving citizen involvement, the relational and structural challenges associated with hosting, and the reported impacts on hosts, refugees, and communities. It will also highlight system-level support, policy considerations, and gaps requiring further attention through research and practice. Conclusions: This scoping review will provide an interdisciplinary synthesis of evidence on refugee hosting as a form of social and domestic hospitality. The findings will inform future research, policy, and community-based hosting initiatives and will contribute to a deeper understanding of the ethical, relational, and structural dimensions of refugee hospitality and hosting in host countries. Full article

Behavioral epigenetics links experiences of adversity, stress, and care to molecular variation associated with health and behavior and can reshape understandings of embodiment across the life course. As such findings enter legal and policy debates, they raise pressing questions about how judges assess responsibility, weigh extralegal factors in sentencing, and govern the use of emerging scientific evidence. This article develops a framework of biological justice to guide the translation of epigenetic evidence into judicial decision-making without reintroducing biological determinism or naturalizing structural inequality. Integrating insights from epigenetics, sociology of science, bioethics, and criminal law, we clarify the inferential limits of current research and examine risks of biologizing inequality, predictive governance, and eugenic logics. We argue that epigenetic evidence should be restricted to contextual, defendant-protective, and rehabilitation-oriented uses in sentencing and post-conviction proceedings, while predictive and coercive applications should be explicitly excluded. Overall, this framework emphasizes structural framing, community oversight, and equity to prevent molecular accounts of adversity from reinforcing existing hierarchies. Full article

This article examines how Ecuadorian national digital newspapers represented adolescents and youth-coded young adults associated with crime during 2025, with particular attention to lexical labeling, moral attribution, visual framing, editorial prominence, news values and the near-presence or absence of educational discourse. The study is based on qualitative content analysis of Spanish-language digital press coverage published in El Universo, El Comercio, Extra, La Hora, GK, Primicias, Vistazo, El Mercurio and Expreso across seven journalistic genres: news, note, feature article, report, editorial, interview and chronicle. The article argues that media discourse does not merely describe youth violence; it actively constructs public intelligibility about who young people are, how danger is recognized and whether social responses are imagined in punitive, preventive or restorative terms. Grounded in media framing theory, news values, moral panic studies, child-friendly justice, critical sociology, school push-out scholarship and philosophies of education and human development, the article shows the inferential route from media representation to educational reintegration: when coverage individualizes adolescent violence, minimizes school interruption and masks structural conditions, it narrows the policy imagination through which young people are understood as educable, rights-bearing and recoverable subjects. The paper ultimately argues that the long-term reduction of violence in Ecuador requires not only security responses but also an integral reintegration agenda centered on education, dignified work, child-sensitive justice and restorative social policy. Full article

This paper offers a theoretical-interpretive contribution to the sociology of lifelong learning (LLL), exploring a sociological reframing of lifelong learning through the concept of social love as an analytical framework for reading the institutional practices of universities in the domain of LLL. Drawing on classical and contemporary sociological traditions (including recognition theory, French pragmatic sociology, and relational sociology), the paper develops the argument that lifelong learning, when understood as a relational and generative practice, can be interpreted through the four dimensions of social love: overabundance, care, recognition, and universalism. The paper proposes what can be interpreted as a theoretical and educational transposition of the World Love Index (WLI) framework: a shift in scale, from the nation-state to the university, and in domain, from general social policy to educational practice, that preserves the core logic of the WLI while adapting it to the context of higher education. This transposition responds to a gap explicitly identified within the WLI research program and contributes to the debate on the civic and relational dimensions of higher education. Empirically, the paper draws on a national survey conducted within the Italian University Network for Lifelong Learning (RUIAP), which mapped lifelong learning services across 27 universities between 2022 and 2023. The survey data are used not as a basis for hypothesis testing but as exploratory empirical material through which to illustrate and develop the proposed framework, following a logic of theory elaboration. The findings reveal a heterogeneous and evolving system, characterized by uneven levels of institutionalization across the four dimensions: recognition practices are most widely present, though concentrated on formal pathways; care emerges in dedicated services for vulnerable and non-traditional populations; universalism remains largely unrealized in terms of territorial outreach; and overabundance (institutional investment exceeding regulatory compliance) is present in limited but analytically significant cases. The study concludes that understanding LLL as a practice of social love offers new insights into the civic mission of universities and their contribution to fostering social cohesion and democratic participation. It further proposes the need for observatories of institutional social love in higher education (such as RUIAP) and identifies directions for future research and policy oriented toward the generation of relational goods and the common good within university systems. Full article

This paper proposes a sociological reinterpretation of the concept of sustainability, understood as a cultural dispositive capable of shaping habitus, social representations, and models of action. From a culturalist perspective, sustainability is analysed as a process of social construction grounded in the internalisation of values, knowledge, and practices that contribute to the formation of responsible citizenship. Within this theoretical framework, the school assumes a strategic role in processes of sustainability education by fostering the ethical, collaborative, and inclusive competences required to address contemporary socio-environmental transformations. The paper presents the Edumat+ design protocol, developed within the framework of the Erasmus+ programme, aimed at experimenting with innovative methodologies for digital education in primary schools through the integration of STEAM approaches, with reference to coding, educational robotics, and information design. The protocol involved the development of infographic mats and digital learning activities focused on themes of environmental sustainability. The findings highlight how the integration of digital education, visual storytelling, and collaborative learning can contribute to the construction of inclusive and participatory educational environments capable of supporting processes of sustainable citizenship from primary education onwards. Although the activation of such pathways is consistent with recent European policies promoting the integration of digital technologies and STEAM approaches within schools, particularly through initiatives focused on teacher education and the acquisition of technologies and software, the widespread dissemination of the project still requires further governmental support, especially for the development and dissemination of the project outputs. Full article

Integrated energy systems (IES) are widely recognized as a key pathway toward carbon neutrality, enabling the coupling and coordinated optimization of electricity, heat, gas, and cooling. This review provides a structured, technology-oriented overview of IES based on a unified five-subsystem framework (production, conversion, transmission, storage, and consumption). It systematically covers: (1) renewable energy utilization—solar, wind, and geothermal—supported by a global spatial distribution map and representative top-performing commercial products; (2) energy cascade utilization, where combined heat and power/combined cooling, heating and power (CHP/CCHP) raises overall efficiency from approximately 35–40% to 70–90%; (3) multi-form energy storage—electrical, electrochemical, chemical, thermal, and mechanical—distinguishing short-term balancing (e.g., lithium-ion (Li-ion), flywheels, supercapacitors, with 85–95% round-trip efficiency) from long-duration and seasonal applications (e.g., pumped hydro, hydrogen/power-to-gas (P2G), redox flow batteries); and (4) forecasting, collaborative optimization, and the bidirectional integration of IES with smart grids and grid modernization. A strategic strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats–Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (SWOT–PESTLE) analysis is further presented to position IES within the global energy transition. The review highlights that IES and grid innovation are mutually enabling, and that realizing the full carbon-neutrality potential of IES requires coordinated progress in standardization, digitalization, long-duration storage, and cross-sector policy alignment. Full article

To investigate the underlying mechanisms of talent mobility in higher-education institutions influenced by factors such as the development environment, macroeconomic policies, and evaluation mechanisms, this paper proposes a nonlinear stochastic differential equation (SDE) dynamical model that incorporates time delays and multiplicative noise. We analyze the dynamic processes of talent mobility under varying conditions regarding the number of nodes, policy implementation cycles, and noise intensity. First, we employ central manifold theory and stochastic averaging methods to reduce the system to a one-dimensional averaged $It\widehat{o}$ equation. Subsequently, with $\tau$ as a parameter, we conduct an in-depth study of the system’s stochastic bifurcation behavior using the corresponding Fok–Planck–Kolmogorov equations. Finally, we validate the theoretical conclusions through numerical simulations. The results indicate that the number of nodes, policy delay, and noise intensity all have significant effects on system stability; an increasing delay induces random P-bifurcation in the system, and when $N\le 3$ and $N>3$, the system exhibits distinctly different steady-state behaviors. We also found that excessively high noise intensity disrupts system stability, whereas moderate noise intensity has a positive effect on stability. This study not only provides theoretical insights into the dynamic evolution mechanisms of talent mobility in regional universities but also offers valuable guidance for universities in formulating talent recruitment and evaluation policies. The methodology employed in this study opens up a promising avenue for analyzing complex dynamic problems in the field of sociology. Full article

This study examines how Syrian migrants in Turkey—who generally have temporary protection status—adapt to their new environment, focusing on their sense of belonging, social acceptance, and social interaction. In this research, acculturation is considered not only as a one-way adaptation process but also as a multidimensional and mutually evaluated process that emerges through various variables such as the relationships migrants establish with the host society, their intercultural communication experiences, and their daily life practices. The study, conducted using a qualitative research design, is based on data obtained from in-depth interviews with semi-structured questions conducted with 20 Syrian migrants who have resided in various cities in Turkey for at least 5 years. The data emerging from the interviews were analyzed using descriptive-thematic analysis. The findings reveal that positive social contact and interaction within the social structure reinforce the sense of belonging; conversely, discrimination, exposure to exclusion, and legal uncertainty negatively affect acculturation processes. The study contributes to the literature by providing a context-sensitive analysis of acculturation, emphasizing the role of social interaction, belonging, and social acceptance in shaping migrants’ experiences. Full article

In Latin America, the double burden of malnutrition is the region’s single most important public health concern for the incoming decade. Latin America’s burden of disease has distinct features in comparison to high-income countries: nearly 20 percent of NCDs are diagnosed in people under 60 years of age in Latin America, whereas only about 13 percent of people under 60 years of age in North America and Europe are diagnosed with these diseases. We aimed to better understand decision-making processes, preferences, and norms around food choices to provide input for future programming and policy suggestions at national and regional levels. We included key informant interviews and focus group discussions with parents and adolescents from urban and rural communities in three regions in Colombia and in Mexico. Results showed that food choices considered to be affordable, acceptable, accessible, and aspirational are driven by environmental and social factors that influence individual cognitive decisions. Across the study groups, cognitive biases influenced food decision-making in relation to eating out, natural, homemade, and “moderation”. At the sociological level, conversations, and social influences at home and in communities were strong indicators of dietary practices, health beliefs, and body size attitudes. Full article

This study examines the multicultural school as a micro-organizational unit, focusing on the interplay of power relations, organizational culture, and everyday pedagogical practices. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with educators at the 16th General Lyceum of Thessaloniki, the analysis situates school life within broader institutional and normative frameworks. Grounded in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), specifically Target 4.7 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the findings show that while educators actively promote intercultural coexistence and democratic participation, their initiatives are constrained by centralized governance and curricular rigidity. Nonetheless, teachers’ personal agency and informal leadership play a crucial role in fostering inclusion, care, and global citizenship values at the micro-organizational level. The study contributes theoretically by reframing the multicultural school through an organizational sociology lens, emphasizing the micro-politics of discretion, institutional logics, and cultural reproduction within school settings. Practically, it highlights the need for structural policy reforms that move beyond reliance on individual teacher initiative and institutionalize inclusive, care-oriented, and sustainability-driven practices within centralized educational systems. Full article

Sociotechnical imaginaries are collectively held and institutionally stabilised visions of desirable futures that link scientific and technological development with social and political order. Developed within Science and Technology Studies, the concept highlights the co-production of knowledge, technology, and governance, showing how ideas of progress are embedded in cultural values, moral assumptions, and political priorities. These imaginaries function as normative horizons that orient innovation, legitimise policy, shape regulation, and guide clinical practice. In health and biomedicine, sociotechnical imaginaries are particularly salient, as medical innovations directly affect life, death, and embodiment. Within medical sociology, the concept has been used to analyse how technologies such as assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), genomics, regenerative medicine, and digital health are framed through narratives of hope, responsibility, risk, and transformation. These imaginaries shape what counts as legitimate knowledge, who accesses treatment, and how ethical debates are structured, from autonomy in ARTs to individualised care in precision medicine. Imaginaries are also shaped by national and institutional contexts. Comparative research shows that the United States, Europe, and East Asia produce distinct biomedical futures, reflecting different political traditions and governance models. As an analytical lens, sociotechnical imaginaries reveal health and biomedicine as domains where futures are imagined, contested, and enacted. Full article