From 'having' to 'being': self-worth and the current crisis of American society.

With growing inequality, the American dream is becoming less effective as a collective myth. With its focus on material success, competition and self-reliance, the intensified diffusion of neoliberal scripts of the self is leading the upper-middle class toward a mental health crisis while the working class and low-income groups do not have the resources needed to live the dream. African Americans, Latinos and undocumented immigrants, who are presumed to lack self-reliance, face more rigid boundaries. One possible way forward is broadening cultural membership by promoting new narratives of hope centered on a plurality of criteria of worth, 'ordinary universalism' and destigmatizing stigmatized groups.

Trump's electoral speeches and his appeal to the American white working class.

This paper contributes to the study of social change by considering boundary work as a dimension of cultural change. Drawing on the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of 73 formal speeches made by Donald Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign, we argue that his political rhetoric, which led to his presidential victory, addressed the white working class's concern with their declining position in the national pecking order. He addressed this group's concern by raising their moral status, that is, by (1) emphatically describing them as hard-working Americans who are victims of globalization; (2) voicing their concerns about 'people above' (professionals, the rich, and politicians); (3) drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, and Muslims; (4) presenting African Americans and (legal) Hispanic Americans as workers who also deserve jobs; (5) stressing the role of working-class men as protectors of women and LGBTQ people. This particular case study of the role of boundary work in political rhetoric provides a novel, distinctively sociological approach for capturing dynamics of social change.

How American college students understand social resilience and navigate towards the future during covid and the movement for racial justice.

The COVID-19 pandemic and crisis around racial injustice have generated compounded macro-level stressors for American society that negatively impact mental health and wellbeing. We contribute to understanding the impact of these crises by examining the process of developing social resilience, which we conceptualize as a temporally-embedded process of sense-making through which actors activate a sense of dignity, agency, and hope in the face of challenges to sustain wellbeing based on available resources. We interviewed 80 college students (aged 18-23) living in the American Northeast and Midwest before (September 2019-February 2020) and during (June-July 2020) the pandemic to analyze how they make sense of crises, respond to challenges, and project themselves into the future. We compare "privileged" upper-middle class youth who have families with more resources to buffer themselves against growing uncertainty, with "less privileged" youth from lower-middle and working class families. Efforts to achieve a sense of dignity, agency, and hope amidst widespread uncertainty illuminate opportunities and constraints in the process of building social resilience, which take different temporal forms across the two class groups given their experiences and resources.

Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed an interconnected and tightly coupled globalized world in rapid change. This article sets the scientific stage for understanding and responding to such change for global sustainability and resilient societies. We provide a systemic overview of the current situation where people and nature are dynamically intertwined and embedded in the biosphere, placing shocks and extreme events as part of this dynamic; humanity has become the major force in shaping the future of the Earth system as a whole; and the scale and pace of the human dimension have caused climate change, rapid loss of biodiversity, growing inequalities, and loss of resilience to deal with uncertainty and surprise. Taken together, human actions are challenging the biosphere foundation for a prosperous development of civilizations. The Anthropocene reality-of rising system-wide turbulence-calls for transformative change towards sustainable futures. Emerging technologies, social innovations, broader shifts in cultural repertoires, as well as a diverse portfolio of active stewardship of human actions in support of a resilient biosphere are highlighted as essential parts of such transformations.

Bridging cultural sociology and cognitive psychology in three contemporary research programmes.

Three prominent research programmes in cognitive psychology would benefit from a stronger engagement with the cultural context of cognition: studies of poverty focused on scarcity and cognitive bandwidth, studies of dual-process morality and studies of biases using the implicit association test. We address some limitations of these programmes and suggest research strategies for moving beyond an exclusive focus on cognition. Research on poverty using the cognitive bandwidth approach would benefit from considering the cultural schemas that influence how people perceive and prioritize needs. Dual-process morality researchers could explain variation by analysing cultural repertoires that structure moral choices. Research using the implicit association test can better explain implicit attitudes by addressing the variability in cultural schemas that undergird biases. We identify how these research programmes can deepen the causal understanding of human attitudes and behaviours by addressing the interaction between internal cognition and supra-individual cultural repertoires.

Publisher Correction: Bridging cultural sociology and cognitive psychology in three contemporary research programmes.

Owing to a technical error, Bo Yun Park's affiliation was incorrect in the originally published HTML version of this Perspective and should have read: Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. This has now been corrected. The PDF version is correct.

Destigmatization and health: Cultural constructions and the long-term reduction of stigma.

Research on the societal-level causes and consequences of stigma has rarely considered the social conditions that account for destigmatization, the process by which a group's worth and status improve. Destigmatization has important implications for the health of stigmatized groups. Building on a robust line of stigma reduction literature in psychology, we develop a sociological framework for understanding how new cultural constructions that draw equivalences and remove blame shape public and structural stigma over time. We examine historical transformations of cultural constructions surrounding three stigmatized groups in the United States: people living with HIV/AIDS, African Americans, and people labeled as obese. By tracing this process across cases, we find that the conditions that account for destigmatization include the credibility of new constructions, the status and visibility of actors carrying these constructions, the conclusiveness of expert knowledge about stigmatized groups, the interaction between new constructions and existing cultural ideologies, and the perceived linked fate of the stigmatized and dominant groups. We also find that the reduction of structural and public forms of stigma often depend on distinct processes and constructions. To conclude, we propose a framework for the comparative study of destigmatization as an essential component of promoting a culture of health.

Cultural diversity and anti-poverty policy.

This article examines how anti-poverty policy has considered the role of culture and how it ought to do so. While some have explained poverty as a function of the presumed cultural deficiency or distinctiveness of the poor, we suggest that these explanations have not been convincing and that policy requires a broader and more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between culture and behaviour. In fact, we suggest that cultural differences may be positively employed in comprehensive anti-poverty strategies.