letter from the editors: summer 2025
Greetings from the True North, where we continue to keep our elbows up in these challenging times. It is bittersweet to be writing this penultimate editor’s letter, but we have enjoyed and felt honored to navigate Contexts for the last two and a half years. On that note, we are excited about our summer issue which, with any luck, will bring a little more sunshine into the start of a new school year.
This issue is special. For starters, it balances much-needed positivity in sociology, as in an essay on love as activist ideology and praxis, with a more traditional focus on social problems, like the ongoing erasure of minoritized communities. Erasure as a theme recurs, from an emphasis on indigeneity in both feature and culture essays to the Trump Administration’s efforts to “erase” genders and gender ideologies incompatible with its worldview, as covered in a trends piece. This edition also continues our year of special sections, this time by featuring three Canadian scholars putting the strained relationship between Canada and the United States into perspective. In the background of all these pieces are important questions about who decides what is “racist” or “sexist,” the central focus of another of our feature articles.
Other insightful pieces include our ongoing conversations with past Contexts editors, this issue with Syed Ali, Philip N. Cohen, Jodi O’Brien, and Arlene Stein, and a pair of articles on poverty: how do we measure it, and where do we generally find it? An essay piece builds on the classic idea of a so-called Second Shift—or the extra work that working mothers do when they come home from paid work—by considering all the labor that goes into making a memorable holiday, thus raising the provocative possibility of a Third Shift. And, writing for the In Briefs section, our graduate students curate the latest social science across a spectrum of journals and national contexts.
An array of interesting conversations animate the rest of this adventurous issue, too. From a feature exploring how plants are both social objects and social actors to one that brings the reader into a rare, exclusive environment for wildlife interaction, our authors are turning their sociological lenses on some surprising places. In the culture section, that roaming brings us to the gun range, where one writer embraces the pleasures of shooting. A photo essay brings us along on the “Island Hopper,” tracing the contours of empire through the aviation infrastructure of the “American” Pacific.
Sociology is often imagined as a downer discipline, focusing too frequently on social problems, but we are pleased to present an array of articles in this issue that respond to an emerging intellectual movement to elevate joy, happiness, community, and love as phenomena of genuine social scientific interest. To shine a light on such issues is something we have strived to do, intentionally and with courage, over the course of our editorial term.
As the days grow shorter, we hope these pages spread some light and cheer,
Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia, and Amin Ghaziani, University of California-Santa Barbara
