Climate change is little studied or taught by Bangladeshi sociologists, even though it poses significant threats to social life in the country. To uncover the level of importance given to climate change issues in sociology departments at Bangladeshi universities, this study analyzes data from six public universities. The data include sociology curricula and interviews with a selected group of teacher-sociologists. This paper unearths several critical factors behind the marginal responses to global warming from mainstream sociology in Bangladesh. First, sociologists seek to separate the discipline from other sciences by focusing solely on ‘social’ structure and social-scientific explanations. Sociology curricula have avoided the global warming agenda because of its allegedly ‘natural scientific’ nature. Second, sociologists are found to have a propensity to suspect teleology in general and to emulate the indifference towards the future found in contemporary society. With myopic vision, sociologists in Bangladesh tend to address immediate social ills while maintaining a safe distance from climate threats, which they view only as a future concern. Furthermore, a lack of expertise among Bangladeshi sociologists impedes the development of climate change courses.

How does educational modality shape the social organization of student life? While the structural consequences of face-to-face versus screen-to-screen instruction have attracted scholarly attention, direct evidence on how this transition reshapes student social networks remains limited. Drawing on complete transcript records and network data from Korea University in 2019 (N=21,607) and 2020 (N=21,572), this paper analyzes co-enrollment networks before and after the shift to online education. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a rare quasi-natural experiment for this investigation. Despite the pandemic disruption, the macro-level architecture of co-enrollment networks proved resilient, preserving small-world properties with comparable levels of connectivity, clustering, and degree assortativity. Beneath this structural stability, however, online learning quietly reorganized the mechanisms of network formation; residential proximity and academic performance emerged as stronger bases of assortative sorting, while disciplinary and cohort boundaries remained largely unchanged. Most strikingly, GPA-based assortativity increased even when self-evaluation-based assortativity declined—suggesting that online learning simultaneously amplifies institutional measures of academic standing while eroding the social salience of students' subjective academic identities as an axis of sorting. These findings reveal a fundamental paradox. Rather than dissolving social boundaries, online education appears to have reinforced stratification along residential and performance lines.

This paper aims to expand the scope of migration research beyond the economic, social, and political perspectives by exploring the role of cultural similarities in migration flows. Drawing data from various sources on language, colonial ties, and values, it uses the gravity model to examine the bilateral migration flows among 45 countries across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas between 2015 and 2020. It reports three findings about the association between cultural similarities and migration flows. First, countries that share a common official language and similar linguistic roots have higher migration flows among them. Second, it finds that colonial links do not have a positive impact on migration flows. Lastly, countries with similar cultural values on several dimensions show higher migration flows among them. It also demonstrates the direction of migration flows in relation to cultural values. These findings provide awaited insights into the importance of cultural factors in global migration patterns.

Over the past few decades, sociology has experienced significant thematic and structural changes due to the rapid advancement of technology, growing social inequality, and changing forms of mobility and governance. The period 2010–2024 offers a significant window, spanning post-2008 economic restructuring, platform capitalism, COVID-19, and shifts in digital data infrastructures. Using bibliometric data and transformer-based topic modeling analysis, this study examines authorship patterns, institutional concentration, and thematic developments in 101,005 sociology articles published between 2010 and 2024. Our findings reveal that the University of Oxford leads in publication output (910 papers), while Ethnic and Racial Studies is the most prolific journal (3,214 papers). Gender distribution among authors is nearly balanced (50.4% female, 49.6% male), though ethnicity analysis shows significant disparities with White, non-Latino researchers comprising 61% of authorship. BERTopic analysis identified ten major research topics, with social theory and financial critique emerging as the dominant theme (9,016 documents). Temporal analysis demonstrates declining prominence of traditional theoretical topics and growing interest in mental sociology and gender studies. By mapping these patterns, the study offers an empirical foundation for understanding how sociology responds to broader societal changes and contributes to debates on equity, disciplinary boundaries, and future research trajectories.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent discursive formations that both shape and are shaped by global geopolitical imaginaries. They (re-)produce hierarchies of power relations, constructing some regions as sites of strategic importance while rendering others peripheral, some as potential threats while others as zones of opportunity. This study investigates how the interaction between ChatGPT-4-generated questions and DeepSeek-R1 responses, mediated by the author, functions as a dialogic space that (re-)constructs broader geopolitical imaginations. It adopts a qualitative approach grounded in discursive geopolitics, historical approach to discourse (HAD), and pragmasemiotic emphasis on textual agency. The primary dataset consists of ChatGPT’s prompted questions about seven geopolitically sensitive topics (CCP media control; Crimea; Uyghurs/Xinjiang; Chinese tech influence; U.S.–China trade; Great Firewall; Liu Xiaobo) and DeepSeek’s responses and its algorithmic behaviours (erasure messages, disclaimers, warnings, and suggested topic shifts). The conversational exchanges between ChatGPT and DeepSeek reveal how LLMs function not merely as data-generation tools but as a geopolitical actor that enacts national identity projects and ideological alignments.

This essay provides an overview of the origins of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave as Korean cultural products spread worldwide, thus elevating the status of South Korea as a whole. We explore the origins of the term and the growth in popularity of the primary components of the Korean Wave: K-pop with groups such as BTS and BLACKPINK, K-dramas such as Squid Games and Crash Landing on You, K-movies such as Parasite and KPop Demon Hunters, and K-beauty products, and how Hallyu has evolved from Hallyu 1.0, or locally-produced in Korea to Hallyu 3.0, or products produced outside of Korea for localized markets. The visibility of these cultural products outside of Korea has far surpassed the success of any other Asian and arguably any country outside of the US. We argue for its importance not only for South Korea’s soft power but also for increasing the visibility of Asians along with the East Asian diaspora. Hence, sociologists ought to incorporate the implications of these changes in their studies of Korea and the East Asian diaspora.

Green criminology, or the study of environmental (“green”) harms, crime, and injustice, has explored a wide range of issues over the past three decades. An important environmental issue that has received little attention is species extinction. To facilitate the discussion about harms against animals from species extinction, this article reviews relevant literature and frames the processes propelling species extinction from a political economic green criminological (PEG-C) perspective. The driving motivation of capitalism—profit making—leads to continually expanding raw material extraction and production that contributes to escalating forms of ecological destruction that drives species extinction. The contemporary extinction cycle is called the 6th wave of extinction. Researchers in the hard sciences note that this 6th extinction is being caused by human behavior, making it distinct from the five previous extinction periods. They also note that there is little hope that this extinction period can be easily remedied. Significant alterations in environmental policy and human behavior are required to save species from extinction.