MacKenzie A. Christensen

While heterosexual relationships once followed a relatively linear path from courtship to marriage, contemporary relationship pathways have become less standardized and more ambiguous over time. This shift has contributed to the emergence of “situationships,” a liminal relational form in which partners are neither fully committed nor entirely casual. Although situationships have quickly become part of the popular lexicon, there has been little sociological synthesis of this emerging relationship type. This review seeks to explain why, and under what conditions, relationship ambiguity has emerged, with a particular focus on situationships. We argue that situationships reflect broader transformations in the social, cultural, and technological landscape of young adulthood. By tracing intimate relationships from courtship to situationship, we show how situationships emerge as a distinct relational form and consider what this shift means for today's young adults. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research and highlighting important data and methodological opportunities.

This chapter examines the relationship between beauty, dating, and desirability, paying particular attention to the role of sexual capital in structuring the intimate relationships of young adults. We draw on a sexual fields perspective, which elucidates how sexual fields condition sexual interactions, and address the contemporary research on young adult dating. In doing so, we move beyond understandings of beauty, which often emphasize physical appearance, to examine the role of sexual capital and desirability in shaping the dating practices of young adults. We use the case of the hook-up culture—which promotes casual sex over committed relationships—to examine the sexual field of young adult dating. We then present empirical findings from the U.S. Dating and Desirability Study to illustrate how sexual capital—which reflects systems of race, class, and gender—shapes women’s constructions of desirability within the field of the hook-up culture. We show how women who construct desirability in ways that align with the sexual values of the hook-up culture report more positive dating experiences than those who violate the expectations of casualness. We suggest that future research would benefit from greater attention to emerging technologies, the dating life course, and cross-cultural and intersectional perspectives.

Young women now surpass young men in college enrollment. While research suggests that this gender gap emerges during adolescence, less is known about the role of adolescent technology use in shaping which youth go on to pursue higher education. This study draws on two youth-focused supplements to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to follow a cohort of adolescents into young adulthood, examining whether patterns of technology use in 2007 predict college enrollment in 2017. Using latent class analysis, I identify three distinct profiles of adolescent technology use: Connected Communicators, Web Browsers, and Digitally Disconnected. Results from multivariate analyses reveal that the relationship between adolescent technology use and college enrollment varies significantly by gender. Among boys, Connected Communicators were more likely to enroll in college than their peers in other classes. Among girls, however, Connected Communicators were less likely to enroll in college than other girls and boys in the same class. These findings suggest that the educational benefits of digital engagement may be more pronounced for boys than for girls. In the context of ongoing concerns about gender disparities in higher education, this study offers new insight into how adolescent technology use may contribute to gendered pathways to college.

Social stressors proliferate to impair the health of those connected to the person enduring the stressor, but they can simultaneously offer relief from other stressors. Using in-depth interviews with 69 mothers of incarcerated men, we investigate mothers’ descriptions of how the stressor of their adult son’s incarceration impairs their health. First, mothers overwhelmingly describe how the increased instrumental, emotional, and financial responsibilities following their son’s confinement damage their health. Second, despite these increased responsibilities, most mothers simultaneously describe stress relief following their son’s incarceration, which may offset some of their health impairments. Third, these processes are situated in a broader social context, with increased responsibilities most salient when mothers have caregiving relationships with their grandchildren and stress relief most salient when their sons endure cyclical incarceration. These findings, which expand our understanding of the symbiotic harms of incarceration for mothers’ health, highlight the complexity of responses to social stressors.

The expansion of the U.S. carceral system profoundly shapes motherhood for marginalized women, yet little is known about how mothers navigate a child’s incarceration. We use in-depth interviews with mothers of incarcerated men ( n = 69), most of whom identify as Latina, to understand how jail incarceration shapes women’s motherwork practices throughout the duration of their sons’ incarceration. Building on theories of decarceral motherwork, we find that women with incarcerated sons engage in multiple practices—including crisis, collective, and hypervigilant motherwork—similar to those of formerly incarcerated Black mothers. We advance these insights, revealing how motherwork operates among a different population of system-impacted mothers—those with sons incarcerated in jail. First, we highlight the temporal process of motherwork by documenting the specific practices mothers adopt before, during, and after their son’s incarceration. Second, we reveal how this motherwork process engenders substantial parenting role strains. Third, we find that cumulative parenting strains commonly lead mothers to engage in an additional motherwork strategy, distanced motherwork, which we define as the proactive—although often temporary—withdrawal of emotional, financial, and instrumental support to children. Thus, by illuminating patterns of motherwork in the context of a child’s jail incarceration, and by systematically linking motherwork to parenting role strains, we advance an understanding of parenting in the shadow of the criminal legal system.

This study examines how the digital affordances of Tinder shape the (hetero)sexual scripts of young womxn. Findings indicate that while Tinder alleviates the boundaries of an on-campus hookup culture, the app has yet to completely rewrite the sexual and romantic scripts of young adults. Instead, participants describe the development of a hybrid hookup script. This multilevel script reintegrates traditional dating scripts, which are absent in an on-campus hookup culture, while maintaining the expectation of a hookup. Yet, not all participants enacted the hybrid hookup script to the same extent. Facing a lack of same-race matches and compounding racist and sexist interactions, womxn of color were overrepresented among those who opted out altogether. Overall, by situating this study within a broader nexus of scholarship on gendered sexual scripts and technological affordances, results offer a new interpretation of young adult sexuality that accounts for the sociotechnical mechanisms shaping contemporary (hetero)sexual scripts.

Understanding how carbon dioxide emissions (CO₂) can be decoupled from economic growth is an important part of planning for climate change mitigation. A variety of critical environmental theories contend that the oppression of marginalized groups is interconnected with the mistreatment and destruction of nature. As a result, social equity, or the removal of barriers of structural inequality, often coincide with environmental quality and reduced environmental degradation. To date, there is limited research on the dialectical relationship between inequality, economic growth, and the environment. The present study seeks to further understand the relationship between social inequality and the environment by assessing how gender equality decouples economic growth from CO₂ emissions. We construct a fixed-effects panel regression model with robust standard errors that accounts for clustering in 140 nations to assess how gender inequality interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO₂ emissions per capita. Our findings indicate that in nations with more gender equality, the association between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions is much lower than in nations with higher levels of gender inequality.

We explore how the language of “just sustainability” may become subsumed into a sustainability fix strategy, depoliticizing the utility of concepts such as justice and/or equity. Building from critical GIS insights, we combine digitized spatial data from participatory mapping exercises and community-organization-based focus group in Portland, Oregon, regarding a proposed six-mile biking and walking path around downtown. We find that 80 percent of participants’ typical travel destinations are outside of downtown Porltand and that participants experience planning and sustainability in a highly localized manner, challenging the equity rationale of downtown investment. We argue the top-down planning model, which presumes that the spatial diffusion of benefits is equitable, is inherently ahistorical and fails to benefit those in historically marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, we argue for the value of community-oriented research, which, in this case, inspired a coalition of community organizations to formally oppose a city-led project based on the inequitable distribution of infrastructure benefits.