Journal of Sociology
Aims and Scope
Journal of Sociology publishes world leading research across all fields of sociology. As the official journal of The Australian Sociological Association, it showcases vibrant research from the Asia Pacific region and the wider world. Tackling complex social problems and addressing the most current social issues and inequalities, Journal of Sociology is a leading source of cutting-edge sociological ideas and inquiry drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods. The journal also features interdisciplinary and applied research that is firmly anchored in the sociological imagination. The journal is relevant and accessible for both scholars and practitioners engaged in sociology.
Editor in Chief:
Ashley Barnwell and Signe Ravn, The University of Melbourne
Managing Editor:
Amy Vanderharst, The University of Melbourne
Editors:
- Lutfun Nahar Lata (Book Review Editor), The University of Melbourne
- Nicholas Hill, The University of Melbourne
- Megan Sharp, The University of Melbourne
- Max Holleran, The University of Melbourne
- Jens Zinn, The University of Melbourne
- Nikki Moodie, The University of Melbourne
- Belinda Hewitt, The University of Melbourne
- Lyn Craig, The University of Melbourne
- Karen Farquharson, The University of Melbourne
- Dan Woodman, The University of Melbourne
- Garrity Hill, The University of Melbourne
- Nick Pendergrast, The University of Melbourne
- Jack Lam, The University of Melbourne
- Sophie Rudolph, The University of Melbourne
The National Expert Advisory Board can be viewed on the Sage website here.
Sample issues of JoS are available (page under construction). To sign up for contents alerts for JoS please create an account or login here and update your alert settings to include Journal of Sociology. Instructions for signing up to content alerts and including JoS are available here (Pdf 689kb).
The Journal of Sociology was founded in 1965, turning 60 in 2025. Come celebrate with us at the TASA conference at The University of Melbourne!
For further information on this journal, including submitting a manuscript, please go to the Sage website.
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Introducing the New Editorial Team
Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Sociology for 2025! Because the first issue of the year was a Special Issue curated by a team of guest editors, the current issue is the first standard issue published under our editorship and we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce our team and our ambitions for the next four years in a bit more detail. A list of the Editorial team is available here. The team is based at the University of Melbourne, where we will work closely together to edit JoS from 2025-2028.
Taking on the editorship of JoS, we hope to continue the great work of previous teams and further develop the journal. One of our key aims is to embrace our position in the Asia-Pacific and connect with sociological communities and encourage more contributions from scholars in our region. To support this aim we are in the process of renewing the wider Editorial Board to ensure better representation of Asia-Pacific sociologists. Another central aim is to diversify the publication formats offered by JoS to allow for a broader range of academic contributions, such as photo essays, roundtables, and interviews, in addition to the conventional research article. We hope this will stimulate the sociological imagination of readers and help make the journal a vibrant and lively outlet for high-quality sociological work, conversations and debate.
One such new format is Teaching Notes, a section of the journal specifically dedicated to short, peer-reviewed articles on teaching sociology - and teaching sociologically - and our section editors, Garrity Hill and Nick Pendergrast, have written a short Call for Contributions which you will find below this editorial. Finally, this editorial and newsletter are also examples of new initiatives that we hope can contribute to creating a renewed sense of community. While the days of everyone gathering in the staff kitchen on publication day to unwrap the latest issue may be past, the newsletter and editorial, landing in your inbox quarterly, provide a thematic overview of each new issue and help to create the feeling of a reading community.
Soon we will circulate the Call for Proposals for the 2027 Special Issue of the journal, so keep an eye out for that if you have a topic in mind. However, please also note that beyond entire Special Issues we also publish Special Sections as part of standard journal issues, as a ‘mini’ Special Issue. For these we have no set deadlines, but encourage authors to get in touch with proposals as ideas develop. In short, a Special Section consists of 3-5 articles focused around a particular topic as well as a short section introduction.
Our first year as new EiCs and editorial team coincides with a special anniversary for the journal – this year JoS celebrates its 60th birthday. To mark this event, we are planning a birthday section for the last issue of 2025 with a few special pieces lined up. If you have something you wish to contribute, please get in touch with us asap.
As we are working to achieve quicker paper processing times and solicit quality and rigorous peer reviews, you might notice some changes in the day-to-day running of the journal. We have also created new submission guidelines which we hope you will consult. JoS already boasts numerous high-quality articles but of course also competes with highly ranked Sociology journals based outside of Australia. It is our hope that new and dynamic formats, increased visibility and a clear sense of sociological community will help make JoS the number one choice for more and more sociologists. We are excited about taking on this role and look forward to receiving your next paper :)
In this issue
While this issue is a standard issue, we have curated the contents to form two thematic sections. The first focuses on critical analyses of intercultural relations, while the second features papers about contemporary uses of digital platforms. In the first section, the two first articles share a focus on cultural assumptions and cultural barriers at play, demonstrating how these impact professional collaborations and everyday examples of racism, respectively. The other three articles in this section have in common a focus on migrant lives and experiences related to their varying visa statusesThe issue opens with an article by Brosnan and colleagues, who draw on qualitative interviews with Australia-based scientists to explore Australian-Chinese research collaborations. Analysed through a Bourdieusian framework, the authors show how Australian and Chinese researchers pursue different forms of capital in such collaborations, reflecting their differential positions in global knowledge hierarchies. They also demonstrate how cultural barriers at times complicate the otherwise ‘international’ field of science. Next up, Worrall-Carter and Yasseri explore whether the Black Lives Matter social movement paved the way for greater recognition of racism and hence positive support for the Voice to Parliament referendum. While originating in the US in 2020, BLM was digitally mediated across the globe and in Australia it took a particular focus on Indigenous issues. Despite this, this article found that the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians widened during the referendum campaign.
The third article in this issue explores how Afghan Hazara refugees to Australia have settled in Adelaide with a focus on the ordinary and everyday aspects of integration processes. In contrast to narrow conceptions of ‘integration’ that emphasise e.g., economic participation and language proficiency, Radford and colleagues argue for a more holistic approach to the notion of integration. In this article, they zoom in on education, sport and business to explore how these arenas facilitate connecting with and becoming part of local communities, at the same time as strengthening connections with the migrants’ co-ethnic communities. The fourth article takes us back to the China-Australian relations explored in the first article, but this time from the perspective of personal rather than professional relations. Here Stevens explores how Chinese migrants settled permanently in Australia decide which country’s citizenship they prioritise as China does not allow double citizenship. Based on qualitative data, Stevens shows how such dilemmas become strategic decisions, balancing benefits and the accumulation of rights, and importantly, how these decisions are not taken at the level of the individual, but with the family as the central unit in what then becomes split-nationality households. And rounding out this first section, and the focus on migrant status and rights, Tran and colleagues shed light on international students’ pathways to permanent residency in Australia. Based on a large, mixed-methods study, the authors show how this pathway has become more complex with time as shifting governments have sought to control permanent migration. Through the notion of ‘spacetime’ the article explores how participants in the study experienced and sought to navigate the varying requirements for PR eligibility and how work has come to play a central role in the education-migration pathway.
The second section of this issue of JoS features exciting new sociological research on digital platforms and their uses for work and life. Brought together by concerns about how algorithmic, monetised spaces are structuring social divisions and inequalities, the four papers in this section look at diverse social groups, including food-delivery workers, Youtube exorcists, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers using dating apps, and online sex workers. First, Wang and Churchill explore the issue of workplace safety among food-delivery workers who secure work via digital platforms like UberEATS and Deliveroo. To understand the working lives of the delivery riders, particularly those of migrant backgrounds, the authors draw on concepts ‘liminal precarity’ and ‘necrocapitalism’ to analyse qualitative interviews with riders. With this framework they show the risks riders face and the exploitative hours and pay conditions they endure. Wang and Churchill also explore how riders demonstrate agency by mediating risks through strategic use of the platform’s features to resist potentially hazardous conditions. In the next paper, sociologists of religion Possamai and Gower track how the digital world provides a new arena for exorcists to share their messages of morality. The authors track the spread of exorcism into the digital realm, particularly on social media. They offer a case study of YouTube videos uploaded by a well-known evangelical exorcist, Bob Larson, known for his role in the ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s. They argue that moreso than casting out demons, the aim of the exorcists is an evangelical one: to share their ‘re-Christianising’ messages about morality to viewers.
Moving from demons to dating, Yodovich, Heaphy and Iglesias examine the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on people’s experiences of using dating apps. Analysing 53 interviews with dating app users, the authors analyse how the use of ‘I’m vaccinated’ badges created silos of ‘homophily’ and debates on the platforms, as wider politics and social divisions about whether to vaccinate against the virus or not played out on the platforms. App users sought ‘covid compatibility’ with matches, or to share similar views about mask-wearing, vaccination, or rule-following. The authors found this issue to be ‘bracketed’ within the pandemic period, as app users sought to distance themselves from such conflicts and concerns after social life ‘opened up’ again. And finally, Palatchie, Beban and Nicholls look at the rise of online sex work and argue that platform capitalism enacts violence against online sex workers structurally, through algorithmic systems and precarious financial payment options embedded within platform interfaces. To understand the experiences of online sex workers the authors conducted content analysis of sticky forum threads on the AmberCutie forum used by sex workers to discuss issues such as emotional labour, pay precarity, and unsafe conditions. The authors argue that we need further sociological research about online sex work platforms, whose embedded inequalities primarily punish women who are already precariously placed in our society.
The issue also features one book review, written by Newitt and Nelligan, about Global Networks of Indigeneity: Peoples, Sovereignty and Futures by Bronwyn Carlson, Tristan Kennedy, and Madi Day. The reviewers read the book as a scholarly text and a call to action, as well as a celebration of how Indigenous peoples globally have not just survived but resisted and reasserted their sovereignty.
We hope you enjoy the rich and provocative sociological research in this issue of JoS.
Introducing Teaching Notes
Nick Pendergrast and Garrity Hill, Teaching Notes Editors
Teaching Notes is a new special section of The Journal of Sociology for teachers and teaching focused sociology staff. While some sociologists are in research-only positions, the vast majority of us do at least some teaching as part of our job. Conversations reflecting on teaching practice are important but also relevant to nearly all sociologists. In Teaching Notes, we aim to create a dialogue among teachers to share ideas about teaching sociology, and insights and reflections that have come out of classroom experiences and practice.
In Teaching Notes, we invite you to consider the issues that are most pressing in our classrooms now. For example, such discussions are important in light of the decline of the lecture across many universities, with low attendance being common and some universities even removing in-person lectures altogether. We welcome any contributions from sociology teachers on their efforts to “do lectures differently” and the methods they employ to attempt to reverse the trend of declining lecture attendance. Conversations about the future of the lecture also point to the importance of other forms of teaching, and we strongly encourage contributions on how other formats can engage students in their learning.
In Teaching Notes, we also aim to challenge the dichotomy of teaching and research, showcasing examples of teaching as research. One example of this is curriculum design, where teaching staff carry out extensive desk-based research to update their subject materials to reflect current issues and developments in the field.
Lastly, we welcome contributions to the Teaching Notes section that speak to the idea of teaching as sociology in action. For example, what teaching practices and strategies are most effective for teaching the sociological imagination as a way of knowing and a distinctive disciplinary lens? How do we prepare students for applying their sociological imagination to wider public discourse and civic life outside of the classroom? What can sociology contribute to an understanding of teaching pedagogy in higher education more broadly?
Teaching notes have been set up as a space that aims to be more accessible to teaching-focused staff who often have limited time for research. The shorter, 4,000-word length for articles in this section should assist with this. We welcome empirical research, but we also encourage sociologists to share their first-hand teaching insights and reflections, grounded in the relevant teaching and sociology (and teaching sociology) literature. This is a space to inspire others with your ideas, as we all work towards best practice teaching and the best possible education for students. Even though the articles are shorter and do not have to include empirical research, they are still peer-reviewed publications.
We hope that Teaching Notes will be a space for sociology teachers to reflect on what it means to teach sociology, and also what it means to teach sociologically.
Journal of Sociology features high quality sociological scholarship in all its forms. We are dedicated to showcasing theory as well as applied sociology, quantitative and qualitative research. Interdisciplinary pieces are welcome, as are submissions from outside the academy. Based in the Southern Hemisphere and committed to intellectual works from the Asia-Pacific region, including Indigenous scholarship, we also encourage submissions from across the globe.
The full-text of over 90 peer-reviewed Sage journals encompassing over 63,000 articles are available online to TASA members.