The review, led by Danian Singh of the University of Auckland with colleagues Meg Parsons and Karen Fisher, employed an integrative critical narrative review methodology, combining a structured Boolean search of Scopus and Google Scholar with targeted retrieval of grey literature from Pacific regional agencies and national adaptation plans. After screening, the authors identified a core corpus of thirty-four empirical studies of gendered traditional knowledge, most published since 2020 and concentrated in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, which they read alongside twenty-five theoretical, comparative and policy works. The analysis was framed by feminist political ecology and decolonial scholarship, and the authors were explicit about their own positionality as partial insiders and outsiders to the communities whose knowledge they synthesised.

Geographically, the review resists treating the Pacific as an ecological monolith. Its primary evidence comes from the volcanic high islands of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, where larger land areas, richer soils and extensive reef and mangrove systems shape one set of gendered knowledge practices. Against this, the authors set the low-lying atolls of Kiribati as a deliberate analytical counterpoint, where acute groundwater vulnerability and constrained nearshore gleaning grounds produce adaptive practices that differ in kind rather than merely in degree. This comparative design guards against the common error of generalising from Melanesian cases to atoll nations facing fundamentally different ecological constraints.

The first domain of evidence concerns agriculture and food security. Across Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the literature documents a culturally defined division of labour in which men typically undertake land clearing and large-scale cropping while women manage household gardens, seed selection, weeding and the maintenance of crop diversity. In Fiji, women cultivate quick-maturing tuber crops to avert shortages and restore farms after cyclones, and on Totoya Island they combine traditional food-processing knowledge with solar-drying technology to produce cassava and breadfruit flour that substitutes for imported wheat. During cyclone seasons, Fijian women have been documented preserving cassava through traditional drying techniques and drawing on drought-resistant crops such as wild yams and sweet potatoes that remain available when water is scarce.

The Tongan case reveals both the depth of this expertise and its colonial reshaping. Before colonisation, Tongan agroforestry cultivated root crops, trees and shrubs together in mutually sustaining systems of nutrient exchange, pest defence and climate buffering, a system progressively displaced by commercially promoted monocropping. Within the customary arrangement, men cultivated the plants while women transformed them through cooking, medicine and the making of koloa, the valued textiles that secure social relationships, so that food security rested on the interlocking of both genders’ contributions. Development interventions, however, misread these arrangements entirely, promoting an urban horticulture that encouraged women to plant Western vegetables in house plots never organised for food provisioning, on the mistaken assumption that Tongan women gardened on a Western model.

The second domain concerns water and marine resources, where women’s knowledge is perhaps most consequential and most invisible. Women’s knowledge of traditional well locations enables communities to find potable water during droughts, while in coastal Fiji’s Bua Province, women proved more likely than men to identify medicinal uses of mangroves, including seedling preparations used to treat children’s coughs and disinfect wounds. Elder women in the villages of Navunievu and Denimanu articulated mangroves’ coastal protection role in vernacular terms, describing how they hold the soil together, and recalled which species best stabilise eroding shorelines, guiding younger women to plant them in vulnerable areas. Meanwhile, the customary tabu system of temporary closures, including a five-year closure reported to have restored sea cucumber and fish populations, fuses ecological and cultural functions in ways formal marine protected areas rarely achieve.

Gleaning, the collection of shellfish, crabs and seaweed from shallow reefs and mangroves, is predominantly practised by women and functions as a disaster-resilience mechanism. In Kiribati, women use finely tuned techniques passed down through generations, watching for telltale holes, bubbles in the sand and particular tidal patterns, and employing specialised methods such as wai ibo and the nocturnal luring of ghost crabs. Elders emphasise that gleaning becomes crucial after storms, when open-sea fishing is dangerous and marine organisms wash into the shallows. Yet a Solomon Islands study found that women’s exclusion from marine governance led them to breach local management rules, because closures had been sited on their customary fishing grounds without their input, eroding both equity and the legitimacy of conservation itself. Researchers have coined the term womangroves to describe how women’s mangrove-based food knowledge is rendered peripheral within a conservation discourse oriented towards male-dominated fisheries and timber.

The third and fourth domains cover disaster risk awareness and caregiving. Women in rural Fiji read unusual flowering times and shifts in lunar cycles as early signs of droughts, floods or cyclones, complementing men’s knowledge of offshore fishing and infrastructure repair, and sustaining the solesolevaki system of pooled labour that becomes a lifeline during crises. After Tropical Cyclone Winston, women in several Fijian villages were among the first to undertake reconstruction, with rapid recovery attributed partly to collective care and local leadership. In Samoa, fa’afafine performed both men’s and women’s roles in disaster response after the 2009 tsunami, yet binary-organised evacuation facilities excluded some from aid distribution, illustrating how gender-blind planning fails even those who contribute most.

The review’s central argument is that these patterns of exclusion are not incidental but the contemporary expression of colonial restructurings of gender and authority. Colonialism and missionary Christianity displaced arrangements in which Pacific women held authority over land, food production and ritual life, imposing patriarchal norms and undermining matrilineal inheritance. Those legacies persist in governance structures that engage male chiefs and elders as the relevant knowledge holders, systematically omitting women’s expertise in agroecology, water security and medicinal plants. The authors warn that incorporating traditional knowledge without a gender lens risks maladaptation, since locally led governance that is not gender-inclusive may simply relocate the exclusion of women’s knowledge rather than remedy it.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors call for institutionalising women’s genuine decision-making power rather than token representation, adjusting consultation processes to address practical constraints of timing, language and childcare, documenting gendered knowledge through community-led oral history and seasonal calendars under protocols that secure Indigenous ownership, and designing adaptation to empower rather than overburden women, whose unpaid labour already sustains community resilience. Knowledge transmission itself faces compound threats from commercialisation, migration and the erosion of customary leadership, meaning that marginalisation and loss reinforce each other across generations. Centring gender in Pacific climate adaptation, the review concludes, is both an equity imperative and a practical pathway to more effective and just resilience, because a community that consults only half its knowledge holders forfeits half its capacity to survive what is coming.

Subject of Research: Gendered traditional knowledge in Pacific Island climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction

Article Title: Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster management: a critical narrative review

Article References: Singh, D., Parsons, M., & Fisher, K. (2026). Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster management: a critical narrative review. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02676-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02676-x

Keywords: traditional knowledge, Pacific Islands, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, gender, Indigenous knowledge, food security, marine resources, mangroves, colonial legacies, maladaptation, Fiji

The research team, led by Mohammed Aman Ogeto of Haramaya University together with John F. Morton, Laxmi Prasad Pant and Fekadu Beyene Kenee, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what actually determines whether a farmer decides to adopt an adaptation strategy? The study focuses on what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls autonomous adaptation, meaning adjustments made in response to experienced climate impacts without deliberate planning or conscious targeting of climate change as such. In a district where livelihoods depend on mixed crop and livestock farming, where average landholdings are just over half a hectare and average rainfall has been declining for decades, these spontaneous decisions carry enormous weight for household food security.

The context is stark. In 2022, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia endured their worst drought in forty years after five consecutive failed rainy seasons, leaving an estimated 23 million people acutely food insecure across the Horn of Africa and killing 13.4 million livestock. Ethiopia alone accounted for 17.2 million of the 32 million people affected. The World Bank estimates that Ethiopia will need roughly 27.6 billion US dollars in investment for climate change adaptation and mitigation by 2050. Agriculture employs about 65 percent of Ethiopia’s labour force, yet the sector’s share of national output has been slipping, and increasingly erratic rainfall and rising temperatures are compounding pressure on already fragile farming systems.

To capture the situation on the ground, the researchers used multi-stage sampling, purposively selecting East Hararghe for its severe climate variability, randomly choosing Kersa District within the zone, and then randomly sampling 384 farming households using a standard formula for categorical data. Data came from face-to-face interviews with semi-structured questionnaires, two key informant interviews and four focus group discussions separated by age and gender, supplemented by district agricultural records and meteorological data spanning 1992 to 2022. For analysis, the team combined descriptive statistics with a probit econometric model, a nonlinear approach suited to a binary outcome, in this case whether a household decided to adopt autonomous adaptation strategies or not. The model passed goodness-of-fit and heteroskedasticity diagnostics and correctly classified about 77 percent of observations.

The perception results are striking in their consistency. Roughly 90 percent of farmers agreed that rainfall has decreased over the past three decades, nearly 86 percent reported water shortages, 85 percent cited increasingly frequent drought, and 84 percent perceived rising temperatures, findings that closely match the district’s meteorological records. Around 78 percent reported crop failure as a climate impact. By contrast, very few farmers perceived waterlogging, landslides or flooding as serious problems, a pattern the focus groups explained by pointing to the district’s declining rainfall. In other words, farmers’ lived experience of the climate aligns remarkably well with the instrumental record, suggesting that perception in this setting is grounded in observable reality rather than rumour or short-term weather noise.

But perception is not evenly distributed. Male farmers were significantly more likely than female farmers to perceive rising temperatures, changing precipitation, frequent drought and livestock disease outbreaks, and significantly more likely to have access to climate change information in the first place, 88 percent versus 71 percent. The researchers attribute this gap to men’s better access to information channels, particularly radio, which 72 percent of male farmers used compared with just 33 percent of female farmers, and to men’s greater freedom of mobility. Female farmers, however, reported significantly more frequent social interaction within their villages, averaging 21 contacts per year against 15 for men, indicating that women’s social capital is strong even as their access to formal and broadcast information lags.

The information landscape itself is perhaps the study’s most policy-relevant finding. Farmers rely primarily on neighbours, at 70 percent, family members at nearly 69 percent, radio at 60 percent and peer farmers at 52 percent. Only 48 percent receive information from agricultural extension agents and just 36 percent from district experts. This is a striking indictment of the formal extension system, and it means that the people most officially charged with delivering climate services are not the primary conduits through which climate knowledge actually flows. The authors argue that smallholder farmers will not benefit from relying solely on formal sources, and that interventions should blend formal and informal channels rather than trying to replace the social networks that already do the work.

When it comes to action, farmers have assembled a portfolio of eleven autonomous strategies. The most widely adopted are soil and water conservation at nearly 64 percent, crop diversification at 61 percent, crop rotation at 55 percent, tree planting at 47 percent, adjusting planting dates at 45 percent and improved crop varieties at 41 percent. The dominance of soil and water conservation reflects the district’s mountainous terrain and erosion vulnerability, while crop diversification reflects both tiny landholdings and the desire to spread risk. At the other extreme, integrated crop-livestock management, seasonal migration and destocking were adopted by only 22, 19 and 11 percent of farmers respectively, largely because small herds, the absence of grazing land and the higher returns from crop production make livestock-centred strategies unattractive. Significant gender differences emerged in several practices, with male farmers more likely to adjust planting dates, diversify crops, rotate crops, plant trees and destock, differences the authors link to men’s greater access to technology, training and mobility.

The probit model then identified who decides to adapt. Older farmers were less likely to adopt, with each additional year of age reducing the probability by 1.3 percent. A higher share of income from crops, larger livestock holdings excluding oxen, longer crop farming experience and larger total landholdings all increased the likelihood of adoption, with each additional hectare of total land raising adoption probability by 38.2 percent and each additional tropical livestock unit raising it by 4.8 percent. Interestingly, larger cultivated land area reduced adoption probability by 45.6 percent per hectare, consistent with evidence that farmers with smaller cultivated plots invest more intensively in adaptation. Male-headed households were 8.2 percent more likely to adopt than female-headed ones. Perhaps most tellingly, simply having heard about climate change had no significant effect on the decision to adapt, underscoring that experience and resource endowments, not abstract awareness, drive action.

The authors are careful about the limits of their cross-sectional design, noting that the analysis identifies correlations rather than causal effects and covers only autonomous rather than planned or anticipatory adaptation. Still, the policy implications are concrete. They call for improved access to climate information, especially for female farmers, through platforms that integrate formal and informal sources, for stronger and more accessible extension services, and for promotion of drought-tolerant, early-maturing crop varieties and climate-smart practices. They also urge gender- and youth-inclusive approaches, arguing that targeted support for female-headed households is essential if the adaptation gap documented here is to close. As climate variability intensifies across the Horn of Africa, the study suggests that the most effective adaptation policy may begin not with new messages, but with the neighbours, families and radios that farmers already trust.

Subject of Research: Smallholder farmers' perceptions of climate change impacts and their adoption of autonomous adaptation strategies in eastern Ethiopia

Article Title: Farmers’ perceived climate change impacts and their decisions to adopt autonomous adaptation strategies to climate variability in eastern Ethiopia

Article References: Ogeto, M. A., Morton, J. F., Pant, L. P., & Kenee, F. B. (2026). Farmers’ perceived climate change impacts and their decisions to adopt autonomous adaptation strategies to climate variability in eastern Ethiopia. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45471. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45471

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45471

Keywords: climate change, Ethiopia, smallholder farmers, autonomous adaptation, climate variability, gender, agricultural extension, probit model, soil and water conservation, crop diversification, food security, East Hararghe

The research team, led by anthropologist Justin Raycraft of the University of Lethbridge alongside Edwin Maingo Ole of Sokoine University of Agriculture and Franco Peniel Mbise of the University of Dodoma, chose Olasiti deliberately. Few places on Earth pack so many different conservation models into one community’s backyard. The village borders Tarangire National Park, a state-run stronghold famed for its elephants; the Manyara Ranch Conservancy, a multiple-use ranch that permits regulated seasonal grazing; the Burunge Wildlife Management Area, a community-based zone with mixed-use zoning; and the Kwa Kuchinja Wildlife Corridor, a de facto movement route for migrating large mammals that has never been formally demarcated on the ground.

Between 2020 and the surrounding twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, the researchers administered questionnaire surveys to 89 residents and conducted in-depth interviews with 20 more, half of them women, in kiSwahili and Maa. Survey data were analyzed using ordinal logistic regression models that tested whether gender, ethnicity, education, age, farm size, and livestock holdings predicted attitudes toward each conservation area. Interview transcripts were coded through a grounded theory approach to uncover why people felt the way they did. The dual-method design proved essential, because the numbers alone sometimes told a misleading story.

The quantitative results were striking. Across all four conservation models, men held significantly more negative attitudes than women. For Tarangire National Park, which received the warmest survey ratings overall, education mattered: respondents with no formal schooling were significantly less favorable than those with secondary education. For Manyara Ranch, attitudes grew more negative as farm size and livestock holdings increased, suggesting that households most dependent on grazing perceived the ranch as a competitor rather than a partner. Ethnicity predicted attitudes only toward Burunge Wildlife Management Area, where Kisongo Maasai respondents were more supportive than their WaArusha neighbors. Age mattered for the ranch, with younger residents markedly less supportive than elders.

But the interviews revealed what the questionnaires could not. Tarangire National Park drew largely positive survey responses, with 65 percent of respondents expressing favorable views, yet beneath that surface lay a more complicated reality. Many residents, particularly Arusha cultivators who settled the area after the park was gazetted in 1970, had adapted to its presence and appreciated tangible benefits delivered through the park’s Community Conservation Programme: access to a health dispensary, funeral assistance, help dealing with problem animals, and condolence payments. At the same time, the researchers found evidence of what political scientists call public and hidden transcripts. Some residents appeared cautious about criticizing an institution they associated with state authority, and an elderly woman in Eluai sub-village, which shares a boundary with the park, described fines for stepping across the border and firewood collection bans that stood in sharp contrast to the compliant survey answers of her neighbors.

The clearest pattern to emerge from the qualitative data concerned rangeland access. Areas associated with seasonal livestock grazing were received favorably, while areas perceived to threaten tenure security or increase human-wildlife conflict were viewed negatively. Manyara Ranch, despite its political distance from Olasiti, earned appreciation precisely because it opens to herders from surrounding villages in the dry season under a seasonal grazing plan enforced by game scouts. One elderly woman crystallized the contrast bluntly: she liked Manyara Ranch because livestock could graze there, and disliked Tarangire because livestock were not allowed. For pastoralists whose wealth, identity, and food security ride on cattle, goats, and sheep, the opportunity costs of conservation regulations are not abstract policy considerations but daily economic realities.

Attitudes toward the Kwa Kuchinja Wildlife Corridor were the most negative of all, with nearly half of survey respondents expressing dislike and a remarkable 45 percent saying they did not know what the corridor was, despite living inside it. The corridor exists in ecological theory but has never been legally demarcated, partly because formal wildlife corridor designation in Tanzania prohibits all human settlement and land use within its boundaries. Villagers understood this legal implication all too well. They viewed the corridor as a potential gateway to displacement and a threat to the land tenure security guaranteed under the Village Land Act. Compounding the resentment, wildlife dispersing from Tarangire onto village land during the wet season destroys crops and threatens livestock, generating costs for communities while the benefits of safari tourism flow elsewhere. Residents reasoned that conservation areas should be for wildlife and villages should be for people.

Burunge Wildlife Management Area, often held up as a flagship of community-based conservation, inspired ambivalence rather than outright opposition. Nearly half of respondents were neutral and 39 percent knew nothing about it. Interviews exposed a spectrum of feeling tied to grazing: resentment among those who had experienced or heard of confrontations with WMA authorities, including accounts of burned homesteads and beaten herders in earlier years, alongside gratitude from those who received village funds from tourism revenues or maintained seasonal homesteads within the WMA. Notably, 38 percent of survey respondents said they would prefer Olasiti withdraw from WMA membership altogether, a signal of unresolved tensions over benefit distribution that echo earlier scholarship documenting conflicts over revenue sharing in Tanzania’s wildlife management areas.

The gendered dimension of the findings deserves particular attention. The researchers attribute men’s consistently more negative attitudes to the cultural division of labor in Maasai society, in which men typically herd livestock and bear the direct, visible costs of grazing restrictions, fines, and carnivore depredation, while women manage the domestic sphere and may value indirect benefits such as health services and infrastructure. The pattern underscores that conservation policy cannot treat communities as monolithic blocks; the same protected area imposes different costs and confers different benefits depending on gender, age, ethnicity, and household assets.

The study’s policy implications are direct. The authors argue that direct effects on livelihoods are the most policy-actionable levers for building conservation support in this social-political-ecological context, even more than governance reform, important though institutional dynamics remain. They call for stronger community awareness campaigns about under-recognized models like WMAs and corridors, gender-sensitive engagement strategies, expanded benefit-sharing mechanisms, participatory land-use planning that values herding and subsistence cultivation, and deliberate efforts to engage younger residents who showed the least support for nearby ranches. They also caution, methodologically, that questionnaire surveys alone would have produced a partial and at times misrepresentative picture; only by pairing regression models with ethnographic immersion and open-ended interviews did the full texture of community sentiment become visible. As conservation expands across sub-Saharan Africa under global biodiversity targets, the lesson from Olasiti is that wildlife protection will endure only where it secures, rather than undermines, the rangelands, farms, and futures of the people who live beside it.

Subject of Research: Community attitudes toward four conservation models in a Tanzanian village, shaped by livelihood impacts and rangeland access.

Article Title: Livelihood impacts and rangeland access shape community attitudes towards four conservation models in a Tanzanian village

Article References: Livelihood impacts and rangeland access shape community attitudes towards four conservation models in a Tanzanian village. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-026-00093-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-026-00093-z

Keywords: conservation attitudes, Tanzania, rangeland access, pastoralism, wildlife management areas, national parks, wildlife corridors, human-wildlife conflict, livelihoods, community-based conservation, gender, tenure security

The study, published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, examines arrest patterns in Irondequoit, a town of roughly 50,000 people bordering Rochester, New York, and Lake Ontario. Led by Oral Nicholas Robertson of Rochester Institute of Technology and Christopher R. Dennison of the University at Buffalo, the research team drew on detailed arrest records from the Irondequoit Police Department spanning 2018 through 2023, supplied by the Monroe Crime Analysis Center. That window captures two years before the pandemic, two years of lockdown and its immediate aftermath, and two years of recovery, offering an unusually clean before-during-after design for a single community.

Suburbs have long been a blind spot in crime research. Most scholarship on policing and criminal justice concentrates on central cities, where crime rates are higher and data are more readily available. But high-profile cases of police violence in suburban settings—including the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota—have underscored that questions about race and enforcement do not stop at city limits. Irondequoit, whose population is about 75 percent White, 7 percent Black, and 11 percent Hispanic according to U.S. Census estimates, is demographically similar to many American suburbs, making it a revealing case study of how a national crisis rippled through communities that researchers rarely examine.

The numbers tell a striking story. In 2018 and 2019, the town’s total arrest rate hovered around 8.6 arrests per 1,000 residents. It fell to roughly 6 per 1,000 by 2021, consistent with the nationwide suppression of street crime during lockdowns. Then came the reversal. By 2023, the overall arrest rate had tripled from its pandemic low to 20.88 per 1,000 residents—a level more than double the pre-pandemic baseline. The surge was driven overwhelmingly by non-violent offenses, which climbed from approximately 5 arrests per 1,000 people before the pandemic to about 19 per 1,000 by 2023.

Violent-crime arrests followed a different trajectory. During the pandemic years, the researchers observed an almost threefold increase in violent arrests even as non-violent arrests continued to decline, a pattern other scholars have linked to confinement at home, which heightened exposure to domestic-related incidents. Prior work by Jetelina and colleagues on domestic violence during the pandemic, and by Piquero and colleagues in Dallas, documented similar dynamics. After the acute phase of the pandemic, arrests for both violent and non-violent offenses rose in Irondequoit, though the non-violent category accounted for the bulk of the overall rebound.

The demographic breakdown is where the report becomes most unsettling. Before the pandemic, Black residents already had the highest arrest rate in the town, followed by Hispanic and then White residents—a familiar racial hierarchy in enforcement data. All groups saw declines from 2020 to 2021. But during the recovery, the disparities widened dramatically. By 2023, the arrest rate for Black residents reached nearly 104 per 1,000 individuals, an extraordinary figure that dwarfs the townwide average and represents a far steeper increase than any other group experienced. Supplemental analyses cited in the report indicate that the sharpest post-pandemic rise in non-violent arrests occurred among non-Hispanic Black men.

Gender patterns echoed the same asymmetry. Arrest rates for men and women both declined modestly from 2018 through 2021, but men’s arrests surged afterward, reaching about 37 per 1,000 people in 2023 compared with nearly 7 per 1,000 for women. Both groups ended the period at more than three times their 2021 levels, yet the absolute gap between them ballooned, reinforcing long-standing patterns in which system contact concentrates heavily among men.

The researchers interpret these patterns through the lens of social dislocation—the idea that crises produce normlessness, uncertainty, and strain that reshape both offending and enforcement. The pandemic disrupted labor markets, social norms, and daily routines on a scale rarely seen in modern American life, and research by Haug and colleagues showed how movement restrictions generated unintended stress on economies and societies. In such conditions, public fear of crime can intensify even when measured offending falls, and confidence in government’s capacity to maintain order can erode. Drawing on work by Reid and colleagues linking pandemic anxiety to public mistrust, the authors argue that communities under stress may demand more punitive responses to perceived disorder, particularly when that disorder is racially coded. Historic anxieties linking Blackness to criminality, documented by scholars such as Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Michelle Alexander, suggest that racial minorities may face intensified surveillance precisely when collective fear peaks.

The report also raises the possibility that the disparities reflect changes in policing itself. Officers, like residents, experienced heightened fear and uncertainty during the crisis, and may have responded to community anxieties with more discretionary or profilable enforcement, especially for the low-level, non-violent offenses that dominated the post-pandemic surge. Studies by Dunbar and Jones on race and pandemic-era policing, and by Kajeepeta and colleagues on racialized enforcement of COVID mandates in New York City, lend plausibility to that interpretation. The authors stop short of attributing causation, noting that the extent to which COVID magnified this historic injustice remains to be fully explored, but they urge future research to examine why the pandemic amplified the problem so sharply in this population.

Beyond its immediate findings, the study carries a warning about the future. In an era of globalization and climate change, pandemics and large-scale disasters are expected to become more frequent, and each crisis may intensify racialized fear of crime while straining the institutions responsible for a fair response. The authors also point toward the longer horizon: leading criminological theories hold that criminal propensity is rooted in childhood environments, and if the pandemic produced lasting increases in normlessness, strain, and financial insecurity among parents, those stressors may spill over into children’s well-being and, decades hence, into criminal careers. With the United States simultaneously confronting a mental health crisis and a substance use epidemic, the authors caution that the pandemic’s full societal costs may still be decades from being tallied. What a single suburb’s arrest ledger reveals, they suggest, is an early glimpse of how crises can quietly deepen the inequities embedded in the American criminal legal system.

Subject of Research: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on arrest rates by race, ethnicity, gender, and crime type in a suburban community in the United States.

Article Title: Suburban Shifts in Arrest Rates: a Short Report on Trends Before, During, and After the Covid Pandemic

Article References: Robertson, O. N., Dennison, C. R., Adelman, R. M., Kalluri, M., Premanand, Y. S., Singh, A. A., Brass, M., & Ngwu, M. (2026). Suburban Shifts in Arrest Rates: a Short Report on Trends Before, During, and After the Covid Pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09951-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09951-x

Keywords: COVID-19, arrest rates, suburban crime, racial disparities, policing, non-violent crime, violent crime, social dislocation, criminal justice, Irondequoit, gender, Rochester

The study, published as an open-access research article in the International Journal for Equity in Health, was designed around a theoretical framework that has become central to modern health equity research: intersectionality. First articulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality holds that systems of oppression such as racism and sexism do not operate as separate, additive burdens. Instead, they interact, producing forms of disadvantage that are qualitatively unique to people who hold multiple marginalized identities. For the researchers behind the new study, this framework made a specific prediction: Black women in academia should experience mental health outcomes that cannot be fully explained by race alone or gender alone, because they confront both racialized and gendered stressors simultaneously, compounded by the structural inequalities already embedded in academic institutions.

To test that prediction, the team recruited participants from across the Brazilian academic community through an online survey that collected sociodemographic information, including self-reported race and gender, alongside the PHQ-9. The instrument asks respondents how often, over the preceding two weeks, they have experienced symptoms such as depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, sleep disturbances, fatigue, appetite changes, feelings of worthlessness, impaired concentration, psychomotor slowing, and thoughts of self-harm. Each item is scored from zero to three, yielding a total from zero to twenty-seven, with established cut-offs distinguishing mild, moderate, moderately severe, and severe symptom ranges. Scores above the threshold for probable diagnosis signal clinically significant depression and, in population research, are widely used as a proxy for the prevalence of major depressive disorder.

The analytical strategy combined two complementary statistical approaches. An analysis of covariance, or ANCOVA, allowed the researchers to examine the independent and joint effects of gender, race, and their interaction on mean PHQ-9 scores while statistically adjusting for other variables. All three effects proved significant, and critically, the interaction term indicated that the impact of race on depressive symptoms differed by gender, exactly what an intersectional model anticipates. Black women displayed the highest mean scores of any subgroup. Logistic regression, which models the odds of a binary outcome such as exceeding the diagnostic cut-off, sharpened the picture further: Black women were roughly twice as likely as White men to meet criteria for a probable diagnosis of depression. That two-fold elevation in odds is not a subtle statistical artifact; it is the kind of effect size that has immediate public health relevance.

The context of Brazilian higher education makes these numbers especially consequential. Brazil has the largest population of African descent outside Africa, and race remains a powerful axis of social stratification despite the country’s national narrative of racial mixing. Within Brazilian universities, Black students and faculty remain substantially underrepresented, particularly in graduate programs, faculty positions, and the upper tiers of the national research system. The study’s authors note that national data from agencies tracking educational attainment and research funding reveal persistent racial and gender gaps in academic advancement, meaning Black women who do enter academia often navigate environments where they are numerically rare, chronically overextended, and subject to what the literature describes as racialized stress, including both the experience of discrimination and the anticipatory race-related stress of preparing for it.

Why would these structural conditions translate into depressive symptoms? Psychobiological research offers several converging mechanisms. Chronic exposure to discrimination functions as a repeated social stressor, activating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sustaining elevated cortisol levels, a pattern long associated with the onset and persistence of depression. Anticipatory stress, the cognitive and emotional labor of expecting bias before it occurs, imposes an additional allostatic load even in the absence of overt incidents. Meanwhile, the underrepresentation of Black women in academia reduces access to the social support, mentorship, and sense of belonging that buffer against stress. The disproportionate caregiving and service burdens often assigned to women in universities, combined with the isolation of being an often-solo minority within a department, can compound the effect. The result is a cumulative exposure model: more stressors, fewer buffers, and therefore greater vulnerability to mood disorders.

The findings align with broader epidemiological evidence. Major depressive disorder affects approximately 3.8 percent of the global population according to World Health Organization estimates, and prevalence is consistently higher among women and among socially marginalized groups. National health surveys in Brazil have documented elevated depression prevalence among women and among Black and mixed-race populations, and studies from the United Kingdom and the United States report similar racial inequities in mental health outcomes. What the new Brazilian study adds is a demonstration that these inequities persist, and may even be amplified, inside institutions that are formally committed to meritocracy and knowledge production. Academia, in other words, is not a refuge from the mental health consequences of structural inequality; it mirrors and sometimes magnifies them.

The authors are careful to frame their conclusions in terms of vulnerability rather than deficit. The elevated depression scores among Black women do not reflect individual weakness or resilience failure; they reflect systematic exposure to racism and sexism that intersect within academic settings. Underrepresentation, racialized stress, unequal access to research funding and career progression, and everyday experiences of discrimination together constitute what the researchers call structural barriers that exacerbate mental health disparities. This framing matters for policy, because it shifts the intervention target from fixing individuals to reforming institutions. Screening programs, counseling services, and wellness initiatives may help, but they will not close a gap generated by the structure of academic life itself unless that structure changes.

The study does have limitations worth acknowledging. It relied on a cross-sectional online survey, which captures associations at a single point in time rather than causal trajectories, and self-reported race and gender, while standard practice, depend on how respondents identify themselves. The sample, at 3,857 participants, is large and diverse but may not perfectly represent the entire Brazilian academic population, and online recruitment can underreach those facing digital or time barriers. Longitudinal follow-up would be needed to establish whether intersectional disadvantage precedes and predicts depressive symptoms over the course of academic careers, and qualitative work could illuminate the specific lived experiences behind the statistics. Even so, the consistency of the pattern across analytical methods, and its alignment with international evidence, lends considerable weight to the central conclusion.

That conclusion carries an urgent message for universities and funding agencies worldwide. The authors call for targeted mental health policies that address intersectional inequalities in academia, with particular attention to Black women. Such policies, they argue, must confront the institutional roots of distress: recruiting and retaining Black women at every career stage, addressing racial and gender discrimination explicitly, expanding access to culturally competent psychological care, and ensuring that mentorship and research opportunities are not distributed along the same racial and gender lines that produce the disparities in the first place. As depression rates rise globally and universities compete for talent, the evidence suggests that equity is not merely a moral aspiration but a precondition for a mentally healthy academic community. The women who carry the heaviest burden of institutional inequality, this study shows, are also the ones paying the highest price for it in their mental health.

Subject of Research: Intersectional racial and gender disparities in depressive symptoms among Black women in the Brazilian academic community

Article Title: Black women: the intersection of race and gender as a source of mental health vulnerability in academia

Article References: Martins, R. M., Fernandes Junior, O., Lana, R. S. M., Freitas Nudelman, M. D., Alves, S. R., Machado, A. V., Portugal, L. C. L., Antunes David, I., Erthal, F. C. S., Volchan, E., Staniscuaski, F., Costa Ludwig, Z. M. D., Pereira, M. G., & de Oliveira, L. (2026). Black women: the intersection of race and gender as a source of mental health vulnerability in academia. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03021-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03021-8

Keywords: Black women, depression, mental health, academia, intersectionality, race, gender, PHQ-9, health equity, Brazil, racialized stress, underrepresentation

The research, published in the International Journal for Equity in Health, drew on the Brazilian National Health Survey (PNS), a large household survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics that samples adults aged 23 years and older. The team, led by Luciana Alves de Medeiros and Catarina Machado Azeredo of the Federal University of Uberlândia, together with Renata Bertazzi Levy of the University of São Paulo and the Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Salamanca, compared obesity prevalence across two survey waves, 2013 and 2019, using body mass index calculated from self-reported weight and height. Rather than simply comparing averages between groups, the researchers deployed sophisticated measures of health inequality that are increasingly standard in the global health literature: the Slope Index of Inequality (SII) and the Relative Index of Inequality (RII).

These two indices deserve explanation, because they are what allow the study to make claims about gradients rather than mere differences. The Slope Index of Inequality expresses, in percentage points, the absolute difference in obesity prevalence between the most educated and least educated individuals after ranking the population by educational attainment. A positive SII means obesity is more common among the more educated; a negative SII means the opposite. The Relative Index of Inequality expresses the same contrast as a ratio: an RII of 0.5, for instance, indicates that the most educated group has roughly half the obesity prevalence of the least educated, while an RII greater than one signals that obesity increases with education. By computing these measures separately for men and women, and within categories of race and skin color as self-identified in the Brazilian census tradition—White, Black, and Brown (pardo)—the team was able to probe what epidemiologists call intersectionality: the idea that social categories do not act independently but combine to produce unique patterns of health risk.

The headline finding concerns the direction of the educational gradient. In high-income countries, decades of research have established that obesity concentrates among the least educated, reflecting the greater availability of cheap, calorie-dense ultra-processed foods in disadvantaged neighborhoods and the protective effect of health literacy, leisure-time exercise, and access to fresh foods among the better off. As countries undergo what demographers call the nutritional transition, the burden of obesity is expected to migrate down the socioeconomic ladder. Brazil, the new analysis suggests, is following this script—but only for part of its population.

Among women, the expected inverse relationship between education and obesity was clearly visible for White and Brown women in 2019. White women showed a Slope Index of Inequality of −15.0 percentage points, meaning that obesity prevalence fell by fifteen percentage points as one moved from the least to the most educated; Brown women showed a negative SII of −9.7 percentage points. Their relative indices, 0.5 and 0.7 respectively, confirmed that higher education was associated with substantially lower obesity prevalence. But the same pattern was not statistically significant for Black women, a striking silence in the data that the authors interpret as evidence that education confers a weaker protective effect against obesity for this group.

For Brown women, the study also detected change over time. The relative index of inequality shifted from 0.5 in 2013 to 0.7 in 2019, a weakening of the protective gradient that the researchers attribute largely to rising obesity among women with secondary and tertiary education. In other words, the obesity epidemic in Brazil is no longer sparing educated women, particularly Brown women, and the social gradient that once clearly separated them from their less educated peers is flattening. This is consistent with the idea that as ultra-processed foods and sedentary lifestyles saturate an entire society, education loses some of its shielding power.

Among men, the picture is nearly inverted. Obesity in Brazilian men increases, rather than decreases, with education—a pattern frequently observed in early and middle stages of the nutritional transition, when sedentary white-collar work, restaurant meals, and higher disposable income accompany schooling. Crucially, the new study shows that this positive gradient is not uniform across racial groups. In 2019, both absolute and relative educational inequality in obesity were significantly higher for Black and Brown men than in 2013, with Slope Index values of 9.9 and 8.5 percentage points respectively, indicating that obesity prevalence among the more educated Black and Brown men exceeded that of their less educated counterparts by roughly nine to ten percentage points. Among White men, by contrast, no significant educational inequality in obesity was detected at all.

Perhaps the most revealing temporal finding concerns Black men: between 2013 and 2019, the burden of obesity shifted from the less educated to the more educated within this group. That reversal within a single six-year window offers a rare real-time glimpse of the nutritional transition at work, and it suggests that the pace of change can differ sharply across racial categories even within the same national population. For Black men, rising education appears to have become associated with rising obesity risk, a combination that complicates any assumption that socioeconomic advancement automatically translates into better cardiometabolic health.

The authors situate these findings within Brazil’s broader nutritional and epidemiological context. Over recent decades, Brazilian diets have shifted markedly toward ultra-processed foods, a trend documented extensively in national dietary surveys and linked to weight gain, and physical activity patterns have grown more sedentary. In such an environment, the classical inverse relationship between education and obesity among women is beginning to erode, while the positive gradient among men persists or intensifies. Overlaying race on this picture, the study argues, reveals structural disadvantages that would otherwise be invisible: Black and Brown individuals of both sexes fare worse, whether because education buys less protection for Black women or because the obesity risk of upward mobility weighs more heavily on Black and Brown men.

Methodologically, the study has both strengths and limits worth noting. The use of two waves of a nationally representative survey with large sample sizes lends statistical power, and the SII and RII indices are considered gold-standard measures for summarizing socioeconomic gradients in health because they take the full distribution of education into account rather than comparing only extreme categories. The intersectional stratification—crossing sex with race and education—represents a methodological commitment to the idea that health inequities are multiply determined. On the other hand, obesity was classified using self-reported weight and height, which is known to introduce measurement error, typically underestimating BMI; the authors also note that the cross-sectional design of each survey wave, even with two time points, cannot establish causation. Education is a marker of many things—income, occupation, neighborhood, food environments, stress exposure—and the survey data cannot disentangle which of these pathways drives the observed gradients.

The public health implications are considerable. Brazil’s national obesity rates have climbed steadily enough that the health ministry has repeatedly revised its surveillance projections upward, and noncommunicable diseases linked to excess weight now rank among the country’s leading causes of death and disability. If anti-obesity policy continues to be designed around the assumption that risk concentrates among the poor and less educated, it may miss growing segments of the educated population—Brown women with secondary and tertiary education, for instance—while simultaneously failing the Black and Brown men for whom education appears to magnify rather than mitigate risk. Targeted interventions, the authors imply, must be intersectional by design: food labeling and ultra-processed food regulation, areas where Brazil has been a global leader with its front-of-package warning labels, will need to be evaluated for their differential reach across racial and educational groups.

The study was funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and approved by the Brazilian National Research Ethics Committee, with all participants providing written informed consent. As Brazil—and much of the middle-income world—continues its nutritional transition, this research serves as a reminder that averages conceal as much as they reveal. The obesity epidemic, the data insist, does not distribute itself randomly, nor does it follow a single socioeconomic gradient. It follows the fault lines of history, race, and gender, and only analyses sharp enough to see those intersections can guide policies that reach everyone the epidemic touches.

These figures deserve careful reflection because they come from a group of people whose primary reason for visiting the hospital was the management of a chronic physical illness rather than a mental health concern. In many low- and middle-income countries, chronic disease clinics are structured around biomedical monitoring: blood pressure readings, blood glucose measurements, prescription refills, and brief consultations. Psychological suffering in such settings can remain invisible unless clinicians actively ask about it. The pattern observed in this study suggests that distress is not an occasional complication of chronic illness but a common companion to it. When more than two thirds of a sample reports extremely severe anxiety, the finding points to a systemic gap in care rather than an isolated clinical problem.

The study also examined how participants coped with illness-related challenges, drawing on the Africultural Coping Systems Inventory, a measure designed to capture coping strategies rooted in African cultural contexts. This choice of instrument is significant. Much of the coping literature has been developed in Western settings and tends to emphasize individual-oriented strategies such as problem-focused planning or cognitive reframing. The Africultural Coping Systems Inventory instead recognizes approaches that are commonly observed in African communities, including collective coping, in which family members, friends, and community networks share the burden of a problem, and cognitive-emotional debriefing, in which individuals work through their feelings by talking them out with others. Measuring these strategies acknowledges that coping is a culturally embedded behavior, not a universal script.

Gender differences emerged in both distress and coping. Female participants reported significantly higher depression, anxiety, and stress scores than male participants, and the effect sizes fell in the moderate-to-large range, indicating differences that are not merely statistical artifacts but meaningful disparities in lived experience. Male participants, by contrast, reported significantly greater use of collective coping and cognitive-emotional debriefing, although the effect sizes here were small. This asymmetry in magnitude is noteworthy. The gender gap in psychological distress was substantial, while the gender gap in coping strategies, though statistically reliable, was more modest. In other words, women in this sample were carrying considerably more emotional weight, and the coping differences detected did not appear large enough on their own to explain that burden fully.

Several lines of reasoning, supported by broader scientific understanding of chronic disease and mental health, help contextualize these findings. Hypertension and diabetes are both conditions that require sustained self-management, and the demands of that management interact with social and economic circumstances. Women in many households assume caregiving responsibilities not only for themselves but for children, partners, and older relatives, which can compress the time and energy available for managing their own health. Dietary recommendations, medication schedules, and clinic visits may be harder to follow when a person is also responsible for feeding a family or working in informal employment without sick leave. Economic vulnerability can also amplify the stress of a condition that requires regular medication, since interruptions in supply or affordability are common in resource-constrained health systems.

The finding of extremely severe anxiety in a majority of participants also invites attention to the biological and psychological interplay between chronic metabolic or cardiovascular disease and emotional states. Anxiety and stress activate physiological pathways that can affect blood pressure and glycemic control, creating a potential feedback loop in which poor mental health worsens the physical condition, which in turn deepens distress. Depression is similarly consequential: it is associated with reduced medication adherence, poorer dietary self-care, and less engagement with follow-up care, all of which can compromise long-term outcomes in hypertension and diabetes. Recognizing this bidirectional relationship strengthens the argument, made by the study’s authors, that routine mental health screening should be embedded within chronic disease clinics rather than treated as a separate service that patients must seek out on their own.

Screening, however, is only a first step. Identification of distress must be linked to accessible psychosocial support, and the study’s findings about coping strategies offer guidance on what such support should look like. Because men in the sample leaned on collective coping and cognitive-emotional debriefing, interventions that mobilize family and community structures may resonate more effectively than purely individual approaches. Support groups organized through existing chronic disease clinics, peer-led discussion sessions, and involvement of household members in counseling could build on strategies that patients already find natural. Culturally relevant care of this kind respects the social fabric through which many Ghanaians navigate illness, rather than importing models that assume an isolated, self-reliant patient.

The higher distress reported by women suggests that gender-sensitive care must go beyond identical treatment for all. It requires attention to the specific pressures women face, which may include economic dependence, caregiving overload, and, in some contexts, limited autonomy in health decisions. Health workers could be trained to ask about these circumstances during routine visits, and referral pathways to counseling or social services could be established within the hospitals where patients already receive care. Task-shifting approaches, in which nurses or trained lay counselors deliver basic psychological interventions, have been explored in various low-resource settings and may offer a practical route to expanding mental health support without requiring large numbers of specialist psychiatrists or psychologists.

The study’s methodology also merits consideration when interpreting its results. As a cross-sectional investigation, it captured a single moment in time for each participant, which means it can document associations between gender, coping, and distress but cannot establish causal direction. It remains possible, for example, that higher distress shapes how people cope rather than the reverse, or that both are influenced by unmeasured factors such as disease duration, severity, income, or social support quality. The reliance on self-report measures introduces the possibility of response bias, and the recruitment of patients from two public hospitals in one region means the findings may not generalize to people managing chronic conditions in private care, in rural communities distant from hospitals, or in other countries. DASS-21 is a screening tool that categorizes symptom severity but is not itself a diagnostic instrument, so the reported percentages reflect symptom burden rather than clinical diagnoses of depressive or anxiety disorders.

Even with these caveats, the scale of the distress documented is difficult to dismiss. The analytic approach, using descriptive statistics and independent t-tests conducted in Jamovi statistical software, was straightforward and transparent, and the moderation of claims about coping differences through small effect sizes reflects a careful reading of the data. The open access publication of the work, carried in Discover Social Science and Health, makes the evidence available to practitioners, policymakers, and researchers in Ghana and beyond, which is particularly valuable for a topic that has received limited attention in resource-constrained settings.

For clinicians, the most immediate implication is the value of asking. A brief, validated screening question about mood or worry during a routine hypertension or diabetes visit costs little and can uncover suffering that patients may not volunteer. For health system planners, the findings argue for integrating mental health services into chronic disease care, a model sometimes described as collaborative or integrated care, so that psychological support becomes a routine component of managing conditions that patients will live with for decades. For communities and families, the findings highlight the role that collective coping already plays and the potential to strengthen it deliberately.

For researchers, the study opens several avenues. Longitudinal designs could clarify how coping strategies and distress influence each other over the course of chronic illness, and how clinical outcomes such as blood pressure control or glycemic stability relate to mental health over time. Qualitative work could illuminate what severe anxiety feels like for a patient managing diabetes in a context of medication shortages, or how women experience the competing demands of illness and family responsibility. Intervention studies could test whether culturally grounded psychosocial support reduces distress and improves self-management.

Ultimately, the study underscores that chronic medical conditions and mental health are inseparable dimensions of the same human experience. The 457 patients who shared their experiences in two hospitals in Ghana’s Central Region reveal a population carrying a heavy and unevenly distributed psychological burden. Women bear more of the distress; men, on average, draw somewhat more on collective and debriefing strategies. Neither pattern can be addressed by biomedical care alone. A health response that treats the blood pressure reading and the glucose value as the whole story will miss the anxiety, depression, and stress documented here. A response that includes routine screening, gender-sensitive support, and culturally relevant psychosocial care would align chronic disease treatment with the full reality of patients’ lives.

The authors’ conclusion, that mental health screening and gender-sensitive, culturally relevant psychosocial support should be considered within chronic disease clinics, is a practical and evidence-based recommendation. Its implementation would require training, resources, and coordination, but the alternative is a system in which the majority of patients with chronic illness experience extreme anxiety without anyone asking about it. This study provides the local evidence needed to begin changing that.

Subject of Research: Gender differences in coping strategies and mental health outcomes among people living with chronic medical conditions

Article Title: Gender differences in coping strategies and mental health outcomes among people living with chronic medical conditions

Article References: Ninnoni, J. P. K., Commey, I. T., Harmah, E. B., Amoadu, M., & Opoku-Danso, R. (2026). Gender differences in coping strategies and mental health outcomes among people living with chronic medical conditions. Discover Social Science and Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00479-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00479-3

Keywords: Gender, differences, coping, strategies, mental, health, outcomes, people, living, chronic, medical, conditions

Somerville, a professor of English and gender and women’s studies, uses the term “queer genealogy” to describe an analytical method rather than a simple history of LGBTQ+ identity. The approach questions categories that often appear natural or permanent, asking how they were produced through laws, court rulings, administrative decisions and political arguments. By tracing these connections across time, Somerville reveals that citizenship has never been merely a legal status granted to individuals who meet a fixed set of requirements. It has also functioned as a technology of governance: a system for sorting populations, distributing rights, controlling mobility and determining which families and communities could reproduce themselves within the nation.

The first federal naturalization law, adopted in 1790, limited eligibility to “free white persons.” That wording established race as an explicit legal criterion for becoming a U.S. citizen. Although Congress and the courts later created exceptions and modified the rules, the racial requirement remained part of naturalization law until 1952. In practical terms, this meant that citizenship was not initially designed as a universal political identity. It was a restricted category tied to whiteness, freedom from enslavement and the colonial project of building a permanent settler population. Somerville argues that recognizing this history is essential because it demonstrates that race was not an accidental feature of citizenship policy; it was embedded in the legal structure of the republic for most of its existence.

The book also expands the meaning of naturalization beyond the familiar process in which an immigrant applies, completes an examination and takes an oath. Somerville examines “collective naturalization,” through which entire populations were converted into U.S. citizens by congressional action or treaty, often without an individual application or expressed desire to become American. After the Civil War, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 collectively naturalized people born in the United States “of every race and color,” including formerly enslaved people, while excluding many American Indians. The Dawes Act of 1887 later extended citizenship to some American Indians individually, but it linked that status to the dissolution of tribal identities and the transfer of communally held lands into private ownership.

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 eventually granted U.S. citizenship collectively to American Indians, although it did not eliminate conflicts between citizenship and tribal sovereignty. In other cases, residents of U.S. territories acquired citizenship through congressional legislation rather than through the individualized naturalization process applied to immigrants. This distinction is technically significant because individual naturalization typically involves scrutiny: applicants may be examined for their residence, political allegiance, moral character, language ability and other qualifications. Collective naturalization operates differently. It can transform an entire population into citizens without the same level of surveillance, while also imposing political and legal consequences on communities that may have distinct systems of land ownership, identity and governance.

Somerville links these policies to settler colonialism, a form of colonial rule in which the central objective is not only to extract resources but to establish a permanent settler population on Indigenous land. From this perspective, citizenship becomes part of a territorial strategy. It can be used to absorb people into the political system, erase or weaken collective identities, redistribute land and define which forms of community life are legally recognizable. Naturalization therefore affected people who had never immigrated to the United States, including Indigenous peoples, formerly enslaved people and residents of U.S. territories. The legal category of citizenship could expand rights in some circumstances while simultaneously supporting the displacement or assimilation of other populations.

The relationship between citizenship and reproduction is another central theme in Somerville’s analysis. The earliest naturalization law addressed not only the status of a new citizen but also the citizenship of that person’s future children. This connection reflected a broader principle of nation-building: citizenship could be transmitted through families, and the state had an interest in defining which families were considered legitimate. In the twentieth century, these ideas became increasingly entangled with sexuality. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 removed the explicit “white person” requirement from naturalization law, but it added provisions concerning adultery and homosexuality. In 1967, the Supreme Court’s decision in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service upheld the federal government’s authority to exclude homosexual immigrants, illustrating how sexuality could be treated as a question of national eligibility.

The decision helped expose the relationship between immigration control and state-sponsored ideas about family structure. Somerville describes this system as “heterosettler colonialism,” a framework in which heterosexual partnership and biological reproduction were privileged as foundations of national growth. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 made family reunification a central principle of immigration policy, a change often remembered as a move away from earlier racial quotas. Yet Somerville argues that the shift also reinforced the importance of heterosexual, reproductive families as the preferred units through which people entered and expanded the nation. In this system, immigration policy could appear more inclusive while continuing to favor particular racial, sexual and familial arrangements.

To build her argument, Somerville combines legal and cultural evidence. She analyzes statutes, court decisions, legislative debates and federal interpretations of citizenship rules alongside literary works, journalism and archival materials. This interdisciplinary method is important because citizenship is not produced by law alone. Administrative agencies, newspapers, novels and public debates help determine how legal categories are understood and whose claims to belonging appear credible. Her analysis treats naturalization as both a formal procedure and a cultural narrative—one that can celebrate inclusion while concealing the coercive conditions under which citizenship has been extended, withheld or imposed.

The book concludes with American Samoa and recent legal controversies involving birthright citizenship and collective naturalization. People born in American Samoa are generally U.S. nationals rather than automatically U.S. citizens, a distinction that has generated constitutional and political debate. Some American Samoans have resisted collective naturalization because of concerns that citizenship could affect the legal protection of communal Indigenous lands. Their position illustrates the limits of treating citizenship as an uncomplicated benefit: a status that provides access to rights may also alter systems of land tenure, collective identity and local authority. Somerville argues that the history of naturalization remains urgently relevant as immigration enforcement, deportation and denaturalization policies once again place racialized, Indigenous, gendered and sexual minorities at heightened risk. Understanding citizenship as a historically constructed system, rather than a timeless promise of equality, may be necessary for confronting the contradictions between American ideals of freedom and the continuing structures of settler colonialism.

Subject of Research: The history of U.S. naturalization, citizenship, race, sexuality, reproduction, Indigenous identity and settler colonialism.

Article Title: Naturalization: A Queer Genealogy of U.S. Citizenship, Race, and Sexuality

Web References: https://dukeupress.edu/naturalization; https://english.illinois.edu/directory/profile/sbs

References: Siobhan Somerville, Naturalization: A Queer Genealogy of U.S. Citizenship, Race, and Sexuality; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign News Bureau.

Image Credits: Courtesy Siobhan Somerville. Cover artwork by Jenny L. Davis.

Keywords: U.S. citizenship, naturalization, immigration, race, sexuality, Indigenous rights, American Indians, American Samoa, settler colonialism, queer genealogy, reproductive politics, immigration law