Weekly Roundup
Jul 20 - 26, 2026
LEADING ARTICLE
Skeptic
(Note: A data brief published at The Nuzzo Letter is referenced in this leading article.)
WEEKLY VOICE
THE NUZZO LETTER IN THE NEWS
Feminists Amass Billions as They Spread Falsehoods About Medical Research
Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE)
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Sex/Gender
How Could an ‘Office of Men’s Health’ Actually Affect You?
Men’s Health
A bill to set up an Office of Men’s Health within the HHS was just introduced in the Senate. We asked the senator introducing it to explain it to us.
Virginia’s new Boys and Men Commission gets to work
Virginia Coalition for Boys and Men
The nation’s first permanent state commission devoted to boys and men held its inaugural meeting—and the data made clear why it is needed.
Title IX Is Holding Back US Men’s Soccer
Compact Magazine
Pauline Hanson: Domestic Violence is a Two-Way Street
Domestic Violence Awareness Australia
Pauline Hanson said domestic violence is a two-way street. PASK research on bidirectional intimate partner violence shows she has a point—here is the evidence.
Fathers and Divorce: The Grief No One Sees
Men Are Good
Why One Divorce Can Feel Like Twelve Different Losses.
The Feminization of the Icelandic State
The European Conservative
Oregon Is Pumping Children Full of Hormones
Wall Street Journal
The state pushes teens toward ‘transgender-related diagnoses’ and dangerous treatments.
Yale scholar says patriarchy creates ‘rigid,’ ‘mythological’ categories of ‘Man, Woman’
The College Fix
Psychology of Men & Masculinities
Abstract: This study examined barriers to help-seeking among male victims of intimate partner violence perpetrated by female partners, comparing differences across non-Latino Black, Latino, and non-Latino White men in the United States. Using a sample of 1,194 men recruited through the online panel Centiment, this study assessed the prevalence of specific barriers to help-seeking and examined differences across racial/ethnic groups. Data were collected through a structured survey with an additional open-ended item to capture barriers not reflected in the checklist. Results indicated that men across all racial/ethnic groups reported similar core barriers to help-seeking, including viewing intimate partner violence as a private matter, fear of retaliation, shame, and concerns about not being believed; however, the pattern of barrier endorsement varied by group. Latino men were significantly more likely than both Black and White men to report difficulty knowing how to disclose their experiences and were more likely than White men to report language- and immigration-related barriers. In contrast, Black men were less likely than Latino and White men to report concerns about bias or disbelief, a pattern that warrants cautious interpretation given broader historical and structural contexts. White men, meanwhile, were more likely than Latino men to report difficulty recognizing or labeling their experiences as abuse. Together, these findings highlight the need for culturally responsive, gender-inclusive interventions that address stigma, structural barriers, and institutional biases shaping men’s help-seeking and service engagement following intimate partner violence victimization.
Health Sciences
Leading Mechanisms of Unintentional Injury Death Among Youth Ages 10–19 Years: United States, 2024
NCHS Data Brief
Key findings: The unintentional injury death rate among youth ages 10–19 years in 2024 was 11.6 deaths per 100,000 population. The motor vehicle traffic death rate for youth ages 15–19 years (12.0) was 6 times the rate for youth ages 10–14 (2.0). The unintentional injury death rate among male youth (16.3) was higher than among female youth (6.7), with similar differences observed in motor vehicle traffic, poisoning, and drowning death rates. American Indian and Alaska Native non-Hispanic youth had the highest rates of unintentional injury, motor vehicle traffic, and poisoning death compared with other race and Hispanic-origin groups. Death rates among youth were highest in the South for all unintentional injuries (13.8), motor vehicle traffic (8.5), and poisoning (2.6).
Education
The White House
Confidence in U.S. Institutions Remains Near All-Time Low
Gallup
Faith in higher ed slips: 38% of adults report high confidence
Higher Ed Dive
California medical schools ditch required social justice courses ‘filled with propaganda’
The College Fix
OTHER
The government part pays the journalists at Nine, Seven, Crikey and 181 other newsrooms
One News Australia
184 newsrooms now draw taxpayer wage subsidies with strings attached to 2028, and none has to tell its readers a thing.
(My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
RUBBISH BIN
Tokyo urges men to wear shorts to work, but some women say it’s ‘leg hair harassment’
BBC News
European Journal of Women Studies
Abstract: Bringing together scholars from Canada and the United States, the Gender Studies Now panel asked us to think about a range of pressing issues affecting the gender academy. What made the questions especially compelling was that they opened onto a comparative conversation about forms of threat that do not always look the same. In some places, Gender Studies is being targeted through open hostility and direct political attack. In others, the pressure arrives less dramatically, through enrolment targets, austerity language, restructuring, and suspended admissions. At Nipissing, that less dramatic approach has nonetheless had a dramatic outcome: the closure of the Gender Equality and Social Justice degree and the enfolding of only some of its curriculum into Sociology. While this paper reflects on the strategies that brought GESJ to this point, it more crucially considers what is lost - by faculty, students, institutions, and societies - when WGS curricula and research are de-specified and WGS departments are effectively disappeared from spaces of higher education.
(My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
Journal of Gender Studies
Abstract: This article analyses the nexus between the transformation of the gender order and the far right, examining accounts of working-class mothers employed in Austrian factories. Drawing on 27 qualitative interviews, I argue that the appeal of far-right mobilizations to women in precarious class positions is shaped by three intersecting themes: nostalgia, antifeminism, and welfare chauvinism. The interviewees articulate a longing for the male breadwinner model and a critique of feminism as elitist, excessive, or irrelevant to ‘ordinary’ mothers. These narratives often intertwine with welfare chauvinism, as interviewees reinterpret insecurity through exclusionary claims about social resources. These narratives can be read as expressions of a retronormative desire for the restoration of gendered norms and securities that are imagined to have been eroded by neoliberal restructuring and feminist gains. Building on insights from feminist scholarship and theories of authoritarian populism, the article situates these accounts within broader debates about anti-feminist politics as a bridging ideology. I argue that retronormativity functions as both a lived response to the contradictions of precarious reproductive and productive labour and as a discursive hinge through which far-right actors mobilize women. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for developing counter-strategies to the contemporary far-right.
European Journal of Social Psychology
Abstract: Despite the fact that women face socially and politically sanctioned disadvantages every day, a large percentage of women and men report that gender discrimination is no longer a problem. Across three studies, which together include over 20,000 participants from 23 countries, we test the hypothesis that denial (vs. acknowledgement) of gender discrimination is associated with higher subjective well-being among women (Studies 1–3), and this is because denying gender discrimination promotes the view that the system is fair (Study 1). We further show that this happens above and beyond personal experiences with sexism (Study 1) and that the association is stronger in countries where sexism is relatively high (vs. low; Study 3). We argue that denial of discrimination is an individual-level coping mechanism and that, like other self-group distancing strategies, it may perpetuate gender inequality.
(My brief comment on this article is available on X here.)
Equity in Education
Abstract: This study examines the experiences and understandings of elementary and secondary teachers in the United States amid heightened political and social scrutiny surrounding Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education. Using the Salem Witch Trials as an analytic heuristic, the study explores how contemporary accusations of “indoctrination” and “divisiveness” function to produce moral panic, professional surveillance, and risk for educators committed to addressing race and racism. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 35 practicing teachers conducted between 2022 and 2024, we identify three key themes: (1) the absence of formal CRT education in teacher preparation programs, resulting in fragmented and uneven understandings of CRT; (2) the ways teachers’ positionalities shape their pedagogical approaches and perceived responsibilities to address race and racism; and (3) the impact of “divisive concepts” legislation on teachers’ sense of safety, surveillance, and resistance. Despite these systemic pressures, many educators employed creative strategies to navigate policy constraints while sustaining critical classroom discussions. Taken together, the findings illustrate how the current backlash against CRT operates as a moral panic with significant implications for educational equity, academic freedom, and teacher agency in U.S. elementary and secondary schools.
Behind the bushes: queer sexual encounters in the liminal cruising spaces of Geneva
Gender, Place & Culture
Abstract: This article examines cruising parks and toilets in Geneva, Switzerland, conceptualizing these sites as double liminal spaces whose sexual potentials are often accessed through moments of spatial and sexual disorientation. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows that public cruising continues to shape how sexual encounters are experienced and negotiated within urban environments. Bringing scholarship on queer space and cruising into dialogue with literature on liminality, I argue that cruising sites function as layered liminal formations. They blur the public–private divide by enabling sexual practices conventionally associated with private space to occur in public, and they unsettle the heterosexual–homosexual binary by facilitating same-sex encounters that do not require stable identity claims. Building on this spatial analysis, the article advances a further argument: access to these liminal formations often depends on processes of disorientation. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on disorientation (2006), I show how drifting, lingering, and moments of spatial deviation allow familiar public spaces to become sexually legible, producing spontaneous encounters that emerge through affective and material relations rather than intentional pursuit. At the same time, the article examines how racialized imaginaries, respectability politics, and moral regulation shape who can comfortably inhabit liminality and disorientation, and who is rendered out of place, complicating celebratory accounts of queer space.
Current Opinion in Psychology
Abstract: Museum decolonization has become a central concern in contemporary museology, raising questions that extend beyond curatorial reform to the construction of collective memory, the psychological elaboration of the colonial past, and the configuration of postcolonial identities. This review synthesizes recent literature on the decolonial turn in museums from a psychological perspective, addressing institutional critique, participatory practices, historical trauma, epistemic justice, and the affective dimensions of collective memory. It also identifies key risks-tokenism, aestheticization of difference, and “decolonization without decolonization”-and outlines a research agenda focused on the psychological effects of decolonial museum narratives, the relational nature of participation, symbolic reparation, and the comparative analysis of decolonization processes across sociopolitical contexts.
Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology
Abstract: This commentary advances a reframing of science as a dialectical process that moves from local lifeworld to provisional universals and back to locally situated renewal. We term this movement Indigenized Science. Building on two decades of cultural praxis work, we propose that universalization has broadened inclusion yet often stalls before reembedding knowledge into the geographic, linguistic, and sociopolitical contexts where athletes live and practitioners work with coaches, teammates, staff, and administrative leadership. Herein, we (a) synthesize how cultural sport psychology has progressed from early calls for awareness to contextualized inquiry, (b) identify limits of prevailing Anglophone methodological canons when transported across geographic settings, and (c) propose a culturally relevant and safe actionable framework for indigenizing research and practice. We offer an actionable framework specifying six intervention points: literature (multilingual and cross-regional canons), philosophies of science (context-congruent epistemologies), development of cooperation (international cooperation), situating of authors/participants/contexts (explicit “place” and positionality), modes of inquiry (community-compatible designs and elicitation), and analytic strategies (coanalysis and coauthorship to preserve local meaning). We exemplify how these choices cohere to enhance ecological validity, ethical reciprocity, and knowledge translation across diverse systems. This contribution reveals a methodological and ethical orientation, but it is not a replacement for scientific generalization. Rather, it is a disciplined return to contexts renewing and reinforcing science. We conclude with implications for scientist-practitioner training, positioning indigenization as a rigor-enhancing route to globally relevant, locally resonant sport psychology.
The global configurations of Whiteness
Identities
Abstract: This article makes a case for the need to analyse the production, reproduction and reconfiguration of Whiteness not just in the Global North but also the Global South, due to connected histories, geographies and sociologies. Additionally, we articulate the need to do so from an intersectional approach and consider methodological aspects of, and epistemological impediments to, studying Whiteness. Contemporary developments show that Whiteness is transforming and emboldening its power and influence through mobilizing in novel ways, through appeals to new geographies and peoples and by diversifying its constituents. Understanding the changing and newer configurations of global Whiteness is essential, as these dynamics also sustain and intensify the resistance Whiteness mounts when its supremacy is questioned.
Data justice and data solidarity
Patterns
Abstract: Datafication shapes and gradually transforms societies. Given this impact, issues of justice around data-driven practices have received more and more attention in recent years as shown, for example, by various reports and guidelines on artificial intelligence and data ethics. In this article, we elaborate on and defend two claims. First, these discourses on justice tend to center primarily around conceptions of fairness. We argue that justice in connection with datafication relates to, but ultimately encompasses more than, solely fairness. Second, although it is an important project to clarify what justice in connection with datafication encompasses, we argue that attention toward attitudes and practices of data solidarity have so far been largely overlooked. They are, however, indispensable as a catalytic element to advance toward data justice in practice.
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Great stuff yet again Jim! Wow, I was surprised to see the DV article with Hines be published in the Journal for Men and Masculinities! That may be the first time I have ever agreed with an article in that journal! LoL Thanks too for the mention!
I never would have known there is so much interesting material out there right now without you collating all of it. Thank you James.