Recently, a research team from the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the School of Journalism and Communication at Nanjing University published a research paper entitled "The Selectiveness of Inclusiveness: Exploring the Influence of Traditional Religious Visage on Contemporary Cultural Tastes" in Social Forces, a leading sociology journal. The first author is Ma Wen, a junior scholar from the School of Journalism and Communication; the second author is Li Ying, a junior scholar in management at University College London (UCL); and Professor Chen Yunsong from the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences is the corresponding author.
This study breaks away from previous analytical approaches centred on individual religious beliefs. It innovatively introduces the concept of the "religious visage" of geographical spaces and a method of cultural entropy analysis, examining the cultural impact of religion from a macro-environmental perspective and proposing mechanisms and interpretations that differ from those of Western social theory. Employing rigorous big data analysis and machine learning techniques, the study has established a new paradigm for research into the Chinese cultural tradition on leading international academic platforms. Furthermore, from the perspective of cultural confidence, it has provided the academic community with compelling empirical evidence and discursive power regarding the evolution of Chinese civilization.
Social Forces was founded in 1922 and is published jointly by Oxford University Press and the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The journal is aimed at readers in the social sciences, focusing on cutting-edge sociological research and paying particular attention to interdisciplinary areas where sociology intersects with psychology, anthropology, political science, history, economics and other disciplines. Owing to its outstanding reputation among leading comprehensive sociology journals, the academic community typically ranks it alongside the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review, regarding it as one of the three most authoritative and representative journals in the international field of sociology.
