Highlights • Wearable monitors enable high temporal resolution analysis of personal exposure • Microenvironments were identified by GIS-based spatial clustering of measurements • Most vulnerable community had highest observed personal-ambient ratios in the home • High variability in personal PM2.5 despite low variability in ambient PM2.

This article examines the contemporary rise of China and its new role on the global stage within the context of semiperipheral mobility. Unlike earlier discourse on the rise of China that revolved around questions of hegemonic ascent, the focus here is on the impact of China's advancement within the structural confines of the modern capitalist worldeconomy. What happens when a country like China, which makes up close to 20% of the world's population, moves from peripheral state to semiperipheral state in a short period of time? Immanuel Wallerstein had argued that stratification of the world-economy took the shape of a three-layered structure with majority of the world's population at the bottom, a decidedly smaller middle stratum, and a small percentage at the top of the hierarchy. Through an examination of global economic stratification from 1990 through 2015, China's movement into the semiperiphery is shown to dramatically change the shape of this three-layered structure. This change that sometimes causes the distribution to appear quad-modal or multimodal is primarily because of the movement of more of the world's population into the middle stratum of world-economy. This massive movement toward the middle is unprecedented. Furthermore, this new shape of the stratified world economy, will create an increasing amount of pressure on the countries in the middle that may translate into open military aggression and/or at the same time, a rise in regional and multilateral organizations such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas.

Commodified citizenship-pay x number of dollars and you can have all the rights of citizenship without any of the traditional duties and obligations-has been on the rise in developing countries since the early 1990s. This article is a case study of such a program on the island nation of Dominica. Ostensibly established as a means to aid the country in its efforts to move away from a monoagricultural economy, this article demonstrates that in reality, the government has become fully dependent on the commodified citizenship program, which has become its primary source of quick liquid revenue. Furthermore, we argue that the program can be an excellent tool for the transnational capitalist class which needs to work around political restrictions on their cross-border movements. With a growing effort to impede movement across countries and re-entrenchment of national border across the world, efforts to penetrate national border boundaries and established systems of exclusions through the visa processes have prompted creative and alternative routes for cross-border mobility. The contention here is that commodified citizenship is just one such creative alternative route and is especially ingenious as it is fully legal and uses the very institutions that seek to hinder mobility.

This study elucidates PM2.5 exposure disparities in a socioeconomically diverse air basin that is heavily burdened by air pollution. A novel spatial clustering approach is applied to classify the microenvironments of more than 900,000 high temporal resolution personal exposure data points. Results from the study indicate that participants from the lowest socioeconomic status community experienced overall higher personal exposures over consecutive 24-hr monitoring periods, despite high participant mobility and low variability in ambient PM2.5 during the study. Our inclusive monitoring protocol minimizes participant fatigue and is well-suited for real-time, long-term characterization of PM2.5 exposure disparities in underserved communities.

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