Public Sociologist Research Articles

Understanding Iraqi society: Reading Ali Al‐Wardi (1913–1995)

AbstractThe present article addresses Al‐Wardi's efforts to study Iraqi society and the foundations he set out to understand Arab society. Al‐Wardi is one of the pioneers of secular intellectuals in Iraq and one of the greatest social thinkers in the Arab world. Al‐Wardi's sociology is a kind of non‐Marxist conflict sociology whose roots can be found in the works of Ibn Khaldun. By reacting to the main issues of his society and conducting research and writing books about them, as a public sociologist, Al‐Wardi provoked many debates and controversies among people and intellectuals. He shows how the foundations of Bedouin culture continue and take on new forms in the modern urban and rural society of Iraq. He considers Bedouin culture to be the foundation of Arab culture. Political repression and censorship in the Baathist regime of Iraq prevented Al‐Wardi from continuing teaching and research and unable to establish a school of thought in Iraq. This issue is considered in the present article under the title of Tragedy of Discontinuity in Middle East sociology. Al‐Wardi's ultimate goal was to develop sociology at the national level and help create an Arab Sociology, which seems to have remained an idea and its future and feasibility cannot be judged.

Uncommon Sense: Home, with Michaela Benson [Audio podcast episode

Public sociologist Michaela Benson on why home matters – from self-build communities in the UK, to young people’s struggle to live in the places they love. Plus: Three novels to make you think differently about security and belonging.

Kathy Charmaz: Theory, Method, and Scholarly Identity

Kathy Charmaz is arguably the most important member of the second generation of grounded theorists. In this paper we present our analysis of her research and published works in reference to the historical and biographic contexts that shaped them. Our analysis is framed by the sexpartite scholarly identity Charmaz developed over the course of the 55 years of her academic career, including: medical sociologist, symbolic interactionist, qualitative researcher, grounded theorist, public sociologist, and interpreter of the Chicago School Diaspora. We examine the significant theoretical, methodological, and substantive contributions she has made, such as her work on the implications of silences in qualitative interviewing, the necessity of contextualizing research, the gendered nature of living with chronic illness and disability, and most notably, the features of her own constructivist grounded theory. In doing so, we address tensions in her understanding of obdurate reality and theoretic saturation, as well as the perils of the unintended consequences of championing reflexivity. We conclude by conceptualizing how Charmaz's scholarly activities serve as a means by which Chicago School traditions are passed on to subsequent generations of symbolic interactionists and grounded theory researchers.

Academics Know Better (?): Scholars and Politics in Major Opinion Dailies During the 2015 Presidential Campaign in Poland

What is the role of scholars when discussing activities of politicians during an election campaign? The article offers a study of articles and interviews conducted with academics in major opinion dailies Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna in the final weeks of the 2015 presidential campaign in Poland. Pielke’s categories of scientists – Honest Brokers of Policy Alternatives, Pure Scientists, Science Arbiters and Stealth Issue Advocates – are used as a point of departure to ask about the part played by scholars in media, to ‘enlighten’ and admonish readers they deem uninformed about what is good for them, or to serve a role closer to Burawoy’s Public Sociologist, who engages in dialogue with others. I conclude that given the election results, which surprised and disappointed most of these scholars, adopting the latter stance may prove a better strategy in convincing voters about the usefulness of scholarly expertise in their political choices.

Doing politics by other means: Abdelmalek Sayad and the political sociology of a collective intellectual

This article proposes a new understanding of the constraints and opportunities that lead intellectuals engaged in different political and social fields to create alternative modes of resistance to domination. The study of the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad offers insights into the social conditions of this mode of committed scholarship. On the one hand, this article applies Sayad’s theory of immigration to his transnational intellectual engagements. It establishes how immigrants’ intellectual work are conditioned by their trajectories, both before and after leaving their country, and by the stages of emigration (from playing a role in the society of origin to becoming caught up in the reality of the host society). On the other hand, the article illuminates the constraints and the spaces of possible action intellectuals face while moving across national universes and disparate political and academic fields. Sayad’s marginal position within the academy constrained him to work for the French and Algerian governments and international organizations while he was simultaneously engaged with political dissidents, unionists, writers, and social movements. In tracking Sayad’s roles as an academic, expert and public sociologist, the article uncovers the conditions that grounded improbable alliances between those fields and produced new forms of critique and political action. The article concludes by drawing out some reflections that ‘collective intellectual’ engagements elicit to the sociology of intellectuals.

Joven, Extranjera, y Deprimida en América: Ruminations of an Immigrant to Prozac Nation

In the spirit of disciplinary disobedience, this autoethnography aims to challenge sociological analyses on the subjective experience of mental health and most plots found in psychiatric memoirs written by U.S. (White) women. Guided by insights from intersectionality theory, Chicanx/Latinx, Black, and Women of Color (WOC) scholarship, this text (re)conceptualizes depression as an embodied social critique, affective logic, and emotional reaction to the sense of uncertainty defined by one’s social location and forced acts of survival along shifting borderlands. This piece also outlines two intersectional knowledge projects that have emerged from this disruption: one is a series of collaborations with other WOC in the creation of affective maps to understand the role of larger societal forces in triggering states of emotional distress and other health conditions, and the other is my work as a public sociologist using my research on Latinas in therapy to educate and work alongside Anglo mental health clinicians.

The Public Sociologist as a University-Community Hybrid: Lessons from Feminism

Feminism is well versed in conversations about engaged scholarship and has provided important critical commentary on Michael Burawoy’s campaign for public sociology in recent years. This paper draws from feminist perspectives to argue for reflexivity, praxis, and interdisciplinary work as key pillars for public sociology. I then draw from my own experiences doing feminist work in community-engaged settings to consider various limitations of Burawoy’s notions of traditional and organic public sociology. To move past this dichotomy, I put forward a conceptual model for understanding public sociologists as public intellectuals, community-engaged scholars, community educators, and/or advocates and activists. In considering how researchers might navigate these various roles, I argue that discussions of expertise and universities as value-laden institutions are important to build sustainable practices. Overall, the strength of public sociology is that it acknowledges these blurred boundaries and allows for the development of collaborative forms of expertise to address social problems. However, there is additional theoretical work to be done, as well as practical supports developed, to enable feminist researchers in particular to successfully navigate these roles.

In Pursuit of Real Utopias: Kerry Preibisch as an Organic Public Sociologist.

In Pursuit of Real Utopias: Kerry Preibisch as an Organic Public Sociologist.

Pierre Bourdieu: Un auto-análisis no biográfico

ResumenEn el artí­culo se recorre la trayectoria social de Pierre Bourdieu, intentando cruzar posición, contexto y obra. Se aborda su estancia en Argelia, su regreso a Francia y el campo intelectual de los años 60; sus iniciativas académicas e implicanciones polí­ticas en las décadas posteriores y, finalmente, su visión del mundo a finales de siglo, con las respectivas tomas de posición e intervenciones del sociólogo. El documento toma como base el Esbozo de un autoanálisis, que fue el libro póstumo de Bourdieu, e intenta, como lo sugiere el propio autor, no construir una biografí­a sino, más bien, situar una trayectoria en distintos momentos del campo académico y polí­tico que le tocó vivir.

K. D. Har: A Public Sociologist in (Post) Colonial Korea

K. D. Har: A Public Sociologist in (Post) Colonial Korea

Reflections of an Irish Pracademic: Mixing Public Advocacy, Teaching and Research?

This article reflects on the challenges of mixing public advocacy, teaching, and research in Irish third level education. It explores the concept of academic activism and introduces concepts of ‘public sociologist’ and ‘pracademic’ to contextualize my own academic trajectory and activism. Having reflected on general academic activism in the context of challenges facing Irish civil society, the focus then shifts to a personal case study. The conclusion addresses the ambiguities and tensions of pursuing a particular approach to academic life. The need for academic activism is intensifying in the context of the neoliberalization of Irish universities, a weakening civil society, and a more precarious academic life.

Richard Madsen, China Scholar and Public Sociologist

Richard Madsen, noted sociologist and China scholar, has spent a career examining the role of dialogue and civic involvement in American culture, in Chinese culture, and in the modern world. He has examined the ways religion can contribute to civic culture, and in his own career as a scholar he has given witness to the need to build bridges of understanding between diverse constituencies, including China and the United States. Madsen began his career with Maryknoll in the decade before Vatican II, and though he left Maryknoll, as he himself affirms, he continued to live out the vocation he nurtured there, but in a very different form. His career reflects the possibilities and promises—some yet to be fulfilled—of the Second Vatican Council and its own dialogue with modernity and the global community.

Minseok Ahn and Public Sociology of Sport

This article presents a biographical overview of Minseok Ahn’s career, specifically highlighting his role as a public sport sociologist. Notably, Ahn has spent time as a student activist, worked as a physical education teacher, served as a scholar with a university appointment, and held office in the South Korean National Assembly. Throughout his career, he has sought engagement with multiple publics in multiple ways to pursue reform in sport and physical education. An examination of Ahn’s career can offer insights regarding the processes and challenges involved in pursuing public sociology and provide a cross-national perspective that helps us consider the possibilities that exist for scholars to seek progressive change in sport through public engagement.

Introduction: Sociology as a combat sport

This introduction sets out from the unresolved paradox to be found in the writings of Bourdieu, namely the theoretical impossibility of public sociology and his own sustained practical engagement with publics. I appropriate and develop his concept of the ‘field’ to account for his success as a public sociologist. It requires us to understand that public sociology is only possible at the intersection of two distinct fields – the academic field and the political field. Public sociology proves to be a rather precarious pursuit, then; first, because of competing demands internal to the academic field; second, because of the difficulty in operating at the intersection of the academic and political fields; and third, because of the obduracy of common sense that cannot be easily dislodged, the very attempt often arousing open hostility. Difficult though it may be, the development of its public face will be necessary for the survival of sociology as well as an important ingredient in defending human existence from extinction by market fundamentalism.

In times of civil war: On being a schizophrenic (public) sociologist

This article addresses some of the dilemmas that sociologists in the Global South face – how does one choose between the demands of the public moment, the university as a space of work and struggle, and our duty to our ‘disciplines’? How do we engage in practically extending the democracy and equality that we routinely learn and teach about and yet seize the time and space required for reflecting and producing research that is valued to the extent that it is seen to be ‘disinterested’? And how do those of us who live and work in the global academic periphery validate our sociology in a world where the standards are often set by scholars abroad?

Marginal at the center: the life story of a public sociologist, by Kimmerling, Baruch

<i>Marginal at the center: the life story of a public sociologist</i>, by Kimmerling, Baruch

Talking sociology

Zygmunt Bauman has always approached sociology as an imagination, as an ongoing conversation with experience rather than a discipline within tight boundaries. This has enabled his work to move outside of the academy, and over the past decade or so he has become a leading public sociologist. But what does this status mean for the practice and possibilities of sociology? In this conversation Bauman reflects on the role, status and opportunities of sociology, who it is for, and what this means for the sociologist.

Book Review: Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change and Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts

Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change, by Raewyn W. Connell. Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2011,200 pages, $35.00 AUD Paper. ISBN: 978-0745653518.Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts, by Esther Ngan-Ling Chow, Marcia Textler Segal, and Lin Tan. Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing, 2011, 334 pages, $144.95 Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0857247438.Two new volumes on gender and intersectionality in a global context provide careful empirical research, as well as thorough theoretical advancements for study of complex inequalities in a globalizing environment: Raewyn Connell's Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change, and Analyzing Gender, Intersectionality, and Multiple Inequalities: Global, Transnational and Local Contexts, edited by Chow et al. These works complement each other and advance global gender research by applying an intersectional lens to shifting dynamics of inequality shaped by neoliberalism, and simultaneously highlighting theoretical analyses beyond Northern paradigms. Both volumes offer a perspective on intersecting spheres of patriarchy, advanced global capitalism (i.e. neoliberalism), and role of state actors that play out in social institutions, organizations, and in women's and men's lives. It becomes clear that globalization must be analyzed in plural, as globalizations play out differently in different regions and for different groups of people.These books advance field not only through empirical evidence from different countries, but also through integrating what Connell calls Theory. Connell makes point that much scholarship is quasi-globalized (98f), as generally means to have or make theoretical and collaborative connections within global North and not with global society generally. She calls for moving beyond Northern theoretical concepts and for inclusion of scholars and theories from periphery to inform current mainstream sociology. Connell addresses this need by introducing various Southern thinkers in her essays. Chow et al. derive their contributions from international conference Gender and Social Transformation: Global, Transnational, and Local Realities and Perspectives, held in Beijing from July 17-19, 2009, and bring together 13 authors from eight countries of four regions. Both books are contributions to a truly global research agenda crossing theoretical, empirical, and collaborative boundaries.Through 10 essays assembled in her latest book, Connell courageously scrutinizes effects of neoliberalism, by which she means the project of transformation under sign of free market that has dominated politics in last quarter-century, both in global metropolis (Western Europe, and North America) and in most others parts of world (2011:41). Connell acts as public sociologist, particularly in first and last chapters of book. She served as an expert for global gender equality policy development in United Nations in 2003-2004 on topic of men's and boys' roles for gender equality. Her experiences are backdrop against which she identifies grounds for optimism in men's interest in gender equality, and also warns of indirect gender politics of churches, ethnic organizations, conservative parties, nationalist movements, media, and neoliberalism. The last chapter is an open letter to Left in Australia in literary magazine Overland, substantiated by an examination of Antonio Negri's theory of Empire in chapter nine. Connell's kaleidoscopic research agenda in rest of book is accompanied by policy recommendations, and demonstrates her dialogical work with a broader public that stands in a feminist research tradition.Connell is concerned with neoliberal project that creates new patriarchal institutions at heart of international economy, including transnational management and high technology industries, which preserve and exploit ideological gender divisions. …

Placing Research: ‘City Publics’ and the ‘Public Sociologist’

This article raises questions about who becomes the proper subject for (non)academic attention in a time when ‘city publics’ might be positioned as democratising and open or, conversely, as curtailed and shaped through specific and pre-determined economies of value and use. The use of the city and its residents are echoed in regeneration politics and objectives, attached to and brought forward by specific ‘regenerative' subjects, now deemed ‘resilient' and capacitated. Such rhetorics of inclusion and measurable impact are echoed within ideas of a ‘public sociology’, which the engaged researcher should practice as she re-engages differently located spaces and subjects. Here, questions are raised about the place of a ‘public sociology' as part of a ‘city publics’, where understanding local disseminations and disparities is important in considering where different users, interviewees and indeed researchers are coming from. Having situated the fieldwork site, we initially focus on the expert advisory group and their constructions of the project's ‘use-value’. We then consider the background ‘shadows' in and out of ‘expert' space, as a trailing presence of research intentions and trajectories. Ideas of public sociology – as with an open ‘city publics' - often assumes that all users are interested, willing to hear and appear as equal members of a ‘community’. In contrast, the experience of engaging a user group may involve dis-engaging the research-researcher-researched and here we provide disruptions to a straightforward ‘travelling through' research space as we walk through our research methodologies. This article presents professional and personal reflections on research experience as well as interpretative accounts of navigating fieldwork and city space.

Len Barton, critical education and the problem of ‘decentered unities’

In the process of discussing the significant contributions that Len Barton has made to the sociology of education and to disability studies, I argue that a good deal of critical analyses of power and inequality in education are impoverished by some of their essentialist and reductive tendencies. I use an example taken from disability rights to show how parts of these tendencies can be overcome. I suggest that disability rights movements provide powerful possibilities for the interruption of capitalist ideological forms and their attendant ways of organising and controlling labour. They do this by challenging some of the most fundamental assumptions that underpin capitalist economies and ways of life. By strongly resisting the ways in which paid work and paid workers are treated, new relations are made possible. I connect this example to some of the insightful analyses of the place of affective equality in the struggle for social justice in both a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition. Building on these arguments, I then argue for a broadened conception of critical research and critical action. I describe nine tasks in which the critical scholar/activists should engage if they are to be true to an enlarged conception of the ‘public intellectual’ and ‘public sociologist’.