Abstract
The article examines recent debates surrounding public sociology in the context of a UK based Department of Applied Social Sciences. Three areas of work within the department form the focus of the article: violence against women and children; community-based oral history projects and health ethics teaching. The article draws on Micheal Burawoy’s typology comprising public, policy, professional and critical sociology, and argues that much of the work described in the case studies more often lies somewhere in between, in the interstices, rather than within one or other of the four types. The result is not without its tensions and dilemmas, some of which are identified and explored, notably those arising from attempts to appeal to diverse audiences and meet the sometimes conflicting expectations of each.
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Notes
Participants — seven care leavers and eight students — were all self selected.
Young people were involved in the process of planning interviews and, although they did not participate in the editing process, they viewed the edited video and approved it before it was shown to professionals.
By critical pedagogy I mean a style of teaching and learning that involves a certain reflexive attitude, one that requires those involved to be committed to exploring the curriculum and their own response to it with the dual aim of identifying operations of power and rectifying processes of oppression therein. (N.B. I have found Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970, and bell hooks’, Teaching to Transgress, 1994, invaluable as I have reflected on the development of my teaching practice over time).
Within the department (DASS) I see rich and deep enquiry and debate regarding the concepts and conceptualisations of, e.g., freedom, democracy, citizenship, equality, justice, human rights, etc. But there is an overarching sense that colleagues are committed to a broadly progressive, egalitarian, social agenda.
Most public sociology thinking I have come across so far does not address the way in which academics or professional sociologists, etc. are themselves constituted as publics, and the implications of this.
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Gabriel, J., Harding, J., Hodgkinson, P. et al. Public Sociology: Working at the Interstices. Am Soc 40, 309–331 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-009-9080-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-009-9080-3