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We propose a framework for citizen social science that brings together three reinforcing elements of a research project – scale, citizen-leadership, and publicness – to improve qualitative research. Our framework was born out of necessity; a desire to involve ordinary citizens, in researching public issues, with limited funding. We illustrate the application of our framework using insights from research we have led, involving first, a series of qualitative studies of state and civil society organizations working on community engagement by three separate years of public policy students; and second, a qualitative study on the system for processing salary and injury disputes for low-waged migrant workers in Singapore conducted by over 100 volunteers and activists. Drawing on a review of the literature and our own experiences, we speak to the advantages and trade-offs of adopting this approach and suggest practical methods for conducting citizen social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Lever-Tracy's call for stronger sociological engagement with climate change in 2008, the number of climate-related contributions to leading sociological journals has increased. Yet, they still represent a small percentage of contributions overall. Reviewing the 37 articles published in eight top-ranked sociology journals until 2018, the authors of the present article identify five main subfields of research: (a) reflections on the role of the social sciences, (b) politics, (c) economy and consumption, (d) media and public perceptions, and (e) global flows. They conclude that the rise in contributions since 2008 indicates that climate change creates some resonance in the disciplinary core of mainstream sociology but that most sociological climate change research is undertaken and published in inter- and transdisciplinary spaces beyond the boundaries of the discipline. Emphasizing that climate change research can provide important epistemic resources for the discipline, the authors argue that sociology would benefit from being more responsive to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international debate on public sociology has failed to increase our understanding of how we might engage with new publics, particularly potential research publics. Parallel literatures exploring over-research, research fatigue, non-response and public (mis)understanding of sociology can shed light on how underlying boundary disciplinary issues might influence willingness to participate in sociological research. This article explores the case study of parents of people with Rett syndrome, an over-researched group at the centre of competing research discourses following a breakthrough in genetic research. Data from a wider study was used to explore reasons for research participation, non-participation and dropout, including interviews (n = 20) and a brief survey about reasons for non-response (n = 58). An individualist perspective led to interpretations of social interventions as stigmatising and refusal to participate. Parent activists fundraising for and promoting genetic research challenged notions of voluntary groups as being receptive to organic public sociology. While individual benefits were experienced, there were signs of research fatigue from multiple approaches. Finally, the close link between social activism and research participation increased the risk of unwitting exploitation, an issue of concern for organic public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical analysis of Michael Burawoy’s model of public sociology, discussing several of its epistemic and methodological limitations. First, the author focuses on the ambiguity of Burawoy’s proposal, problematizing the absence of a clear delimitation of the concept of ‘public sociology’. Second, the author links the academic success of the category of public sociology to the global division of sociological labour, emphasizing the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ involved in Burawoy’s work and calling for the decolonization of social science. Then, the author expounds his concerns regarding the hierarchy of the different types of sociology proposed by Burawoy, who privileges professional sociology over other types of sociological praxis. Reflecting upon these elements will provide a good opportunity to observe how our discipline works, advancing also suggestions for its transformation. Along these lines, in the last section of the article the author elaborates on the need to go beyond a dissemination model of public sociology – the unidirectional diffusion of ‘expert knowledge’ to extra-academic audiences – and towards a more collaborative understanding of knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses perspectives for the formation of a truly ‘global sociology’, implying active, open, mutually beneficial and equal interaction between sociologists from different locations, countries and cultures, in their joint efforts to comprehend, explain and improve the social world. The study is based on the conceptual scheme proposed by Burawoy, highlighting four different disciplinary practices: ‘professional sociology’, ‘policy sociology’, ‘critical sociology’ and ‘public sociology’. The formation of a ‘global sociology’ demands harmonious development and mutual enrichment between all the four ‘sociologies’, however, each of them has its own path in the global arena. The literature analysis demonstrates serious limitations in the global progression of ‘professional sociology’, while ‘policy sociology’ and ‘critical sociology’ also experience major difficulties. ‘Public sociology’, largely inspired by Burawoy, seems to be especially promising globally due to its key advantages: orientation towards non-academic audiences and a focus on the most acute social problems. However, currently this disciplinary practice has several fundamental constraints: marginality, radicalism, ideological bias and inherent conflict-orientation towards other ‘sociologies’. Drawing on John Meyer’s theory of ‘Scientized Environment Supporting Actorhood’, the article proposes the project of the new ‘Global Solidarity Sociology’, which utilizes the advantages of Michael Burawoy’s project while overcoming its principal limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A current debate on environmental sociology involves how the subdiscipline should conceptualise and investigate the environment and whether it should be prescriptive and deliver policy recommendations. Taking this debate as a point of departure this article discusses the current and future role of sociology in a globalised world. It discusses how environmental sociology in the US and Europe differ in their understandings of sociology’s contribution to the study of the environment. Particular stress is placed on how these two regions differ with respect to their use of the tradition of sociological thought, views on what constitutes the environment and ways of institutionalising environmental sociology as a sociological field. In conclusion, the question is raised of whether current versions of environmental sociology are appropriate for analysing a globalised world environment; or whether environmental sociology’s strong roots in European and US cultures make it less relevant when facing an increasingly globalised world. Finally, the article proposes some new rules for a global environmental sociology and describes some of their possible implications for the sociological study of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the premise that ‘social science’ should never be separated from ‘politics.’ The authors also shed light on how social and economic injustice was creatively challenged by combining the strengths of workers, researchers and transnational movement activists. The study uses both quantitative (semi-structured questionnaires) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and participation observation) methods to gain insights concerning the experiences, world views and collective agency of Chinese workers who are struggling to make sense of the global production regime they inhabit and to contest the forces that shape their working and social lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author surveys his own career to illustrate some of the dilemmas of research, especially when it assumes a critical and public face. He shows how his work on Palestinian refugees, their socioeconomic rights, their right of return and their camps evolved toward complex forms of traditional and organic public sociology. The article concludes with reflections on one of the major dilemmas researchers face: conducting public research without losing its critical edge, even toward the deprived groups it seeks to protect. The moral of the story: good scientists are not always popular. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this appendix we describe two successive efforts in the use of digital media to develop courses that brought together distinguished sociologists from around the world. In the first course, we put together a vision of global sociology that revolved around issues of marketization while in the second we were more attentive to the public engagement of sociologists, facing very different political contexts and social issues. In the first course we faced the problem of building a global sociology that was attentive to local contexts while the second was beset by the contradictory demands of local pedagogy and global dialogue. If nothing else our use of digital media clarified some of the problems of building a global sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociology involves challenging received wisdoms. Thus, it requires unusual fortitude, as these wisdoms are embedded in common sense, itself backed up by interests and sometimes force. To change what is taken to be common sense, such as neoliberal orthodoxy, therefore, can be accomplished most effectively through a social movement. To challenge conventional wisdom requires the discovery of truth and that can call for unorthodox methods, such as breaking into powerful agencies that hold official secrets. To challenge deeply held truths, whether they are deeply held by the powerful or the weak, can earn one long-lasting hostility, such as when I investigated the killings by the Philippine Communist Party. This is because there is an inherent and inescapable conflict between truth and power that will never disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociology and the sacrifices it entails, richly described in the case studies in this monograph, are driven by moral commitment. This is one element of sociology as a vocation. The other element is sociology as a science. The case studies are built on an embryonic sociology of commodification, understood in its historical dimensions and its global consequences. This sociology of commodification examines the disasters created by third-wave marketization and the bleak future for human existence, thereby, fueling the original moral commitment of public sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociology implies not simply a general orientation to social research but also a methodology that connects the sociologist to a ‘public.’ This is the case, with some provisos, for the method of sociological intervention, invented by Alain Touraine, that I have pursued in studies of racism, anti-Semitism and terrorism, as well as of anti-nuclear and labor movements. The approach has led to complicated relations with the media and with politics. In this article I give a series of examples of such engagement and the dilemmas it creates for the sociologist who wants to maintain a critical distance. Ultimately, the question and the challenge of public sociology boil down to how one can intervene in social life and, at the same time, remain a social scientist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we discuss the uneasy development of gender studies in Russia as one example of public sociology. For empirical evidence we concentrate mainly on our own experience in the Gender Studies Program at the European University in St. Petersburg, but we also refer to the other cases. We observe how the political and academic context of the 1990s created opportunities for academic innovations that ideologically challenged Soviet patriarchy and invoked gendered criticisms of post-Soviet changes. We discuss the effects of the rapid but partial institutionalization of gender studies in the Russian academic context and how gender became the umbrella term for both feminist and anti-feminist standpoints. We claim that since international support for the gender studies diminished in the 2000s, the fashion and economic benefit of doing gender studies has declined, with only a small group of researchers maintaining their commitment to the feminist approach to gender. We focus on the politicization of gender in the last decade of Putin’s Russia and the role of feminist researchers in the analysis of the new conservatism, expressed in gender ideology. We examine the problems of combining public expertise and academic work in the particular realm of gender politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Framed in a context of questioning of the social sciences by European institutions, this article offers an example of a way of doing organic public sociology for and with civil society. The authors employ the Communicative Methodology, which goes beyond oppositions between descriptive and normative sociology. It does so by using the concept of ‘successful actions,’ which brings scientific knowledge into dialogue with the knowledge of people from the communities and institutions involved. Thanks to Communicative Methodology, the European Parliament approved the successful actions from a study of a Roma neighborhood in extreme poverty, leading to the creation of a successful cooperative with sustainable employment. In sum, this public sociology calls for a dialogic democracy accountable to all voices, in which the successful actions that researchers analyze then get recreated in collaboration with the publics, so that society can implement them to improve people’s living conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author argues that socially engaged sociology cannot be understood as a practice isolated in the quadrant of ‘public sociology’ as suggested by Michael Burawoy’s organization of sociology into four distinct quadrants but that it is closely associated with critical policy sociology as well as critical professional sociology. The author uses a case study of hospital transformation in post-apartheid South Africa to demonstrate the way sociological activism cycles through public, policy and professional sociological fields and to explore the nature of each of these fields as contested fields of power characterized by dominant and subordinate sociologies. The author resurrects Eddie Webster’s concept of critical engagement and expands its scope to suggest that the stance of the progressive – or radical – sociologist, who is engaged and committed to subaltern publics but retains a critical independence, is reproduced in the field of professional sociology in the form of what Burawoy calls critical sociology and in the field of policy sociology as critical policy sociology. The latter is a possibility that cannot be entertained in the Burawoy model, where policy sociology occupies a quadrant constituted by instrumentality and a lack of reflexivity. The practice of critical engagement, then, has to be understood as combining public sociology, policy sociology and critical sociology in a practice that may produce new knowledge that enables a more complex comprehension of domination across these fields, the better to challenge it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public sociologists’ deep engagement with non-academic publics tends to give research findings greater empirical accuracy, relevance and influence, as well as provide a powerful source of motivation. However, it also creates constant risks of dispersion, loss of independence, lack of analytical distance and burnout. Based on the author’s experience with research and advocacy about socio-environmental conflicts in Latin America, this article dwells on these opportunities and risks. To take advantage of the former and tackle the latter, it makes a case for ‘amphibious sociology,’ an approach that embraces hybrid styles of writing and uses advances in multimedia technology to engage several audiences, while keeping the enterprise of public sociology afloat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the growing field of public sociology and the important role played by sociologists in society as of 2014. It examines several reasons for a flourishing debate on public sociology, including market fundamentalism. The four ways of practicing sociology, such as professional, critical, public and policy, are also discussed.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociology has been a subject of extensive debate in South Africa, especially over the last two decades. Central to the debate on sociology as a discipline and practice were efforts to document its history and paradigmatic shifts that characterized it, as well as topical themes that defined its research. One key observation in its evolution pointed to a historical shift from being a service discipline to the previous racially segregatory political regimes, especially between the early 1900s and 1960s, to a multi-paradigm discipline that challenged the racial order and inequalities in the 1970s onwards. This period marked the height of public sociology. Recent observations, however, especially in the post-apartheid period, projected a scenario of the discipline in a state of decline. Counter-evidence was nevertheless also presented suggesting not only the renewal of sociology in South Africa but also its active interest and involvement in the struggle against inequalities as part of the voices of the poor. This article calls these observations as the decline thesis and the renewal thesis, and contrasts them. The latter, I argue, is more compelling than the former. Notwithstanding this, the article argues however that the extent to which sociology in involved in struggles against inequalities is under question since public sociology, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, is underdeveloped. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critically considers Michael Burawoy's 'public sociology for human rights' through the lens of Timothy W. Luke's 'rites of rule'. The author argues that, while admirable in its stated aim, public sociology for human rights neglects to reveal its roots in governmentality and thus does not recognize the empirical practice of human rights within cosmopolitan global governance as a shift to consolidated contragovernmentality. The author concludes that public sociology for human rights as it is currently framed stabilizes the practice of human rights as rites of rule in an attempt to stabilize knowledge and the relations that it orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nine articles in the dialogue divide into two groups: an abstract universalism constituted from above (Burawoy, Martinelli, Wievorka, Smith) vs concrete practices knitted together from below (Shen Yuan, Zdravomyslova, Habib, Baviskar and Braga et al.). In fact, a global sociology has to be constructed from below and the question is whether this is possible. This raises three questions. First, is there a common project that might broadly unite sociologists? Second, is there a community of discourse that would allow us to communicate our different practices? Third, if we do have a common language how can we handle the inequalities within and across nations, regions and the globe? In fact, there is a convergence on the challenges posed by third-wave marketization, otherwise known as neoliberalism. Furthermore, sociologists all recognize different types of engagement: professional, critical, policy and public. We must forge a subaltern universality from the connections among particular sociologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks three questions. How does the sociologist understand the common sense of subaltern groups, whether subjugated on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity or nationality? What could be the political practice of the sociologist with regard to such groups? Finally, through what form of public discourse can sociology articulate the interests of subaltern groups? These broad questions have general answers, even if their specifics are shaped by national and local contexts. The argument is organized into eight theses relating to third-wave marketization, the special role of sociology, the rationale for public sociology, traditional vs organic public sociology, common sense in nature's commodification, political practice on a global scale, the public discourse of human rights and the end of the ivory tower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]