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In this interview, Dr Prudence Carter, 2021–2022 President-Elect of the American Sociological Association, discusses how sociology can contribute to anti-racist futures across national contexts. Her insights point to the need for greater self-awareness in sociology regarding race and racism, for clarification of our aims and for better articulation and translation of popularized theoretical concepts, such as structural racism, to the general public. To achieve radical inclusion in the future, she highlights the importance of engaging in public and policy sociology, by explaining and substantiating policies and practices derived from our research. She also underscores the significance and value of comparative cross-national and multidisciplinary collaborative research. Most importantly, she brings to the fore the necessity of imagining new epistemological and methodological approaches to study the conditions that will enable our societies to attain equitable and anti-racist futures. Fundamentally, this involves extending our sociological imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on core principles of public sociology, this article discusses the creation of four theatrical vignettes about living with early onset dementia (symptoms of dementia pre-65). The vignettes were developed through an Image Theatre workshop, involving families living with early onset dementia. They were designed to capture key themes, issues and experiences that emerged from the group’s collective experience. While the content of the vignettes speaks to a range of key sociological debates (especially in relation to the lived experience of time, risk, social exclusion and stigma in dementia) the process of creating and using the vignettes represents the first empirical application of a (public) sociological approach to ‘person-centredness’ in dementia; which views persons as ‘dividual’ and selves as transactive. We conclude by advocating for a rich and diverse public sociology of dementia in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for global and provincialized sociologies have emerged in the last decade as thoughtful projects in contemporary sociology. In this article, I criticize the rhetorical nature and epistemic endogamy of some of those calls through case studies of sociologies in Mexico and their institutional and epistemic complexity. Avoiding reductionisms, I will characterize sociologies in Mexico as both central (mainly Westernized) and (semi)peripheral. From a critical stance, I will argue that the latter are constructed upon teleological, prescriptive and pragmatic-theory logics and constitute epistemologically legitimate (professional) sociologies, given their logics’ internal cognitive affinity and the consistency these logics present in relation to external ideological structures and socio-political discourses. I will then make explicit some of the theoretical and disciplinary challenges these overlooked professional sociologies bring to the fore. I conclude by suggesting a postcolonial theoretical-methodological strategy to address such challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the current economic, social and political crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors’ interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue. Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements’ knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of ‘talking between worlds’. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article borrows the form and metre of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner to describe and analyse the social situation of the globalised mariner. The shipping industry is characterised by complex global value chains and an outsourced, casualised labour force. The paper aims to be a piece of ‘public sociology’ and (in seeking to appeal in as vivid a manner as possible) is written in a style that Wright Mills called ‘sociological poetry’, attempting a pastiche of perhaps the best known poem in English. The auditor in the poem is a late-modern consumer and the narration is shared between the mariner, an inspector of shipping and (to remind the reader and the auditor of the mariner’s partisanship) a Chorus of Greek Shippers. The narrative covers deficiencies in seafarer training, reductions in crew numbers, the consequent long hours and seafarer fatigue, and the failure of global governance of the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is the first e-special issue for the journal Sociology and its chosen focus is the article ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’ by Savage and Burrows (2007). This article challenged sociologists with a variety of questions about the role, relevance and methodological opportunities for sociological research in the 21st century. On publication it stoked the already charged debates on a public sociology (Burawoy, 2004), the role of publicly funded research (ESRC, 2009) and relevance of sociological research in an age of burgeoning social media (Brewer and Hunter, 2006). This e-special provides a reprise of these debates and explores relevant papers in Sociology, as well as alerting readers to recurring themes and new directions on the topic of methods and social research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Journals and research networks are awash with advice about how best to promote children and young people's participation, with young people's involvement in the doing of research often presented as a specific expression of this wider good. Most of this discussion, however, is concerned with methods, the practicalities of securing research involvement and, more recently, with research training. At the same time, wider debates about the uses of sociological research have unfolded at an abstract level, framed in terms of 'knowledge for what' and 'knowledge for whom' with little focus on research practice, including who is carrying it out. In this article, I examine the 'young researcher' to do two things: embed discussions about young People's research participation in long-standing epistemological and political debates about the role of research; and add to the broader sociological debate by foregrounding the question of who carries out research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]