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Sociologists very often have extra-curricular lives as musicians. This article explores the relationship between musical life and sociological identities. Through a range of examples from Howard Becker's grounding in field research as a pianist in the Chicago jazz clubs and his theories of deviance, to the connection between Emma Jackson's life as a bass player in Brit pop band Kenickie and her feminist punk sociology, an argument is developed about the things sociologists learn from music. Based on 28 life history interviews with contemporary sociologists this paper shows how sociologists learn – both directly and tacitly – to understand society through their engagement with music. Music offers them an interpretive device to read cultural history, a training in the unspoken and yet structured aspects of culture, and an attentiveness to improvised and interactive aspects of social interaction. For sociologists, involvement in music making is also an incitement to get off campus and encounter an alternative world of value and values. Music enables sociologists to sustain their research imaginations and inspires them to make sociology differently. However, the article concludes that in the contemporary neoliberal university it is harder for sociologists to sustain a creative hinterland in music. The tacit knowledges that often nourish sociological identities may run the risk of being depleted as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Chicago was founded in 1833, it was an abstract grid that operated as an instrument of procession and dispossession. Almost a century later, sociologists Robert E. Park and Eugene Burgess mapped another process of possession and dispossession as they studied the city's social organisation. Their students St. Clare Drake and Howard Cayton adapted that map in their 1945 book, Black Metropolis. Both Park and Burgess, who were white, and Drake and Cayton, who were Black, marked the area of the city where Black people lived, situating it as an anomaly cutting through an otherwise well-determined model of urban growth. Park and Burgess labelled this territory the 'Black Belt' while Drake and Cayton named it the 'Black Metropolis', representing a radically different understanding of the city as a particular form of optimism. Using the notion of 'Black optimism' that emerges out of Fred Moten's understanding of the Black Radical tradition as a framework, this paper argues that Blacks in Green, a Chicago community organisation, has advanced a form of radical sustainability that asks us to learn how to think and be 'otherwise'. It pursues a form of environmental justice that depends on African American heritage, particularly abolition and reconstruction, to create new possibilities for Drake and Cayton's 'Black Metropolis'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn's (1886–1959) views about technological unemployment, which were intimately connected to his analysis of the social impacts of technological developments and resulting social problems due to cultural lag. We trace the development of his views as seen through his well‐known 1922 book, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature, his important contributions to the President's Research Committee on Social Trends (1933), and his lesser‐known pamphlets designed for a broader audience—Living with Machines (1933), You and Machines (1934), and Machines and Tomorrow's World (1938). He used these pamphlets to educate the public about the dangers of new machines and technological unemployment. In doing so, he drew upon sociological analysis in his professional scholarly writings and his long‐standing personal interests in social betterment and social reform. Our analysis also calls into question the adequacy of existing scholarship on Ogburn that has emphasized his commitment to a statistical, dispassionate, and "objectivist" approach to social science research. We call for a revised, richer, and more complex view of Ogburn's work and legacy as one of the nation's leading social scientists during the first half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sociology we have recently witnessed a move towards a stronger emphasis on temporality and narrative analysis. The paper discusses the so-called narrative positivism proposed by the American sociologist Andrew Abbott as one of the first, most original and wide-ranging attempt to construct a narrative sociology. In particular, through a focus on both his interpretation of the Chicago legacy and his research on temporality, the paper addresses Abbot's criticism of mainstream sociological methodology and his developing social theory of spatial and temporal contexts. In the final section, four motives are given to closely consider Abbott's theoretical pursuits although still in progress and far from systematic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an analysis of the work of six leading sociologists, Albion Small, W.I. Thomas, Robert Park, Louis Wirth, William Ogburn and Morris Janowltz, Dennis Smith explores the interplay between the constraints and opportunities of sociology, liberalism and capitalism, the key to the work of the prominent scholars who compose the Chicago School. They considered very seriously the goals and values lauded as "the American Way" and wrestled with the inherent ambiguities of this historically grounded myth and its many implications. The intellectual and moral outlook of the Chicago sociologists within the tradition of American liberalism is examined, as well as how these views offer a critical perspective on modern American society.