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By many accounts a global revival of religion is afoot – not simply a revival of individual religious belief, but of the public role of religion. Correspondingly, development scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that we must reconsider the meaning of national development in light of religious worldviews. However, scholars have yet to fashion an empirically grounded, synthetic framework for understanding the range of approaches to development, both material and spiritual, that are at play in the world today. This paper presents such a framework, drawing on 200 interviews with development practitioners sampled from across 9 countries in the global south.

This article combines network analysis and cognitive frame analysis to explain the institutionalization of homeless politics in San Francisco into a stasis of organized stable conflict. The persistence of stable conflict within the San Francisco homeless policy field brings into question the widespread notion within sociology that the stable ordering of a social field or institutional arena emerges when a group of incumbents or elites comes to dominate that arena and impose their conception of the world onto it. The San Francisco homeless policy field shows that even in the absence of a dominant organizing conception of the world, stable order within an institutional arena can still be achieved through a complex equilibrium of ideas, relationships, power, and resources.

Reflecting on my experiences as a graduate student, I argue that the terminology of public sociology should be dropped. The public sociology rhetoric is at odds with the fundamental professional reality in the discipline. Sociology, as a "hyper-professionalized" endeavor, primarily values abstract, explanatory theories, even if those theories make the world less descriptively comprehensible to people seeking to act in the world. Moreover, I question whether sociologists, as a professional class, should or can take on the public position as the partisan representatives of civil society and marginalized peoples. Instead, I argue for a greater openness within professional sociology to descriptive work, as well as more departmental supports for graduate students to pursue careers outside of sociology. Sociologists interested in public engagement should focus primarily on cataloguing and practical evaluation of engaged research tactics and community oriented teaching strategies, rather than theoretical discussions of what sociology can or should be.

This article analyzes key strategic considerations for setting up targeted research interviews, including human subjects and Institutional Review Board requirements, approaching respondents, the medium of contact, using technology, cultural conceptions of time and commitment, using networks, wading through bureaucracies, and watching for warning signs. By making these considerations explicit and conscious, we can better specify how to gain interviews for our research and how to ethically approach this task. This analysis will be most useful as a pedagogical explanation for students and for scholars newly approaching interviewing.

This article analyzes key strategic considerations for setting up targeted research interviews, including human subjects and Institutional Review Board requirements, approaching respondents, the medium of contact, using technology, cultural conceptions of time and commitment, using networks, wading through bureaucracies, and watching for warning signs. By making these considerations explicit and conscious, we can better specify how to gain interviews for our research and how to ethically approach this task. This analysis will be most useful as a pedagogical explanation for students and for scholars newly approaching interviewing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placing sociology into dialogue with the theories of Thich Nhat Hanh can prove a fruitful endeavor, especially as another example of the growing conversation between science and spirituality. Engaging in a dialogue with Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings, however, requires that we understand these teachings both (1) within their context as an example of a family of engaged spiritualities that arose in the 20th century to address the dreams and dilemmas of modernity, and (2) within their context as a contemporary adaptation of traditional Buddhist philosophy. This essay discusses both of these contexts, while also suggesting possible ways that academic sociological theories might relate to or parallel with the Engaged Buddhist theory of Thich Nhat Hanh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]