2020 Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology Membership Survey

The Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS) was formed in 2005 by the merger of the Society for Applied Sociology and the Sociological Practice Association giving name recognition to both applied and clinical sociology, and a professional home for all sociological practitioners. In an effort to provide greater benefit and value to members, and to better meet the needs of its members, the AACS conducted a membership survey. On October 9, 2020, a membership survey was sent to AACS members to gather data. While the current survey results could have benefited from a greater response rate, the data gathered provides some degree of insight to members’ characteristics and attitudes toward the AACS. It is recommended that the AACS consider conducting future membership studies periodically to determine how to better meet member needs, and to estimate the value of AACS to its members.

Worlds apart? On Niklas Luhmann and the sociology of education

In an effort to address the relationship between globalisation, education and Niklas Luhmann’s branch of systems theory, we present his essay, published here for the first time in English translation, ‘Education: Forming the life course’, next to the nine contributions that compose this special issue and build on this and his other writings to take up the theme of education in world society. To conclude, we underline that systems theory’s emphasis on functional differentiation helps to address two lacunae in the today prevailing sociological practice. By positing the development of self-referential domains as modernity’s central mode of differentiation, it provides sociology with a comprehensive theory of world society. By the same token, it also allows one to observe education as a global affair with, so to speak, a life of its own.

A Life in Motion: Exploring Auto/Biographical Exchanges by ‘Walking With’ Nelson Sullivan

In this article, we combine a number of related elements – YouTube films, autobiographical methods, diaries, letters, and walking – to explore the sociological value of the films of Nelson Sullivan (1948–1989). Sullivan was a film maker who documented New York, and elsewhere, in the mid-late 1980s; however, the films are ‘vlogger style’ and offer richly detailed, relational, and dialogical accounts of the ever-changing figurations between Nelson and a cast of other characters. Here we aim to walk sociologically with Nelson. We explain of how we analysed Nelson’s films before considering the implications of repositioning ‘vlogs’ as something of a hybrid between letters and diaries. We then explore walking as an autobiographical act a little further. Finally, we conclude by considering the implications of Nelson’s work for past, present, and future sociological practice which uses YouTube videos and vlogs, by emphasising the importance of the ‘dialogic exchange’.

A Case for Conscious Normativity: Or How Ethics Literacy Can Benefit Sociology Students and Their Teachers

We argue that sociology students and their teachers could benefit from cultivating literacy in normative ethics, as well as from developing a thoughtful approach to ethical values and principles, an intellectual virtue that we label “conscious normativity.” The benefits of ethics literacy and conscious normativity include a deeper appreciation for the centrality of normative evaluations in social life, a renewed connection with many of the intellectual and ethical traditions that underpin sociology and society, and an enhanced ability to navigate the discipline’s inescapable plurality and to develop an informed position on the doctrine of value neutrality. We outline some ways in which students and their teachers could enhance their ethics literacy, focusing on the many points of contact between sociological practice and ethical reflection. The article concludes by considering the meaning of our argument for sociology’s relationship to ethics, highlighting the cycles of critique that become accessible to consciously normative sociologists.

Digital sociology for exploring digital society

The advent of the digital age has become a serious challenge for researchers in various fields of scientific knowledge. Among others, this refers to sociology, which tried to give an adequate answer to the question of how the world is changing. The purpose of this article is to outline the contours of a new sociological field — digital sociology, which has been actively developing in recent years. The article provides an overview of Russian and international studies that have contributed to the formation of the scope of research and research objectives of digital sociology. It focuses on digital society, which appears due to the development and implementation of modern technological infrastructure represented by key digital technologies (communication networks, big data technologies, algorithms and complex algorithmic systems, platforms, artificial intelligence technologies, cloud computing, augmented and virtual reality technologies, etc.). This extremely complex infrastructure has a decisive influence on the emergence of new social practices, on identity, on the everyday life of both the individual and society as a whole. Digital sociology aims to theorize critically about digitalization, datafication, algorithmization, and platformization, and to determine the social implications of these processes. Moreover, digital sociology offers a range of methodological techniques and tools based on digital technologies that provide new possibilities for quantitative and qualitative sociological research. Digital sociology is also seen as a professional sociological practice which includes teaching the discipline, carrying out scientific communications, and sharing the results of sociologists’ scientific work.

Pragmatism as Problem Solving

At the level of sociological practice a three-sided debate occurs in American sociology between the rationalist tradition, in which the goal is the better understanding of society; the emancipatory tradition, in which the goal is improvement of society; and the skeptical tradition, which argues that we cannot know if either our knowledge or our norms are correct, and therefore it is not possible to expect progress in either. Each of these strands runs into difficulties: for the rationalist tradition, an inability to cumulate knowledge; for the emancipatory tradition, a difficulty in grounding the norms that would determine what counts as emancipation if norms are socially constructed; and for the skeptical tradition, inability to accept the logical conclusion of the argument, which is inaction even in the face of extreme injustice. The author shows that when pressed on these points, each tradition moves in the direction of pragmatism understood as problem solving, and that the practice of problem solving offers resolutions to these dilemmas.

How the meanings of ‘home’ influence energy-consuming practices in domestic buildings

The UK introduced carbon budgets in 2008, with an aim to reduce greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050 compared with the 1990 levels. It has been argued that the 2015 Paris Agreement on limiting the global average temperature rise to ‘well below 2° C’ requires deeper and more rapid emission reductions than the current UK targets. Household energy consumption accounts for almost a third of total UK CO2 emissions in recent years. This paper explores drivers of high energy consumption in domestic buildings from a sociological practice perspective and through a lens of dominant meanings of ‘home’. Whilst the practice approach and meanings of home have been explored separately in the literature to understand household energy consumption, this paper adds new findings on the interaction between the meanings of home and the elements of practices. Results show the dominant meaning of home differs between householders; this in turn affects the materials and procedures of energy-consuming practices. For instance, if ‘home’ means ‘hospitality’, this changes the standard of comfort and convenience people perceive at home. Understanding how practices and meanings of the home intersect, provides new, much needed insights that could support policy change commensurate with more rapidly reducing CO2 emissions from domestic energy consumption.

Augustus Granville Dill: A Case Study in the Conceptualization of a Black Public Sociology

Black sociology developed as a response to mainstream, white sociology’s failures to address the condition of Black people in the Unites States. Central to the practice of Black sociology is that it necessitates sociological work be used, where possible, for the benefit of Black people. The contemporary practice of public sociology has similar aims of bringing sociological knowledges to various publics to address their particular issues. The public sociology literature, though, fails to conceptualize or articulate praxes of public sociology that are constructed to address the unique needs of various communities. Using the biography of the little-known Black, queer sociologist Augustus Granville Dill (1881–1956) as a case study, the authors conceptualize a practice of Black public sociology as one of many public sociologies. Like Black sociology before, Black public sociology is a rearticulation of established sociological practice that centers on Black people and Black communities. Using the most comprehensive biography of Dill published to date, the authors examine how he transitioned from knowledge producer to knowledge disseminator via the practice of Black public sociology. This article, then, serves to highlight a Black, queer foreparent of the discipline and to use his forgotten story to inform the practice of contemporary public sociology.