Case III.6: Trade Unionism as Collective Education

When you’re telling me to be resilient you are really telling me that I am failing the system, when really it is the system that is failing me. So fuck you. Fuck you for sending me invitations to stress reduction courses While you make me teach larger classes for less money....

Dialogue II: ‘Really Useful’ Public Sociology Knowledge

This dialogue includes an engagement between the author and two of the case contributors, both of whom are operating at the boundaries of policy sociology. Whilst this has perhaps underrepresented those working in other spheres of knowledge co-production – research, art, behaviour – it has allowed a focus on the kinds of knowledge that find their ways into the process of policy development and, more generally, what knowledge is valued in the public sphere....

Introduction

This chapter focuses on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology developed and popularised by public sociologist Michael Burawoy, which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It also discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. The chapter explains how the dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education and the dialogical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, whose influence is fundamental to diverse forms of radical education. It describes the value of the knowledge that the poor bring to the educational context and challenges the oppression that kept them in poverty.

Case I.2: ‘Seeing Things Differently’: Gender Justice and Counter-Hegemony in Higher Education

This chapter is rooted in the reflexive experience of feminists in Scotland struggling for gender justice – particularly the movement to resist and end men’s violence against women (VAW). Our case study focuses on a course ‘Gender Justice and Violence: Feminist Approaches’ (GJV), the fruit of an ongoing partnership between Scottish Women’s Aid (SWA) and Queen Margaret University (QMU). Offered every year since 2007, the course engages with debates concerning public policy, professional practice and political activism – particularly in relation to gender-based violence and abuse. The module teaching sessions bring together practitioners and activists (who register as associate students at QMU) alongside full-time sociology students. This enables a challenging process of mutual learning which highlights both the tensions and the transformative potential of grounding social theory in the sometimes divergent standpoints of these overlapping groups. The course is delivered by, and open to, both women and men. The curriculum draws on the struggles of the women’s movement and of pro-feminist men, and utilises the work of engaged feminist scholars across a range of academic disciplines, including history, philosophy, criminology and gender studies, as well as sociology. Its presence demands that the practice of activists and the movements which have ...

Public Sociology Practices, Privatising Universities

This chapter analyses how public sociology education is practised in diverse contexts and where public sociology educators locate their practice with respect to communities and movements of publics. It describes institutions and forms of educational organisation that are allowed for public sociology education. It also discusses how public sociologists work with institutions of higher education, in which it is possible to do public sociology education in increasingly neoliberal universities. The chapter explores what public sociologists do and illuminate the ambivalent institutional locations of public sociology. It explains how locatedness and institutional status is marked by the power relations considered in the constitution of publics and the production and validation of knowledge in public sociology.

Conclusion

This collection makes an argument for understanding public sociology more dialectically. The focus of our practice is on dialogue, and the dynamics of knowledge production involves dialectical relations: between teachers and students; researchers and publics; practice and theory; between different practices of sociology reflected in Burawoy’s ‘quadrants’; between the parochial and the universal; the local and global; and between the neoliberal university and the spaces that public sociologists find to engage in dialogue with subaltern counterpublics....

Case II.6: The Construction of ‘Public Knowledge’ within Community Planning Partnerships: Reducing Structurally Embedded Inequalities at Local Level?

The concept of ‘public knowledge’, how it is created, its role and influence has become central to understandings of forms of democratic community engagement, which are designed to address economic, social and economic inequalities at local level (Fraser, 1990; Williams, 2008; Bivens et al, 2015...

Case II.1: Crossing the Quadrant: Policy Research and Public Sociology

This chapter explores the relationship between policy research and public sociology. Sociology, as Burawoy (2007a) famously argued, has a responsibility to turn the reflexive knowledge that it produces over to the service of social and political ‘progress’ and has a long tradition of producing ‘really useful knowledge’ to address ‘social problems’. Useful knowledge is subject to dialectical and dialogical processes between diverse publics and sociologists, producing open-ended, morally and politically freighted possibilities that cannot be predetermined. In terms of extra-academic knowledge ...

Class, Gender and Identity: Axes of Structure and Difference in Subaltern Counterpublics

This chapter identifies who are the 'publics' of public sociology education by referring to Nancy Fraser's formulation of the subaltern counterpublic. It explores who constitutes a 'subaltern counterpublic' and produces curricula in public sociology education. It also mentions who is included and excluded by the practice of public sociology education. The chapter analyses the provocation that makes the case that public sociology primarily engages with subaltern counterpublics, such as those engaged in resistance, resilience, or building alternatives to some form of oppression, exploitation, or injustice. It explains what constitutes a 'counter public' that emerges, for the public sociologist, from dialogue with the praxis of those engaged in struggle against structures and representations that oppress, exploit, and exclude.

Dialogue III: Public Sociology Practices, Privatising Universities

As a dialogue, this section engaged a wider range of participants than previous attempts. The email invitation to respond to the provocation and cases generated responses from contributors to four of the six cases, interestingly reflecting the contexts of England and Scotland; early career and recently retired academics, on more or less precarious contracts; and in ancient and modern universities. To what extent is public sociology as educational practice sustainable, even possible, within the neoliberal university? The challenges of engaging with integrity in educational practice within the neoliberal university, however that is mediated and experienced, has prompted an engaging and impassioned debate which will undoubtedly continue. Moreover, the personal cost of public sociology as educational practice has also been articulated. The context of the neoliberal university makes public sociology, and indeed educational practice with any integrity, a constant battle: exhausting, upsetting and demoralising. The medium of email exchange has mediated the emotional content, but the experience of rage, and tears, and indignation, is clearly shared by the dialogical participants....