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.

Sociological Stoicism

This article initiates a conversation between sociological theory and the contemporary revival of Stoicism. Identifying four problems common to historical and contemporary incarnations of Stoicism and tracing them to their shared individualism, I contend that only a sociological Stoicism is viable. I then sketch this sociological Stoicism by redefining key Stoic terms in the collective register; outlining a Stoic logic of case selection; assessing the fit of redefined Stoic concepts and logic of case selection with Marxian, Weberian, and Bourdieuvian frameworks; and developing a Stoic research agenda. These exercises culminate in the proposal to significantly alter sociology’s methods and epistemology.

Policing and Racial (In)Justice in the Media: Newspaper Portrayals of the “Black Lives Matter” Movement

The “Black Lives Matter” movement, centered on fighting racial injustice and inequality (particularly in the criminal justice system), has garnered a great deal of media attention in recent years. Given the relatively recent emergence of the movement, there exists very little scholarly research on media portrayals of the movement. In this article, I report findings from a qualitative examination of major newspaper portrayals of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement between April and August 2016, before the particularly divisive 2016 presidential election. Inductive textual analyses of 131 newspaper articles indicate that, although the movement’s goals were represented positively and from the perspective of members of the movement, the newspapers politicized and sensationalized the movement, and they focused far more on supposed negative consequences of the movement. I discuss these findings by drawing on the “protest paradigm” and the “public nuisance paradigm” in media coverage of social protest movements, arguing that the latter is particularly useful for interpreting portrayals of Black Lives Matter in the prevailing US political climate.

Writing Justice/Performing Injustice: Reflections on Research, Publicity, and the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair

This article discusses issues of public communication. It does so in terms of the ethics of verbatim theatre and public sociology. The issues raised are exemplified through the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair, which has been subject to extensive media reporting and public inquiries of various kinds as well as legal processes. In that sense, there have been various “courts of public opinion” where the affair has been “staged.” In this article, it is understood as an injustice visited upon a community of British Muslims and the teachers and governors responsible for their schools, an injustice that was largely a consequence of provocative media reporting and peremptory government action. The article addresses the role of verbatim theatre in staging the injustice for public reflection and the role of public sociology as a project of writing for justice.

Aesthetic Citizens: Producing Engaged Artists and Civic Art in the Modern University

The connection between the research university and the creative artist has markedly increased during the past half century. As a result, artists are embedded on campuses with the mandate to contribute to the university’s mission and to shape the civic order. Today artists are researchers, theorists, and activists. How did this occur? Based on a two-year ethnography of three master of fine arts programs in the American Midwest, I explain the creation of the discipline of visual arts as academic practitioners have become professionalized, have become able to control their evaluations, and have developed a set of motivating theoretical ideas that lead to participation in civic culture as their practices are linked to social justice and the good society. Artistic practice is not now value free, if it ever was. With the university as a political and a progressive space, students are encouraged to articulate their practices as linked to their responsibilities as aesthetic citizens.

Civic University or University of the Earth? A Call for Intellectual Insurgency

This article reviews an attempt to rejuvenate the concept of the civic university in the United Kingdom through the establishment of the Civic University Commission in 2018 by the UPP Foundation. This review is based on a critical appraisal of the concept of ‘civic’ on which the idea of the civic university relies. The review suggests another formulation for higher education: not the civic university but the university of the earth, built on a convergence of the social and natural sciences and Indigenous knowledges connected to world-wide progressive social movements and political struggles. The university of the earth supports an intellectual insurgency to deal with emergencies confronting humanity and the natural world.

The Chicago School and City Planning

While sociology and urban planning might seem respectively to represent the theory and the practice of knowledge about cities, their relation has usually been distant. British sociology and urban planning were closely related before 1914, but largely because sociology was not a bounded specialty: community investigation methods were common throughout the British reform world, finding particular and successful application via city planning’s focus on housing and industrial location. In the United States, by contrast, sociology early became a clearly-defined academic discipline, and sociological empirical methods, although widely shared, supported only generalized reform demands, because local planning of housing and industry was politically impossible outside industrial communities. Most prewar city planning aimed at middle-class and aesthetic values rather than socially ameliorative community design. Between the wars, British academic sociology continued to develop slowly, and community sociological investigation fell largely to the rapidly developing profession of city planning, whose success and power culminated in the masterful plans for postwar London. In the United States, by contrast, sociology rapidly evolved towards national survey analysis, distancing itself even further from practical application in city planning. In general, then, the theory and practice of knowledge about cities remained separate in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and the United States.

THE SECOND CONVIVIALIST MANIFESTO: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World

As a sequel to the Convivialist Manifesto: A Declaration of Interdependence (2013), The Second Convivialist Manifesto: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World was originally published in French and signed by three hundred intellectuals from thirty-three countries. Convivialism is a broad-based humanist, civic, and political philosophy that spells out the normative principles that sustain the art of living together at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over and against neoliberalism, productivism, and populism, it values relations of cooperation that allow humans to compete with each other without hubris and violence, by taking care of one another and nature.