The Future of Public Sociology
Following the 2004 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association at which public sociology was introduced and subsequently discussed, there has continued to be interest in the topic. In the last couple of years, three books have appeared in public sociology: The "Public Sociologies Reader", edited by Judith Blau and Keri Iyall Smith; "Public Sociology: The Contemporary Debate", edited by Larry Nichols; and "Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century", edited by Dan Clawson, et al. The ASA meeting in New York City in 2007 likewise contained many facets of public sociology. Some articles presented include: "Constituting a Practical Public Sociology: Reflections on Participatory Research at the Citizenship Project" by Paul Johnston; "1. A New Public Sociology of Punishment" by Heather Schoenfeld; " What Do Activists Want? Public Sociology for Feminist Scholars of Reproduction" by Danielle Bessett and Christine Morton; and " Developing a public sociology: from lay knowledge to civic intelligence in health impact assessment" by Eva Elliott and Gareth Williams.
Read more about this topic: Public Sociology
Famous quotes containing the words the future, future, public and/or sociology:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“One day my mother called me ... and she said, “Forty-nine million Americans saw you on television tonight. One of them is the father of my future grandchild, but he’s never going to call you because you wore your glasses.””
—Lesley Stahl (b. 1941)
“Once, when lying in bed with no paper at hand, he began to sketch the idea for a new machine on the back of his wife’s nightgown. He asked her if she knew the figure he was drawing. “Yes,” she answered, “the figure of a fool.””
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)