Framing public sociology – the American lens

The Potential for Engaged Scholarship in Academic Careers

“…However, Burawoy was not the first ASA president to suggest the discipline needs to be more concerned with its public impact. As Leslie Hossfeld (2022) highlights in a brief history of public sociology in the United States, the ASA’s first president, Lester Ward, noted in 1906 that sociology was taking an “applied turn”; and in 1988 another ASA president, Herbert Gans, also made a plea for more publicly engaged scholarship (Gans 1989).…”

“…Some of these seminal projects and sociologists include The Hull-House Settlement Project associated with sociologist Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (for a brief history of these projects and other early examples of public sociology, see Hossfeld 2022). Though public sociology by sociologists of color was foundational to the discipline, racism and other forms of oppression have buried much of this early history from the mainstream of sociology.…”