The other Chicago school - a sociological tradition expropriated and erased

W. E. B. Du Bois at the center: from science, civil rights movement, to Black Lives Matter

“…Deegan () has demonstrated how the pioneering sociology of female sociologists at Hull House have been marginalized by mainstream sociology. Seltzer and Haldar () have also documented the fate of Hull House scholars, including Jane Adams and Florence Kelley, who made pivotal intellectual contributions to modern sociology but were erased from sociology's collective memory because of sexism. These erasures document the need for critical and reflexive sociologies that are forever diligent, ensuring all sociological contributions are considered rather than merely those of mainstream elite sociologists.…”

Social work and sociology/sociology and social work: Peering back and forth

“…The collection by Levin et al (2016), while helpful in some regards, bears several of these four marks. Rightly placing centre-stage the work of people at the University of Chicago a hundred years ago, they unduly generalise from the writing of Robert Park and, in the case of Selzer and Haldar (2016), are too-heavily influenced by a small number of critiques, in particular those by Linda Gordon and Mary Jo Deegan. 7 While Park's rather dramatically expressed negativity towards social work is well-known, such 'story-plucking' leads to an overly homogenous drift in their argument, that gives no attention to the ways in which a significant number of the men in sociology deeply integrated 'social work' in their agenda.…”

“…Abbott, 1931). One problem is that writers such as Selzer and Haldar (2016) do not seem to have had access to the key archival materials in the Special Collections at the University of Chicago. Harriet Bartlett, later an important figure in the development of social work thinking, looked back on her decision to register in the Sociology Department at Chicago rather than the Graduate School of Social Service Administration.…”

“…An influential line of argument has been to the effect that sociologists werepossibly are -almost wholly disregarding of social work. The groundwork for this argument has been brought together recently by Levin et al (2016) and Selzer and Haldar (2016). We will return to this below.…”

The road not taken: the fate of W. E. B. Du Bois's science of society

“…Situated in a niche in the fastest growing city in the world at that time, the main focus of these sociologists was with investigating the problems related to massive population size, immigration and the anonymity of urban life. According to the orthodox version of the department's birth and development, these men for the first three decades of the department's history devoted themselves to developing theories mainly focused on various aspects of life in cities, sometimes assisted by a group of women from Hull House serving as data collectors for their theories (Deegan 1988; Lengermann and Niebrugge‐Brantley ; Seltzer and Haldar ).…”