I have to be honest. When I first got the invitation to write an essay for First Publics, I wasn’t much interested. I didn’t think it was for me. The reason is that I had assumed that First Publics—this wonderful new TSP blog spot for sociology instructors—was going to be all about and for sociology […]

Hey, hey, Everybody. Happy summer! We’re writing to you from Los Angeles, California, the site of the annual American Sociological Association meetings—the first in-person gathering of the post-Covid era. We’re not sure how many of you will be able to join us, but whether we see you face-to-face or not, we want all of you—our […]

The article “Community-Engaged Research: What It Is and Why It Matters” appears in the Winter 2022 issue of Footnotes published by the American Sociological Association At least since the movement emerged in the early 2000s, I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of all things public sociology. I edited Contexts magazine from 2008 to 2011 with […]

Next week marks the anniversary of the tragic, now-world infamous police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It has been a year of mourning, of anger, angst, and anxiety, of trauma, of uncertainty and fear. To mark this inauspicous milestone, the Minnesota Historical Society Press has produced a new book entitled Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and […]

Wow, what a week for my TSP co-publisher and partner in public engagement Chris Uggen! It started on Tuesday at the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Barrett. There, Senator Durbin called out Barrett’s contrasting positions on gun rights relative to (racialized) felon disenfranchisement. The senator raised Uggen’s classic AJS article (with Angela Behrens & […]