sociology

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 Chris Uggen, fellow sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, and together we built The Society Pages.org, host of the largest collection of sociology websites on the internet. I helped create a senior capstone course based on service-learning placements for undergraduate majors in sociology at Minnesota. I’ve written op-eds and collaborated with various advocates and organizations, policy initiatives, and media projects. When I was president of the Midwest Sociological Society in 2016, I chose the theme “Sociology and its Publics: The Next Generation” for meetings. But in recent years, the public-facing sociology I’ve found most intriguing and significant is community-engaged research (CER).

I learned most of what I know about CER while helping launch the American Sociological Association’s Sociology Action Network (SAN) and serving on its Advisory Board over the past few years. SAN is the initiative created by Council to help sociologists interested in community-based, pro bono work get connected with small, nonprofit organizations, agencies, projects, and initiatives looking for services, assistance, and support from professional sociologists. The driving idea was that large numbers of academic sociologists who have both the skills and the passion to contribute to concrete, on-the-ground efforts to address social problems and issues don’t always know how to get connected with appropriate organizations and groups, even those in their own communities who could benefit from their energy and expertise. It was almost like we needed a matchmaking service—a sociological Tinder—to help sociologists and organizations find each other. Indeed, one of SAN’s first projects was the creation of this service—thus, the “network” in our title.

In addition to our professional matchmaking work, SAN hosted special sessions at ASA’s Annual Meetings; worked to find and promote links and resources for community-based collaborations; and, thanks to the hard work of Carol Glasser of Minnesota State-Mankato, created an online resource page with links to webinars, best practices, and sample documents for those interested in doing this work. SAN also became the review panel for ASA’s long-standing Community Actions Research Initiative (CARI) grant program, which provides funding for sociologists who are collaborating with community organizations to address social problems.

I have learned a lot in the process. One of those lessons was about how many different organizations, programs, and community leaders dedicated to social problem-solving are out there in the world right now, and how much they need our assistance. Another was how difficult it is for a national professional organization to facilitate networking, connections, and the exchange of information at various local and regional levels. But much of what I’ve learned—from the sociologists I’ve met and worked with on and through my role on the SAN Advisory Board—is about community-engaged research itself, as a distinctive approach to research, knowledge-creation, and public engagement—what it is; who does it and how committed and skilled they are; and why it is such an important part of our discipline, its legacies, and its traditions. That’s what I’d like to share briefly with you here.

Definitions

Let me begin with the usual proviso that what we call “community-engaged research” can be defined in many different ways and often goes by several different names—community-based scholarship; participatory action research; research-practice partnerships; or collaborative social justice research. Some see it as a branch of applied sociology, others as its own distinct thing. But whatever we call it, this approach to research and sociology refers to initiatives that involve some kind of mutually beneficial collaboration among academic researchers and folks from outside of the academy who are collecting data, offering programs, or creating services that speak to the needs of specific communities and target populations on the ground.

The nature of these relationships and the kinds of contributions sociologists make to these collaborative projects vary widely. Engagement can range from consultation on vision and mission to data collection and needs-assessment using surveys, interviews, or focus groups. It can include advising on program design and policy development as well as conducting program evaluations and assessments. It also often involves some type of public or legislative advocacy or public communication (via op-eds, position papers, or formal reports). Community-based work spans the gamut of sociological methods and subfields, and can refer to policies, programs, and initiatives that are local and issue-specific, as well as those that are broader and more encompassing. Many sociologists who do this work operate at multiple levels and across a range of areas all at once.

Since I came to understand community-engaged scholarship in the context of public sociology, I find it useful to clarify the distinctions between the two as well. Public sociology, or publicly engaged sociology as I prefer to call it, refers to any sociological research, writing, and work happening outside of the academy. Among the characteristics and principles that distinguish community-based sociology from other forms of public scholarship are that it is oriented not only to the dissemination and application of general knowledge, but also to the construction of new knowledge, ideas, and approaches. In addition, the principles of relationship-building, reciprocity, and responsibility are far more “up front” and indeed imperative in this collaborative work than other, more standard forms of public engagement. And finally, community-based work can involve advocacy, but is not actually, or even necessarily, normative. Indeed, oftentimes participatory action research involves surprisingly basic and conventional social theories, data, and methodological approaches, albeit applied and adapted to unique cases and local contexts that help develop or improve programs that can make a difference in the lives of individuals and communities.

For what it is worth, the conception of public sociology that I have employed here is a bit broader than Michael Burawoy’s original definitions (Hartmann 2017) in that it includes sociology that employs instrumental as well as reflexive (or critical) knowledge—that is, it can be policy oriented or advocacy centered, or even both. The key thing for me is not what kind of sociological research and knowledge we are talking about, and not whether its politics are oriented toward reform or more radical change, or something else—only that we are talking about any and all sociology that happens outside of the academy, which is precisely what makes community-engaged research, with all of its various manifestations and forms, so compelling.

Significance

So, why should we care about this unique branch or brand of sociology? Why should those of us who don’t do community-based research ourselves be interested in any of this? There are many reasons that come to mind, and intellectual and scholarly benefits are at the top of my list.

Sociology is a discipline in need of constant reinvention and renewal. Working with concrete, community-based initiatives, organizations, and advocates provides academic sociologists with opportunities to put our theories and methods to the test—to assess how they vary in different contexts and conditions, to observe new developments in the world, and to identify underlying mechanisms and multiple modes of understanding and engaging the world. Community-engaged work helps us understand the applications and implications of our knowledge, and even develop new knowledge and theories about the social world. Even more, community-engaged work provides real-world, empirical cases from which to reflect seriously on some of the biggest and most fundamental questions of the discipline and on knowledge construction more generally: How is knowledge produced? Who produces it? How is it used? And who benefits—or doesn’t?

Community-engaged research requires us to grapple with these matters of epistemology and ontology. It forces us into needed reflection on the complexities of objectivity, positionality, and reflexivity, the constructedness of science, and the contextuality and utility of knowledge. Research that is fundamentally embedded in, and engaged with, communities also helps us to see how sociology can be complicit with power and privilege, as well as a source of social progress and change.

Framed as such, it is important to emphasize how many of the time-honored, ivory tower assumptions and conceits about our own work—our status as intellectuals and researchers and our role in the world—can be turned on their head by community-engaged research. In collaborating and coordinating with others, we realize that much of the work is not so much what we have to give (or “dole out”) to them, but rather how much we don’t know—that is, how much we sociologists have to learn from those doing the work of society right there on the ground, every day, without fanfare, recognition, or great reward.

There are practical and professional considerations here as well. CER is especially attractive to many graduate students in our discipline. For some sociology graduate students, community-based research provides a way to get started on research that can be personally rewarding, as well as lead to theses, dissertations, or other, longer-term projects. For others, it provides numerous and immediate opportunities for making good on their visions of using sociological theory and research to help solve social problems or address injustices—the very reasons many came to our field in the first place. Still other graduate students, when faced with the uncertainties of the job market and the changing nature of work in higher education, simply see better, more meaningful professional prospects in this work than elsewhere.

And it isn’t just graduate students. A large and increasingly diverse number of scholars in our field also care about this kind of work and do it regularly, even primarily. These are our colleagues, classmates, and students, our friends, and potential collaborators and coauthors. And there are more community-based researchers than those of us at elite doctoral universities with very high research activity may realize. This was one lesson I learned and a dominant theme during my time in the leadership at the Midwest Sociological Society. Action-oriented, community-based research was perhaps the most common and most meaningful kind of scholarship in which many of my colleagues at regional universities, liberal arts institutions, and community colleges were engaged. These are academic sociologists who do a lot of teaching yet are also committed to both scholarly research and giving back to their communities. In a world where time and energy are limited, community-engaged work provides an avenue to make good on all the goals, demands, and rewards of being an academic—organically and simultaneously.

Many questions about community-engaged sociology remain ahead:

• What resources or support should ASA be developing and providing to our members interested in doing community-based work?
• Do we need new outlets or venues, or even a journal, to better support, promote, and coordinate this work and sociologists doing this kind of work—and ultimately to bring that work closer to the center of the discipline?
• What kinds of course work and resources are necessary to train graduate students to do this work?
• How do we properly recognize and reward this work in our discipline and in the academy more generally when it comes to things like hiring, tenure and promotion, and merit?

Some of these questions will be addressed by other articles in this issue of Footnotes; others will remain unanswered for now. But there is no doubt in my mind that how we answer these questions—and the extent to which we support and facilitate and understand community-based research—is a crucial task for our discipline and its future.

Friday was the final TSP Board meeting for long-time member and graduate editor Allison Nobles. Allison marked the occasion with some remarkably candid and heartfelt reflections of her time on TSP, which she generously agreed to share with our readers. Although a bit more backstage than our usual TSP fare, we offer Allison’s remarks because they are such a powerful tribute to the special group of graduate students who make TSP possible–AND because it’s more important than ever to share such moments of gratitude, grace, and togetherness with each other in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.

— TSP Editors Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen

In the spring semester of my first year in grad school, in 2015, several of my cohort-mates joined The Society Pages (TSP). I tried to pretend not to be interested, but in reality, I was super jealous. I remember one morningI heard the TSP crew laughing from another room. It just sounded like everyone was having a great time. Plus, my cohort-mates were actually writing stuff in their first year of grad school and sharing it all over facebook — “look at this new thing I wrote!” 

I knew I had to get in there. 

Essentially, The Society Pages  is a website where grad students (and others) write stuff about sociological research — what new research is coming out, how sociology can speak to current events, and so on. But it’s much, much more than that. TSP supplies you with all sorts of intangible skills and social connections that go beyond its purpose on paper. 

For me, TSP was a community, a space where I found friendship and support, and a place where I learned I had value. Maybe that sounds harsh — but as a grad student in my early 20s, constantly struggling with imposter syndrome and trying to figure out my place in the world, I seriously needed that validation. Through my time with TSP, I learned that my writing is worth reading, that people actually want to know my opinions, that they cherish my friendship, and that they value my leadership. 

I also learned a lot about the field of sociology, about academia, and I picked up quite a few useful skills along the way. Sociology is HUGE, diverse, and I learned that mostly, I like all of it. It doesn’t have to be boring — there’s plenty of space for creativity in sociology — and it doesn’t have to be jargony or confusing for the sake of being confusing. In my time at TSP, I came to truly value public sociology and doing public sociology in a way that can be understood by people who don’t know much about it. 

Here’s another big thing I learned: my colleagues are freaking awesome. When you’re in grad school, it’s hard to get a sense of your fellow grad students’ talents, skills, and ambitions (again, see imposter syndrome). You often don’t even get to read anything they’ve written until it’s published in a journal. In TSP, you not only get to see people write stuff pretty often, you get to workshop their writing during Friday meetings, hear their creative ideas in brainstorming sessions, and listen to why they are passionate about particular research during the days we pitch discovery articles. And if you pay attention, you also learn what your colleagues are good at: you see who is great at rephrasing things other people say, who asks really detailed questions you never would have thought of, who sees the “big picture,” who can type and talk at the same time, who gives constructive yet supportive feedback, who can teach you how to do a literature search without making you feel like a kindergartener, and whose energy makes everyone else perk up. To all of my colleagues during my time at TSP, I’m so glad I got to learn about you.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I spent nearly my whole term as grad student editor suffering some pretty serious and persistent concussion symptoms. I spend a lot of time thinking about how much more I could have done if that wasn’t the case, how much more I could have written, the new blogs I could have started, the ideas that never came to fruition. But I’m going to trust my very smart colleagues who have told me numerous times what a good job I’ve done as editor — and I know from the way they say it there isn’t an asterisk that says “even though you had a brain injury.” 

I’ve never told anyone this, but I think in some ways TSP saved me during the past two years. Sure, maybe sometimes I pushed myself too hard or tried to do more than my brain was capable of because I was editor and felt like I couldn’t take a break. But I probably would have done that no matter what. TSP gave me a supportive space to still feel productive — something I desperately needed (see definition of grad student). It also kept me connected to people. I wasn’t able to attend very many things in the department at that time or really go out and do anything (I was social distancing before it was cool). TSP was my community. I showed up every Friday for our board meeting — often wearing dark sunglasses and a floppy hat — knowing I would be greeted with smiles, hugs, and sometimes bagels. 

For all of those things and more, I say thank you.

We think of the Society Pages as a place for social scientists to connect with public issues and audiences. Sociology’s professional organization, the American Sociological Association, has a new initiative to connect sociologists to other organizations in an exciting way.

The Sociology Action Network (or SAN ) will match ASA members who are interested in volunteering their sociological expertise with not-for-profit organizations in need of technical assistance. If you or your organization are intrigued by this possibility, the project is up and running so the time is now!

SAN volunteers help organizations in many ways, including conducting needs assessments and program evaluations, reviewing technical reports, writing grants, and providing training.  In the process of helping a local organization achieve their goals, you will be helping to expand the public’s understanding of sociology and its value to society. 

Sign up here to become a SAN volunteer today. And/or learn more about the initiative by coming to the SAN workshop at the upcoming 2019 Annual Meetings in New York. (Full disclosure: Doug is on the advisory board and will be on the panel in August, and Chris was a member of the ASA council that approved the project). The more, the merrier — and the more meaningful use of your sociological knowledge and skills.

Sociologists are uniquely positioned to pull together research and provide perspective on almost any of the major problems that confront the human species today—from climate change to terrorism and war, inequality, food scarcity, human rights, criminal justice policies. Anything. You name it, there are sociologists working on it and writing about it and helping large public audiences to understand what we are up against. I’ve believed that at least since I was editor of Contexts, and probably long before that.

One example I’ve given numerous times over the past couple of years is an article Eric Klinenberg wrote for The New Yorker in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. It called attention to how unprepared most American cities are for the effects of climate change. Klinenberg’s piece was big picture and beautifully written. It also synthesized research findings from other fields (including the natural sciences) and packaged them in a way that not only made the work coherent, but really highlighted its implications for citizens and social life (for an overview from our Clippings team, click here.)

This week brings a few more wonderful examples. One comes from the most recent class of MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, Matt Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard. Writing in The New Yorker (again!—it was only about a year ago that I christened the magazine “champion of serious sociology“), Desmond helps draw our attention to the crisis in housing and evictions that is so deeply implicated in the problems of urban policy, crime, and poverty all across the country:

For decades, social scientists, journalists, and policymakers have focused on jobs, public assistance, parenting, and mass incarceration as the central problems faced by the American poor, overlooking just how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers, or pastors. But nearly everyone has a landlord.

“For many poor Americans,” he writes with authority and conviction, “eviction never ends.”

And then there’s Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis’s reborn sociology department. Drawing on the pioneering work of Arlie Hochschild (along with Minnesota’s own Jennifer Pierce and Millsaps College’s Louwanda Evans), Wingfield writes in The Atlantic about the consequences of the emotional labor done by women in the service industry, “How Service with a Smile Takes a Toll on Women.”

Writing—and writers—like this show off many things, not least of which is the synthesizing and contextualizing ability that characterizes the discipline of sociology, that enterprise I told my intro students last night is can be called the “big tent” of the social sciences.

We sociologists tend to have a chip on our shoulder. We tend to think—not without substantial evidence, of course—that our research and ideas are not particularly visible or influential in the public realm, both in general and especially in comparison to our social science cousins. Maybe we should all be reading The New Yorker. It seems like we’ve got a few champions over there.

Exhibit A: A few weeks back, for example, the magazine ran an intriguing and insightful profile of Howie Becker. This was not a fluff piece. Inspired by Becker’s current popularity among a certain set of French sociologists in Paris (where the 86-year-old Becker now spends a great deal of his time), Adam Gopnik’s* article thoughtfully walks readers through Becker’s intellectual career and distinctive way of thinking about deviance, culture, and collective activity. This wonderfully written piece serves, I think, not only to introduce a broad, general audience of readers to one of the truly iconic (and iconoclastic) figures in sociology and his uniquely sociological worldview. More than this, it frames and situates Becker’s work in the broader history and current debates of the field in a subtle, sophisticated way that I believe proves provocative and edifying no matter how much we may already know and think about the discipline and Becker’s contributions to it. (For you insiders: Becker directs a zinger or two at Pierre Bourdieu along the way.)

Exhibit B: Last May, a review of recent books on office design by Jill Lepore was framed around a discussion of C. Wright Mills’s classic 1951 study White Collar. Although ostensibly about new studies of the new trends in office work, this review, at least in my reading, seems more fascinated with and driven by what Mills and his sociological perspective contribute to our understanding of life and work and contemporary work culture than anything written recently from more specialized scholars and fields. more...

Welcome back! Wait, many of you never went anywhere. You’ve been reading TSP all summer. You guys have been great. It was me who’s been on hiatus, buried in book writing among other things. (One of those manuscripts, on migration with Syed Ali, is done; another, my long-suffering study of midnight basketball, is close… very close.) Anyway, with the start of a new academic year, I always feel a little like Mr. Kotter.

I am excited about the year ahead. On the teaching front, I’ll be offering—for the first time—a new graduate seminar on “great books” in sociology, a course that grew out of a few posts I did wrote winter, right here on The Society Pages. In terms of the website, we’ve got a great new graduate student board shaping up and we are just about ready to unveil a facelift for TSP (we think it’s pretty sweet).

One of our goals for The Society Pages this year, both online and in our social media, is to do a better job of covering the field of sociology taken as a whole. That’s no easy task. Some of this will involve bringing in more content on topics where there is a lot of great sociological research and writing, but that hasn’t been represented well on our site to date: for example, education, health and medicine, population studies. But doing a better job of covering the field also includes bringing in types of research that are also difficult to find on the web, but needed more than ever: basic social facts, emerging demographic trends, and empirical evaluations of public policy and conventional wisdom. For reasons that aren’t too hard to figure, there’s a lot of opinion and editorializing online, but not nearly so much accumulation and reporting of social facts and useful empirical information.

As fate would have it, our local newspaper ran two big pieces on the OpinionExchange page this very morning that seem to underscore these points and goals. One was about “the situation” in Ferguson, the other about the proliferation of flawed studies—what the author calls “pop-sociology and pop-psychology” in the news and in our social media streams. The former argued the need for more information before taking stands on Mike Brown’s death and its aftermath (though it didn’t have much to say about the broader social contexts and public policies sociologists have focused on in recent weeks). The latter was about how scholars in certain fields still seem to misunderstand the difference between correlation and causation. Specifics aside, both ran under the subtitle: “We need more facts.” We here at TSP couldn’t agree more—and will do our best to help provide those in the weeks and months ahead.

—–

A few resources for the interested reader hoping for a little social science around that “Ferguson situation”:

“Reflecting on Ferguson? There’s Research on That!”

“Social Fact: The Homicide Divide.”

“Social Fact: Death—Not the Great Equalizer?”

“Explaining and Eliminating Racial Profiling.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education: “How Professors in St. Louis are Teaching the Lessons of Ferguson’s Unrest.”

The Washington Post Wonkblog: “How Decades of Criminal Records Hold Back Towns Like Ferguson.”

“The Average White American’s Social Network is 1% Black.”

“What Are Rappers Really Saying About the Police?”

“The Role of Empathy in Crime, Policing, and Justice.”

“Failing to Understand When Non-White People Distrust the Police.”

“How Targeted Deterrence Helps Police Reduce Gun Deaths.”

“Who Would You Shoot?”

“Roundtable: Social Scientists Studying Social Movements.”

“Roundtable: The Revolutions Will Not Be Globalized?”

“Reading the Camouflage: ‘You Are Now Enemy Combatants’.“

Spring break brings time for reflection. Last week during my days at home in Minnesota (where it still does not feel like spring), I spent a little time reflecting on what we’ve learned about sociology in doing The Society Pages. And in that process, I came across this line, which can be found in the “About Us” that runs in the banner on our home page: “we’re talking about society with society.”

I haven’t always been enamored with this phrase. In the past, it has read to me as a bit trite, and probably kind of functionalist. Truth be told, I’ve tried to edit it out of existence several times. But somehow—largely, I think, due to the insistence of our masterful associate editor and coordinating producer Letta Page*—it has hung around, and recently, it has begun to grow on me. Part of its emerging appeal is that I have had folks use it to introduce me and TSP at several public events recently. Clearly it works, it has appeal. It means something. Why is that? What is that?

Besides the catchy turn of phrase, I think the reason it resonates is because it stands in contrast to the usual “detached ivory tower intellectual.” It signals a vision of sociology and scholarly activity that is embedded and engaged in the worlds and with the people that it studies—or, even better, engaged and involved in the communities of which it is part and parcel.

One of the readings that has been a staple of the senior capstone sociology course I teach regularly has been a piece from Minnesota public affairs scholar Harry Boyte. The basic gist is that social scientists should not think of themselves as legislators (who come from on-high, bearing truth to the people), but  as interpreters, whose job it is to produce information and ideas that can enrich public discussion and policy. Even better, they should be part of those processes of deliberation and public policy formation. In other words,  social studies scholars should understand ourselves as part of the public, working with everyone else to refine our understandings of the worlds we all share and live in together.

This more involved, reflective orientation isn’t just about producing a more accessible and useful sociology for society (which we talk about a lot here at TSP), but actually—in its engagement with real people in the social world—a better sociological understanding of society itself. In short, it’s about creating a better sociology.

*I knew he’d come around. –Ed.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

Such was the rather awkward beginning of a recent conversation I had with a friend in the social sciences—let’s call him “Norbert”—here at the University of Minnesota. Even more disconcerting, it turned out that Norbert (who is not a sociologist by training) was talking about my Editor’s Desk post from a week or so ago, the one trying to specify the distinctive elements of the sociological imagination. It’s not that I minded being challenged—I actually thrive on the thrust and parry of intellectual discussion and debate. It was more that I didn’t see it coming. Aside from a little kerfuffle about wholism and holism, the post had circulated fairly widely and had generated a number of complementary comments and supportive emails. more...

This week, on The Editors’ Desk*, Doug Hartmann enumerated and tried to define** six elements of the sociological worldview. Elsewhere on The Society Pages, our many contributors worked to demonstrate that worldview—enjoy!

*That’s right: we all share one desk. It’s adorable. Possibly even adorkable.

**See what I did there? The man never met a conjunction he didn’t like. more...

At the beginning of this academic year, Chris and I set a goal: we wanted The Society Pages to do a better job of representing the field of sociology  as a whole. This aim is driven by our sense that the site does a great job in certain areas and specialties (race, gender, and sexuality, for example), but not so much in others. In addition, much of our content tends to be more oriented toward commentary, advocacy, and critique than the facts, empirical data, explanations, and discoveries which are so crucial to the research orientation and contributions of the field. We’ve made some great progress on these fronts, especially with building the topical beat pages (which we will unveil soon), revitalizing the Reading List, and launching the new There’s Research on That! feature. But there is still work to be done. In addition to these innovations—actually, as a supplement to them—we want to push for a renewed emphasis on developing content and material that does a better job of identifying, illustrating, and advocating for distinctly sociological approaches and perspectives to the study of human life. more...