“…our students are our first and captive public.” I have invoked this phrase throughout my career to frame my motivation and approach to teaching sociology. From the job market, to teaching award nominations, to my tenure and promotion dossier, this statement from Michael Burawoy’s 2004 American Sociological Association (ASA) Presidential Address has served as a starting place to express my own convictions around the potential that the classroom holds for me as a public sociologist. I became a professional sociologist after nearly a decade of work in the non-profit sector with the hope that through research and teaching I might help inform solutions to difficult social problems. Like many sociologists, as Burawoy notes, my “pursuit of academic credentials” stemmed from my “original passion for social justice.” 

Being a professional sociologist, for me, has never been about generating new knowledge for its own sake; rather, I strive to be a translator of that knowledge to others who are in the position to enact change. I’ve found the classroom to be an incredibly rich and rewarding place to do so. I include my students among the ranks of future citizens, leaders, and change makers who will “carry sociology” into many fields that desperately need the sociological imagination. As a teacher, I’m committed to engaging my students in conversation with the theories and research that sociologists generate to explain complex social issues and inform potential solutions. Launching First Publics flows from this commitment and from the hope that others who teach sociology will want to join in a conversation about how teaching is public sociology and what that means for our discipline and our daily work.

I’ve been incredibly lucky throughout my education and career to be taught and mentored by scholars who embrace public sociology and are excellent teachers. My first experience in an introductory sociology course at the University of Iowa in 1993 blew apart many of my assumptions about how the world works and fueled nothing short of an identity crisis – in a good way. My path to a PhD in sociology was not linear, but after some twists and turns, I found my way to the University of Minnesota’s Department of Sociology and Chris Uggen, a public sociologist and co-founder of The Society Pages (TSP) with Doug Hartmann. As a grad student, I joined the graduate student editorial board first for Contexts and then for TSP. This experience gave me a vision for reaching a broader audience with social science research and helped me hone skills in public communication. 

As I moved into a tenure track job at a R1 institution, I began to feel discomfort with two dynamics in the discipline: the undervaluing of teaching and definitions of public sociology that ignore teaching as a vital way of engaging a public audience. The fact that teaching is devalued for professional advancement in academia is no secret. My own department at the University of Georgia is wonderfully supportive of great teaching, and many of my colleagues have won awards for excellence in instruction. Yet for tenure and promotion here and in many academic contexts, it’s clear that research is what matters. I absolutely embrace rigorous and relevant research as crucial to what we do as professional sociologists. But despite Burawoy’s contention that as teachers “we are all potentially public sociologists,” efforts to define and set standards for “what counts” as public sociology overlook or at best take for granted our classrooms as sites for translation and public engagement (see e.g., here and here). Such formulations leave out the context of most professional sociologists’ daily work and ignore the multiple, potential publics that our students represent.

At First Publics, we are driven by a vision for foregrounding the sociology classroom as a site for public sociology. We contend that teaching is public sociology in at least two ways. Teaching is public sociology because for most professional, academic sociologists the classroom is where we are most often and most directly engaging non- (or not-yet) sociologists. When we teach, we are always in some way engaging in conversation about public issues, whether we like it or not. This is not only because as sociologists we often teach on topics of public interest, but also because we enter into dialogue with our students whose lives are always already enmeshed in issues of great consequence. 

Now that I’m past the hurdle of tenure, I’ve found myself wishing for a space for this kind of reflection and conversation. Because I’m collaborative in all I do, I invited my colleague Diana Graizbord to join in the effort to launch First Publics. We want to build a community around teaching as public sociology that engages the practice of teaching beyond “what works” and other instrumental ways of valuing instruction (e.g., awards, CV lines). Together, we’re starting a dialogue and hope that you will join. Consider this your invitation to read with us, engage in the comments, and submit your own Reflections, Dialogues, and Class Notes to further the conversation.