In higher education, instructors are encouraged to incorporate service-learning into their curricula— activities that provide the chance for students to assist local organizations and learn while they do so. Typical service-learning can run the gamut: anything from a small trip to a community garden to help weed while learning about food systems to holding a survey to assist the local cultural center’s seasonal programming. Service-learning cultivates a sense of civic responsibility within students that enhances what’s being learned in the classroom, increases students’ emotional support, and so on. It also increases student retention by cultivating their connections with the university and local community— something many of us are concerned with, given decreasing enrollment and retention on a national scale.

Instructors also face pressures to hone students’ saleable skills as they prepare to enter an ever-technologizing job market. Most universities push programs to advertise themselves in terms of the jobs a graduate may attain and how the program caters to those potentials. My department, for example, notes possible careers on the front page of our website—just to underscore our focus on this facet. And we are not alone.

Compounding these demands is a growing call from our field to engage more with the public—to expand the boundaries of our work and the discipline itself. To do public sociology. 

With these pressures in mind, I developed a class project that could address all of these items: service-learning, saleable skills, and public sociology. Students receive hands-on training as they work with a local organization, and then create informative digital, print, in-person, and/or media content about that work to share with the public.

How can we kill all three birds with one stone? Expansive creativity.

Expansive creativity, I argue, is the bedrock for a project of this sort. What I mean is that if we instructors expand our ideas of what service-learning projects look like through incorporation of technology and art, we can create new opportunities for our students to engage with the public. So, rather than service-learning that focuses solely on assessments and volunteer work, consider the incorporation of:

• Recording podcasts
• Holding teach-ins
• Inviting non-traditional community speakers for a talk series
• Filming videos to host on streaming sites
• Creating social media campaigns
• Drafting digital and print pamphlets
• Developing project websites
• Organizing a community-based mini-research conference
• Constructing an art installation
• Performing dramatic storytelling
• Writing and sharing poetry
• Creating a graphic novel

By encouraging students to produce creative public work, they not only share the collaborative accomplishments they achieved alongside local organizations (who typically appreciate the promotion), but do so in a manner that fits the modern appetites of their generation and beyond. This is the space in which informative dialogues can be initiated with those that may not have been exposed to certain ideas or facts, where opinions can be changed, where students can become active participants in community discourse, and where marketable skills come into play. Students’ final products can be cited on resumes—examples of their growing abilities.

I created a worksheet to help instructors interested in this sort of project plan their scope, goals, and logistics. I also encourage you to explore an example of a project that my 300-level Criminology class completed in Spring 2023 with the East Hawai’i Cultural Center (EHCC), titled “Community Perspectives on Policing.” In addition to conducting a community-based study on perspectives on policing at the behest of EHCC—where students learned research design and partook in hands-on survey-interviews and data analysis— the class created a video, website, brochure, and gave a televised public talk about their findings, all of which garnered media attention and provided community feedback to the players in our local criminal justice system.

We can do service-learning, public sociology, and impart saleable skills all at the same time in a meaningful way in our classrooms– meaningful to our students, to our local communities, and to ourselves. We just need to be creative.

Ellen T. Meiser is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, and a co-creator and co-host of The Social Breakdown, the sociology podcast nobody wants, but everybody needs.

Intro to Sociology classes are frequently the first and only contact many students will have with sociology, which also makes Intro textbooks an important platform for public sociology engagement. In this Dialogues series, we interviewed four authors of Intro to Sociology textbooks and asked them to explore how their textbooks can facilitate students’ first encounter with sociology while also promoting the reflection and practice of public sociology. In this third interview, we spoke to Dr. Lisa Wade, the author of Terrible Magnificent Sociology, an Intro to Sociology textbook published by W.W. Norton. Check the first two interviews for this series here.

First Publics: We’ve read some of the pieces you and Norton have written about the textbook, but we wanted to hear from you firsthand. What motivated you to write Terrible Magnificent Sociology? What were your goals for this book?

Lisa Wade: The marketing materials have done a pretty good job of packaging my story, but that story is true! I’m a first-generation college student. My extended family is all rural. My mom went to a one-room schoolhouse through middle school. My dad was drafted into the Vietnam War out of high school, when my mom married him. I didn’t grow up on the farm, but I didn’t feel that far off it.

Being first-generation, I wasn’t sure I’d actually make it through college. I had so little cultural capital that, when I took the SAT, I didn’t know what it was for. When I applied to colleges, I just applied to the ones on the beach. I didn’t even like the beach! I just didn’t know any other way to discern one school from another. I had no information, no college counseling, and my parents couldn’t help me. I got into one college, thank goodness, UC Santa Barbara, and when my parents dropped me off to start my first year, it was the first time I’d ever stepped foot on a college campus. I was scared. 

I took Sociology 101 that year, and that scared me more. As we know, sociology is about understanding the things outside of us that are affecting our lives. My prospects didn’t look so great from that point of view. Sociology was telling me that no matter how hard I worked, I wasn’t well positioned to make it. And working hard was all I had. Mentally, I just couldn’t accept what I was hearing. 

My sophomore year of college was also the peak of the HIV epidemic in the United States, and that was really terrifying, too. At that time, most everyone who contracted HIV died. I was already getting involved in sexuality activism on campus and so I was out begging my peers to wear condoms. But condoms break and monogamous partners aren’t always faithful. That was scary, too. In the same way, I thought, if I just practice safer sex, I’ll be okay. But would I?

Sociology responds to these kind of reassurances – about the benefits of working hard and wearing condoms – with “Well, maybe.”  I just couldn’t handle that information as a young person. So, Sociology 101 was my worst grade in college (I didn’t want to put the “correct” answers on the tests, even if I knew them). I majored in philosophy. It’s overconfidence about truth with a capital T was reassuring.

Much later, as my career in sociology was maturing and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, that early experience of being frightened away from sociology – especially given how much I came to love it – was still quite present for me. I worried that experiences like mine could scare people off of sociology forever. So, I wanted to write an intro to sociology that acknowledged that and was organized around the kind of emotional work we need to do to make sociology accessible. And one way to do that, of course, was to lean into how wonderful it is, right? So let’s go ahead and feel all the scary things and face them head-on – all of what C. Wright Mills calls “terrible” – but let’s also bring forward, in a heavy-handed way, all the “magnificent” things about sociology. And that, of course, is the origin of the title, thanks to Mills. 

That was a really big part of the motivation, and a big part of how I thought to write a book that would be accessible to first-gen students like myself, and others who are marginalized in academia. I did this not by making the ideas simple, but by making them irresistible. I thought I could help students push themselves to overcome some of their fears of higher ed and the deprivations of their previous educational experience if I made the book worth reading. If it was rewarding emotionally, intellectually, and pragmatically, this would inspire students to keep coming back to it all semester.

First Publics: Thank you for sharing that biography of the book. You mentioned how you hope the students will encounter the book. How else do you hope the book will be used by students and instructors? 

Lisa Wade: While I was writing, I assumed that most students would take one sociology class, just this one. Of course, I want them to take all the sociology classes! But I assumed not, and I wanted them to leave this one class feeling empowered. 

I noticed that a lot of introductory texts had a very inspiring conclusion, but I wanted to do a little better than that. 

First, I tried to empower by giving students real knowledge about how harm is done in and by society. One of the totally new chapters in my book is on the social structure. Most books discuss the idea briefly in an introduction to a section on social institutions, but I felt we needed a whole chapter because it’s one of the most difficult concepts in sociology to understand, and also one of the most important. This chapter is paired with another innovative chapter called “Elite Power,” which is all about the elites that so often go unscrutinized: Who are these people? How do they grasp power? How do they wield it? And how do they legitimate it? 

Now, those two chapters don’t sound very inspiring, but I think knowledge is power, so the book is really giving students an understanding, not just that there are these dark clouds over some people’s lives, but about what exactly is going on. 

Then, in the last three chapters of the book, I lean very heavily into showing that people are already working hard on making the world a better place. After “Elite Power” is “Power to the People,” a social movement chapter where I highlight many examples of young people who are doing amazing things in our society. And it’s really easy to show a very diverse range of young people, because that’s often who is at the front lines of these fights. In that chapter, I start with Frances Fox Piven’s idea of “interdependent power,” which is the power of non-cooperation. I’m trying to show rather than just tell them that they have much power, even as individuals, but especially together.

The chapter before the conclusion is called “Our Future on Earth,” and it is the chapter in which I introduce the idea of globalization and world systems theory. But it’s also heavily organized around the climate crisis and climate activism. That is a perfect example of how young people are literally changing the world. I will admit to tearing up every so often when writing that chapter. Young people are genuinely inspiring.

First Publics: Great! How do you think textbooks in general and your textbook specifically can help teachers and students practice public sociology? How does that connection happen? And how do you perceive your book doing that?

Lisa Wade: I think one of the biggest obstacles to taking our sociological imagination out into the world and making change is just overwhelm. There are a thousand things we want to do, and no time to do any of them. Our students — even mine who are very privileged — are feeling overwhelmed, as they sign up for too many clubs and take too many classes and feel fearful about whether they’re gonna do enough in college to make them stand out on the other side. 

But of course, those aren’t the typical college students. The typical college student is a parent, or they’re taking care of their parents or siblings, or they’re working to pay their own tuition, or they’re helping someone else get through school. And that’s the challenge: I think that, in some ways, it’s a lot easier to inspire people than it is for inspired people to find time. 

So, one thing I’ve decided to do for the second edition is include a supplemental chapter that poses answers to the question, “What now?” Rather than saying, “Oh, Michelle Obama was a sociology major, you could be too,” or “Here’s something you can do with a sociology major”, my idea is to inspire students to embrace sociology at whatever level they can. The first level is guidance about how to just keep thinking sociologically. The next level would be like, “Okay, maybe you want to be a nurse or a paralegal or start a business. What’s one more sociology class you could take that would help you be more sociological in that occupation?” And so on. I am trying to think about overwhelm and how I can meet students where they are in terms of growing their capacity to build sociology into their lives. 

First Publics: We’ve been thinking about the kind of challenges involved in writing a textbook with the goal of public sociology in mind. Helping students deal with overwhelm is surely one of these challenges. What other kinds of challenges did you consider? 

Lisa Wade: I worked hard to expand the scope of students who would feel like they belonged in sociology, not just as research subjects but as researchers. I believe I’m the first author to write an intro sociology book that breaks out of the canon of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. They, of course, appear in the book, and they get lots of kudos and attention, as well as they should. But I don’t set them apart from the many other scholars of the same era who made important contributions to sociology. Typically, you would see DuBois and Jane Addams, maybe, highlighted in the theory chapter alongside a mea culpa. I don’t do that. They’re just in the book. And so are Anna Julia Cooper, Harriet Martineau, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Oliver Cox, Marianne Weber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. 

And so, if you read my book, you get the sense from the beginning that sociology is an inclusive field. I do address our own history of exclusion in the supplemental material on the evolution of the field, but I decided that at some point we had to start presenting the field it always should have been. 

Of course, I include a diverse set of contemporary sociologists, too. I tried to make sure that no matter who you are – if you were trans, an immigrant, a single mom, a person with disabilities – there would be a sociologist profiled who you could identify with. 

Then, I foreground standpoint theory. I try to make it clear, both explicitly and subtly, that difference is an epistemic resource. I say so in the introduction. I introduce standpoint theory, and I argue that we need everybody involved in sociology if we want to get to the truth. But also, throughout the book, whenever I introduce a scholar, I spend a short paragraph or two giving some information about that person that ties into their insight. 

So, for example, Charles Horton Cooley was a shy, awkward child with very high-achieving parents who had very high expectations for him. He felt very intimidated by their gaze. Arguably that translated into his capacity to come up with his idea of a “looking-glass self.” I do that throughout the book. I say, “Sure, maybe being Black helped W.E.B. Du Bois see things that other people couldn’t see, and maybe being a woman helped Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the same way, but also being shy and awkward helped Charles Horton Cooley, or being from a family that was anxious about their reputation helped Goffman come up with “impression management,” and so on and so forth. I tried to make clear the value of everyone’s perspective by constantly showing throughout the book that everybody’s perspective is in fact really valuable. 

That was a really big part of the motivation, and a big part of how I thought to write a book that would be accessible to first-gen students like myself, and others who are marginalized in academia. I did this not by making the ideas simple, but by making them irresistible.

– Lisa Wade

First Publics: Did you face any other political or practical challenges in writing a textbook with this kind of public sociology orientation in mind? What was it like to write the book?

Lisa Wade: It’s amazing! It’s wonderful! I love writing, and I love sociology, and I love teaching. The writing process was a delight, and I hope that my enthusiasm comes across. I loved finding new and exciting ways to describe something or discovering a fresh and effective example. I was kind of sad when I was done! 

The thing I worried about the most was the price. Currently, our hard copy is $74 and our ebook is $37. I don’t think that’s too bad. I wish it were better, but I’ve learned a lot more about what Norton does to help students learn, help faculty teach, and make classes fun, and easy, and productive. I understand that that takes a lot of effort and work. So, I know the book has to cost something, but I did try to make sure that it was as affordable as possible.

First Publics: Great! And are you working on the next edition now?

Lisa Wade: Yes! It takes a long time to revise it when you have twelve chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and three supplemental chapters! Most Intro books are on a two-year revision schedule, but we’re on a three-year schedule. We feel like the book has more staying power because I tried to use timeless examples rather than ones closely tracking pop culture. In revisions, we’re integrating methods more deeply into every chapter and trying to do more around decolonization in addition to de-canonization. We’re just at the beginning. We’re excited, but it is going to be a while before anyone sees it. 

First Publics:  Do you have anything else that you would like to add? Anything else you’d like our readers to know?

Lisa Wade: I just wanted to thank you all for doing this! And I hope your project helps replace some of the cynicism about textbooks with enthusiasm. I think that, as college has become more expensive, textbooks have been a scapegoat for problems of affordability. And many are obviously too expensive. But I also think a well-written and well-supported textbook can be an incredible pedagogical tool, especially in intro classes. So, I’m going to keep pouring love into Terrible Magnificent Sociology and hoping that it makes a difference. 

Lisa Wade is an Associate Professor at Tulane University with appointments in Sociology, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Newcomb Institute. She is the author of American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus; an introduction to sociology titled Terrible Magnificent Sociology; a sociology of gender textbook, Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions, with Myra Marx Ferree; and numerous other research publications. Her newest project documents undergraduate social life during the pre-vaccine pandemic. As a public-facing scholar, Lisa works to make her and others’ scholarship engaging to a public audience. You can find her online at lisa-wade.com and on Threads at @lisawadephd. 

Intro to Sociology classes are frequently the first and only contact many students will have with sociology, which also makes Intro textbooks an important platform for public sociology engagement. In this Dialogues series, we interviewed four authors of Intro to Sociology textbooks and asked them to explore how their textbooks can facilitate students’ first encounter with sociology while also promoting the reflection and practice of public sociology. In this second interview, we spoke to Dr. Shamus Khan, one of the editors of A Sociology Experiment, an online Intro to Sociology textbook published by CritReview. Check the first interview for this series here.

First Publics: Tell us about your motivation to write and edit an Intro to Sociology textbook. What were your goals and what do you hope the textbook will accomplish?

Shamus Khan: It’s hard for me to just describe it as my goals because I did this project with Pat Sharkey and Gwen Sharp. Although Pat Sharkey and I spearheaded the initial design, Gwen Sharp was really key to execution, which is the hardest part. Ideas are easy, execution is hard. Our idea was that textbooks had variable quality and were too expensive. They were driven primarily by a profit motive, owned, designed and operated by large corporations that didn’t have the interests of students or faculty at heart. For students, we wanted to prioritize providing the highest quality presentation up-to-date with the latest research; it was also essential to be truly financially accessible. For faculty, we knew we had to provide a low barrier to entry, particularly for faculty who are teaching pretty considerable loads. You know, making sure that things like lecture slides, exercises, everything was provided with a textbook. That ended up being half of the work: half of it is writing the chapter, and then half of it is producing the things for faculty to use. 

Pat and I started with this idea that textbooks cost a hundred dollars, of which 90 go to the publisher in a variety of ways, and that students really get the short end of the stick on that. So we created a book that had leading people in the field and was financially accessible to students ($1/chapter). Another element that was really important was that there needed to be a diverse group of scholars writing it. There’s a lot of white people who write textbooks. There are a lot of men who write textbooks. We were pretty deliberate in the people we brought to the project. If you look at A Sociology Experiment and its authors, it is a much more diverse group of authors overall than what you typically get. We have a bunch of people who are not like me and Pat: people who teach at community colleges and people who teach at very small regional state institutions. That was extremely important to us as part of the project as well, to reflect excellence across a range of places where excellence didn’t just mean status. 

First Publics: How widely has the textbook been used? Do you have a sense of its impact in any way? 

Shamus Khan: I think we serve about 30,000 students a year, maybe more. We also have a commitment to making it free if it needs to be. If students can’t afford it, they can just ask us, and we give it to them. We have people who teach it throughout a range of penal institutions. So, it is taught to incarcerated people. It’s free – we don’t charge for that. 

The other idea behind it was also to make the textbook modular so that people only pay for what they use. Often textbooks will have lots of chapters, which increases the cost overall. But students might only read five of the twenty chapters in a textbook. And so three-quarters of what they’re paying for is a resource they don’t use. We find that, on average, courses teach seven chapters of our book. So that means that, for students, the textbook costs $7. That’s an extremely low price. We are for profit, but we don’t make any money. I don’t want to give the impression that we’re a nonprofit enterprise. Pat and I own the company. But we have a really strong commitment to paying our authors. The authors receive a third of the royalties, which is a much higher royalty rate than any other. In other publishers, if you can get 12 percent, you’re doing pretty well. We pay 33 percent of the royalties to the authors. It is a textbook by sociologists for sociologists rather than by a huge publisher for a huge publisher. 

First Publics: How do you perceive textbooks in general, and your textbook specifically, are stimulating or promoting the practice of public sociology? Do you think that this is something that can be done through textbooks? If so, how? 

Shamus Khan: I think it is absolutely something that can be done through textbooks. In general, sociologists in R1 institutions can be pretty dismissive of textbooks. But I think we need to remember that this is how most people are introduced to sociology, right? If we can create a textbook like the one we did, that is useful, that is helpful for the contingent faculty that we’re producing all the time to reduce their workloads and actually give them resources that are helpful for them. You can buy a physical version of our textbook, but it’s pretty much a totally online resource. I also think that textbooks can respond very quickly to what’s happening in the world in a way that scholarship can’t. We can integrate into our textbooks, and we’re going to, what’s happening in Israel right now and Palestine, and throughout the Middle East. If I were to write an article on that, it wouldn’t come out for two years, right? With online resources, we can be highly responsive and relevant to young people in a way that reflects the kind of immediacy of sociology while making sense of the present. When we did our market analysis, we found out that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of sociology textbooks are sold every year. The most successful sociology book, like a monograph, does not sell anywhere near as many copies as the total amount of textbooks sold. Most people won’t become professional sociologists, but textbooks can introduce tens of millions of people to the core ideas of sociology. So we have some responsibility to do it well and to do it in ways that represent the kinds of voices and perspectives that we value. 

First Publics: Could you tell us some of the political and practical challenges that come with writing textbooks, particularly when you use public sociology as part of the goal? This could be anything from resources, time, class size, political context, or even the publishing industry, which you’ve talked about a little bit.  How have you all tried to address some of these challenges?

Shamus Khan: I don’t know if I would count this as a political challenge, but Gwen has been enormously valuable for the enterprise as an editor because Gwen has really highlighted the importance of accessibility of the textbook for students with different learning needs and making sure that the assessments and the structure, and all kinds of things meet students with a range of needs. Now, we can’t do it fully because of the specific nature of some students’ needs. But being attentive to that, I think, is enormously important, especially in contexts with students with a wide range of learning abilities. Those sets of needs are gonna need to be met by the things that you produce. I think it’s very important for us to do that. 

On the other hand, we made a decision that we are not really appropriate for high schools. Because we can’t satisfy the different regional textbook requirements for the State of Texas or for Florida, or for anything like that. I think in sociology, this isn’t as big of a concern, but it is in other areas. We are launching a second textbook in political science, for example. We have a soft launch this semester, and it’s fully launching next semester. The big market for political science is high schools, not college. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to be in high schools because we just can’t meet the learning objectives and constraints that are put on by various boards of education, and neither would we want to. If we wouldn’t teach materials in ways that erased particular histories or people, we wouldn’t publish a textbook that did the same thing. Pat and I are the publishers, so we wouldn’t publish a textbook that refused to have critical race theory in it, or that didn’t discuss queer people, or that was engaging in trans erasure. This is just something we would not be willing to do. I think in other contexts, it’s really important to think about these things because, basically, the Texas Board of Education has an oversized impact on the content of history textbooks across the country. And textbooks can and do serve dual purposes, in college and high school. So when they do it for high schools, they influence what people learn in college, especially in community colleges where textbooks serve as the foundation for what students will be reading, for very good reasons. I think those concerns are super important as political concerns. 

We started this years ago, and you know, inflation is a thing. We’re still at a dollar and we’re not driving up the price. We can never compete with the rest of the textbooks because we don’t have a marketing team. We have one employee who works 15 hours a week.  So, you put that up against Sage, Elsiver, and Pearson, they have teams of people going door to door getting people to teach their resources. We are a very, very scrappy group of people. We don’t have the resources to make major transformations. We’re financially solvent, we pay our employee well above a living wage and we do right by our authors. Whereas, authors of major textbooks from large publishers can make orders of magnitude more money because of what they are charging students. I don’t begrudge the authors but the publishers are pretty profoundly irresponsible, I think because their profits are being extracted from students who are more likely to be low income and at less-elite institutions. 

Most people won’t become professional sociologists, but textbooks can introduce tens of millions of people to the core ideas of sociology. So we have some responsibility to do it well and to do it in ways that represent the kinds of voices and perspectives that we value.

– Shamus Khan

First Publics: You touched on making textbooks more financially accessible, but in what other ways do you perceive your current textbook being inclusive and accessible to different types of publics and people with different backgrounds and experiences?

Shamus Khan: We have a range of authors, many women, more than half of our authors are women. We have several Black faculty who have written chapters for us. We have people across a range of backgrounds. So, you know, someone who teaches in the Houston community college system, or who is at SUNY New Paltz. They’ve written incredible chapters. I think it’s very important that those perspectives, and also people who have actually taught the end users of these books, are present in the textbook. One of the editors of the book, Gwen Sharp, she’s at Nevada State College. She herself is a first-generation college student from Oklahoma. To her, it’s incredibly important to teach a largely first-generation, diverse student body. As the final editor of every chapter, she’s able to infuse a deep understanding of what it means to teach students who are often the students who are encountering textbooks. I think that’s super valuable. 

Our authors are experts in the field that they’re writing on. What ends up happening in most textbooks is that they have one author who writes an initial version of a textbook, then, the publisher hires out the edits to other people, and these edits get approved over time. In our case, we are a pain in the neck to our authors every year because they have to update their materials and we ask them to do so with the newest research in mind.  We do that so that sociology isn’t introduced to some students through the “Stanford Prison Experiment,” which has lived in a textbook unquestioned for decades, for example, and to other students through more recent American Sociological Review papers. It’s helpful that the chapter on crime has as its author my co-owner and editor, Patrick Sharkey, who is one of the leading people producing information about crime, right? And for Pat to be joined by Angela Barian, who is an award-winning teacher from a small regional college in the midwest and by Bryan L Sykes, another leading sociologist. They combine a diversity of experience and perspectives that is exceptionally powerful. We ended up with a textbook that’s very responsive to what has happened to the crime rate since 2020, and we can integrate that into the overall narrative arc of our materials. I feel that it helps bring both perspectives  – recognizing the needs of students as well as bringing them cutting-edge research in a unique and invaluable way. 

First Publics: Would you like to expand on anything or share anything else?

Shamus Khan: We have a wide range of supplemental materials. During COVID, I gave over 50 lectures on the book so that if teachers wanted to flip their classroom and not have to lecture on Zoom but, instead just run a discussion section, they could have me lecture their course from the textbook and then they could run a discussion section. I did this basically in August of 2020. It was online for people in September of 2020 for all of these chapters. And I think it’s still useful to this day. 

Another thing we did during COVID was to create a podcast because we thought students might be missing out on student conversation. We had someone create a podcast for us, where they interviewed the author of each chapter and then brought in students who were taking the course at that time. I was basically a 30-minute discussion section where the authors were asked questions about the chapter, and then students were brought in to be part of the discussion so if you wanted additional materials, that was a valuable resource. I think having a student-centered approach where you really recognize what it is to be a student and some of the challenges during that time was really important. 

Those lectures have nearly 70,000 views. They’ve been used as a resource for a lot of folks who were learning about education or family or race authenticity, gender, and sexuality, for example. It wasn’t easy, right? Each of those lectures is 30 minutes, and I made close to 50 of them divided into small sections. But the aim is to be really publicly minded in how it is that we’re doing this kind of work. And you know, for someone like me, with a low teaching load, a lot of financial support from institutions, and a research account, this was something I thought valuable that I could do. 

Also during COVID, I created an online school for a time period, and the school was reaching thousands of kids. That was a way where kids who were stuck at home could get a different kind of encounter. I taught this book, and people like Ruha Benjamin, the author, doing a diverse children’s storybook hour. I think stuff like this is an important part of our public work as scholars. It infuses widely through the logic of the textbook, which is like “How are you socially responsible?” and “How do you take your public platform seriously?” These resources, like the videos, aren’t sophisticated, it’s me on Zoom recorded, very lightly edited. But they’re also free, they are not behind a paywall. You don’t need to have registered with our company. Nothing like that. There is a way that we, as a community of scholars, can do stuff like this that can be valuable to our colleagues who have very different kinds of jobs than we have. And to our students, who I don’t think we should treat in extractive ways, and to be blunt, I think most textbooks treat students in extractive ways. 

It’s also why we’re expanding to political science, following the same model. It’s the most diverse group of political scientists that has ever done a textbook. And, in our view, it is really high quality. I don’t know if we’ll grow beyond this. But we have a vision that maybe we, as public-minded scholars, can reclaim the textbook industry and do it in a way that’s really responsible.

Shamus Khan is Willard Thorp professor of sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, and essays, including Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, and Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (with Jennifer Hirsch), one of NPR’s best books of 2020. He writes regularly in the New York Times and Washington Post. He has been awarded Columbia University’s highest teaching honor, the Presidential Teaching Award (2016), and the Zetterberg Prize from the Upsala University for “the best sociologist under 40” (2018).  

Intro to Sociology classes are frequently the first and only contact many students will have with the discipline, which also makes Intro textbooks an important platform for public sociology engagement. In this Dialogues series, we interviewed four authors of Intro to Sociology textbooks and asked them to explore how their textbooks can facilitate students’ first encounter with sociology while also promoting the reflection and practice of public sociology. In our first interview, we talked to Professor Dalton Conley, author of You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist, already in its 7th edition.

First Publics: Thank you again for joining us, Dalton. I wonder if you could start by telling us about your motivation to write an intro to sociology textbook, including what your goals were and how you hoped your textbook would be used.

Dalton Conley: This is now 20 years ago, scary to say, but I was supposed to write a research methods textbook. I’m very interested in sociology as an empirical social science. I know there’s a tension in the field between that goal of sociology and sociology as kind of an agent of social change. I’m definitely in the former camp. I want it to be a science, a human science. So, I had this idea to do a research methods textbook that used case studies, as they do in law schools or business schools. I would go and interview, for example, Mitchell Duneier, who is now my chair. He made certain methodological choices in using real names or in doing member checking with his ethnography, with his whole book (Sidewalk). This was very unheard of back then. He got all his key informants into a hotel room and read them the manuscript, and they all argued about it. Anyway, I would interview him and talk about that case, his study of doing an ethnography of street vendors in New York City, and at certain points, I would make the content interactive with the students and discuss these choices and what they imply. I love that idea and concept. Maybe someday I’ll actually get around to doing that textbook. But when it came to delivering on the contract,  I was going to lunch with the editor to tell him that I just could not do it. I was too overwhelmed with other stuff. 

I didn’t have the time to invest in doing all these sorts of interviews and fully develop the case studies. When I showed up to lunch, it wasn’t just my editor there. It was like three people from W.W. Norton, including the vice president for college publishing. So, I got very intimidated.  They had been talking about how they wanted another Intro text, and they had commissioned one, but it didn’t work out. I taught Intro to Sociology for a number of years by then, so I said, “Oh, Intro, forget research methods. I could do an Intro textbook in six months”. I was just joking, but they took me up on it, and I decided to do it.  

I just thought I would transcribe my lectures and then that would be the basis of a textbook that I would build on. After editing out all the “ums” and the “ahs” and all the announcements about homework and other housekeeping items for the class, it was a really thin stack of pages. Yes, it could be an outline or a backbone, but it really wasn’t enough for a textbook. So, I got to work, and it was definitely more than six months, maybe two and a half years. My goal with it was to do the same thing I was doing with research methods: to show sociology as a scientific enterprise and engage in important debates. The textbooks I had seen up until that point had been organized around theories. For instance, they would look at gender through conflict theory, Marxist theory, and an interactionist perspective. It was just like a cookie cutter, one chapter after another, like, “How do these different theories explain this phenomenon?”  I just thought that that wasn’t interesting and that’s not teaching students how to think like they’re supposed to, to be critical skeptics, and hypothesis formers and hypothesis testers. So, I did it in a different way – organize around paradoxes and then empirical research questions for every topic. That was a long time ago.  The textbook evolved over time and added different features, and we are busy adding more now, actually. 

First Publics: How are you hoping instructors use the text?

Dalton Conley: I try to make it an entire course in a box. Obviously, I don’t want to step on an instructor’s autonomy, and people can use it however they want, but I want to make it sort of a textbook of this day and age when most people are using ebooks, and they are multimedia. The textbook is kind of a buffet that an instructor can selectively deploy. Some instructors might want to use the videos, in which the various sociologists and some non-sociologists that are relevant to particular topics are interviewed, and they could use that content in their lectures to illustrate certain concepts. Others might want to eschew those completely and use it as a straight textbook that students are required to read before they get to class so they have a deeper understanding of the topic of that day, and they build on that.  I think we’re trying to serve the whole range of instructor and student needs with these different kinds of materials, like the InQuizitive tool, which involves interactive, adaptive quizzing of key concepts. We’re adding new features. We had sociological practice in the last edition, which tried to get people to think about concepts and apply them to their own lives. Now, sticking to our alliterative theme of “Ps,” we’re adding professionalization, which involves using certain skills students learn from sociological studies and bringing them into the wider world. That includes critical thinking, data literacy, study design, and things like that that would be useful skills for white-collar employers that hire a sociologist.

First Publics: Can you tell us a little bit about how textbooks in general, and your textbook in particular, can help teachers and students practice public sociology? Do you think your textbook promotes that goal? And if so, could you give us some examples?

Dalton Conley: Well, first I’d say that I consider the textbook probably the most important form of public sociology I have done in my life because it’s reaching more people at an important formative age, trying to shape how they view big public issues, as C. Wright Mills has put it. How can an instructor help students to be public sociologists? In every chapter, we try to take a very counterintuitive or off-the-beaten-path policy idea and think about it from a sociological perspective. I consider that part of public sociology.  

On another dimension, all sociologies have become more public sociology and engaged in important debates more as the world has moved toward sociology, sociological concepts, and understandings. In fact, I haven’t taught Intro in the classroom other than guest lecturing for quite some time now. When I think back to when I first taught Intro to Sociology, I would talk about how gender is not just a binary, or that gender can determine sex as much as sex can determine gender or talking about race as a social construction. I don’t know if this is true, but I felt like I was blowing their minds at the time. In some ways, I feel all that, not in all sectors of society, but for many college students, those ideas have already been inculcated into the culture, and the students have kind of a more intuitive understanding of those concepts, probably than even I do, because of my generation. So, I feel like getting young students to think as public sociologists in some ways is easier, in some ways harder. They’re already thinking that way, on the one hand. On the other hand, in pushing them further to understand big issues or to question their own orthodoxy that might be in line with sociological mainstream thinking, my goal is not for them to have certain views about certain topics, but to have a way of thinking and engaging with public issues that is critical and skeptical. I think that part might be harder these days. 

I consider the textbook probably the most important form of public sociology I have done in my life because it’s reaching more people at an important formative age, trying to shape how they view big public issues, as C. Wright Mills has put it.

– Dalton Conley

First Publics: What forms of political and practical challenges can arise while writing textbooks with public sociology in mind? How have you tried to address some of those challenges? 

Dalton Conley: That’s a good question. I’d say one of the big challenges I’ve encountered is that our social understanding of American society and social norms have evolved so rapidly. It’s very difficult to keep up with that in the textbook. For example, in one section about how colleges are adapting to non-binary students, we’ll talk about the college experience a lot because we want to be relatable to the students themselves. I gave the example of the pronoun “zee”, which was for a while in the running for a third, gender-neutral pronoun. But by the time the book came out, it was very clearly entrenched that “they” was the non-binary pronoun of choice in the U.S. So, we looked really odd and out of place. The next edition, which we’re doing now, is going to change that. 

As another example, I have been going back and forth over whether to use “Latinx” or “Latino” or whether to capitalize “Black” and “White.” I’ve read so much scholarship from philosophers and social scientists on these subjects. For example, in the current edition we use capital “B” and capital “W” for “Black” and “White.” In that choice, I was following the philosopher Anthony Appiah’s ideas that because both categories are social constructs, they should both get capitalization.  But The New York Times, for example, capitalizes “Black” but not “White” because they say that there’s a Black experience that’s unifying that there’s not for Whites. But I thought, and I’ve written about this, that that’s not true, that Whites have a unifying experience of privilege, of all sorts of things. And as for Whiteness, the fact that it would be lowercase is like playing into the idea that it’s a default category when it should be “undefaulted,” if that is a verb. So, I ended up capitalizing White too, which I hope people, if they read the preface, will understand. That’s where I explain the logic of it. I hope they won’t just jump to conclusions that I’m trying to assert white nationalism or something like that. I used Latinx in these last two editions, but if I have my druthers, I will probably switch back to Latino and just mix it up with Latino and Latina, because survey data shows that something like 93% of the Latino population does not like the term Latinx. I mean, it’s very imperialistic: it makes no sense to have an X at the end of a word in a Latin language like that. But at the time I thought that often the academic vanguard is out in front of the general population, like we saw with gender fluidity or non-binary gender identities, and I should be representing that vanguard and not the resistance of most people. But the thing that tipped me over to switch back is the notion that it really is a kind of linguistic imperialism. These are the things I’m struggling with, and I don’t know the right answer. But I feel like the next edition’s going to drop the X, though I’m not doing another edition for a couple of years. So, by then, maybe it’ll be something completely different. That’s going back to the original point: things are happening very fast and I find that very challenging. It’s always challenging in sociology that we’re studying the world we’re living in and that it’s changing, and we’re affecting it just by studying it and by what we publish, and do, and argue.

First Publics: We know that students, in general, represent multiple publics. Can you speak a little bit on the ways you hope your textbook is inclusive and accessible for students with various backgrounds and experiences? In what ways have you considered the various publics your textbooks serve?

Dalton Conley: There are various publics. We talked about demographic or racial-ethnic identities. In guest videos, whose work I highlight in the book, I try to be as broad and inclusive as possible. Then, there are issues of ability status. I’ve been hearing impaired over the last 10 years, so I’m very sensitive to that issue, for example. All of our interactive activities in the ebook or on the website, if you get the regular book and log onto the website, are accessible by visually impaired or hearing impaired people. There’s more and more gender diversity represented in the pages as well. So, again, it’s an evolving thing, just like the field, or society, is as well. But given intersectionality, it’s going to be hard to represent every possible intersectional identity in the book, even if it’s almost 1,000 pages. That’s just a reality. There are so many different configurations of identity when we think of Simmel’s web of group affiliations and who the individual is. But I hope that, by covering some of the broader categories, people will see themselves in it. 

First Publics: I hadn’t thought about that, but I imagine there are just so many different choices you have to make along the way about what to include and not to include.

Dalton Conley: This is a book that I want to be used by first-year community college students and senior sociology majors in highly selective colleges. I’ve seen other textbooks kind of oversimplify things, forgive the expression, dumb it down. But I want to reach a broad audience without doing that, which is challenging sometimes.

Dalton Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology and a faculty affiliate at the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.  He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and in a pro bono capacity he serves as Dean of Health Sciences for the University of the People, a tuition-free, accredited, online college committed to expanding access to higher education. Conley’s scholarship has primarily dealt with the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic and health status from parents to children.

I can still recall that 2016 election night gathering filled with sociology faculty and graduate students from across Rhode Island. Nobody, early in the evening, expected Donald Trump to beat Hillary Rodham Clinton to become the president of the United States of America in 2017. But he did. People cried. It was not a Trump-friendly party. Even in that moment, however, his victory made me happy about my own career choice. 

His triumph reminded me just how critical sociology is not only for our collective intellectual distinction but also for our common good, especially when crisis pervades our public sensibility. With his victory, I began to rethink how I would teach introductory sociology in the spring of 2017. #TrumpSociology, as I came to call it on what was then still called Twitter, would animate the course. 

That would not be the first time when a US president and associated global transformations would define how I engaged what Michael Burawoy has called sociologists’ first public. I have, apparently, been treating my introductory classes as expressions of public sociology for nearly 40 years. But it’s only been with this essay’s invitation that I came to think seriously, reflexively, about how my expressions of public sociology have changed. My students and I have become increasingly critical, if also with greater humility, about what is to be done. 

During 1985-86, in my first year of full-time teaching as a visiting assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, I taught introductory sociology in a more conventional fashion, juxtaposing Human Societies, whose lead author was my senior dissertation advisor, Gerhard Lenski, with a short volume by Anthony Giddens on sociology (it had a most clever subtitle: a “brief but critical introduction”). I explored sociology as a discipline that was simultaneously scientific and critical, even if those accents were variably evident among sociologists. But I was not thinking much about my students in that address; I focused more on those professors from whom I had learned. 

I arrived at the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in 1986. I remember the shock on my senior colleagues’ faces when I said that I would be happy to teach two introductory level courses in my first term. I frankly loved the chance of hooking more students on sociology.  On top of that, not only did I have lectures already prepared from the previous year, but I also had no stage fright after having cultivated a more activist sense of self through speaking at demonstrations in Chapel Hill. 

While my introductory sociology courses continued to explore the science/critical articulation, I took advantage of an available “social problems” course and moved it in a decidedly public direction. Social problems, of course, lend themselves to that emphasis given their dependence on the discursive construction of issues as problems.  But I thought it appropriate at the time to make it even more critical by asking whether the political culture inspired by the president at the time, something commonly called Reaganism, was itself a social problem. 

By asking the question I was inviting my first public to figure out, from an analytical distance, what would make Reaganism a problem — whether or not they themselves were Reagan Republicans or Mondale Democrats. Because I relied on their helping me figure out that question’s address, they felt very much part of the analytical process. And because I asked the question without presumption of their answer I could not be called simply political. Of course,  that question is political in the bigger sense. It asks our first public to think about how broader publics engage questions of power, knowledge and justice in global social change.  

Like other departments, ours, at Brown University, has been trying to encourage our senior faculty to teach introductory sociology. Just as I was at the University of Michigan (albeit when I was a much younger professor), I was an easy mark. But now I’ve taught it almost annually since 2017. I have thus taught it in these years after Trump’s (challenging) exit from the Oval Office, but those first years engaging #TrumpSociology demanded quite an investment in my own learning. 

I was no specialist on American electoral politics, I told my students, but I had a sociological imagination that was kicked into high gear by his election. I’ve asked them to cultivate their own. Why did Trump win? What contradictions did his election embody? What consequences could we imagine, document, explain, from his term in office? Alas, my own imagination did not consider an attempted insurrection to overturn the results of the election, but it did consider violence as a possibility.  

We still covered all those foundational areas in introductory sociology – from demography to cultural sociology – but their engagement found plenty to explore in the Trump transformed public sphere, from the politicization of the census to the meaning of the red MAGA cap to the fate of truth and truthfulness. 

Trump lost in 2020, but the public consequences associated with his movement have far from disappeared. Understanding, for example, the dynamics of political polarization draws students into sociology without having to name where one stands in any contest. 

Sociology thrives in times of crisis. But it will thrive only if sociology addresses crisis and figures the discipline’s place among the publics who face increasingly existential anxiety in epoch end. Asking our first public to develop their intellectual responsibility in partnership with those publics enables our students to find meaning in their learning. It helps us to do the same.

Michael D. Kennedy is a professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. Professor Kennedy explores the relationship between knowledge practices and global transformations, with particular regional expertise in Europe and Eurasia. His work on global and transnational sociology focuses now on how various articulations of difference and solidarity travel.