Following our interview with 2023 ASA President, Professor Prudence Carter, we invited a group of scholars and teachers to respond to her presidential address in a virtual roundtable discussion. We asked participants to reflect on what they are excited to share with their students from the address, the critiques of the discipline that Prof. Carter offered, and how sociologists can work toward integration and harness the “educative power of sociology” given the challenges of this particular political moment. Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

First Publics: Think about the students you’ll see and the courses you are scheduled to teach when you are back on campus this fall. What specific aspects of Prof. Prudence Carter’s ASA presidential address are you excited to share with your students? What were the takeaways you think your students might connect with?

Michel Estefan: Prof. Carter posed one of the central political questions of our time: how do we build a multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-faith democracy that promotes integration across groups? Indeed, how do we even begin to conceptualize such a project when a society like this has never existed? And what could possibly be the next steps in the context of deep political polarization, where groups perceive each other as existential threats, and political backlash threatens to undermine the “reformist” achievements of the Civil Rights movement? These questions will strike a chord with my students’ deep-rooted convictions for social justice while urging them to think more expansively, critically, and with greater nuance about the challenge that lies before us.

Prof. Carter underscored that relying solely on a politics of (material) redistribution would prove inadequate to address these challenges. She urged us to pay equal attention to the relational and sociocultural spaces in concrete organizations and institutions where attempts to resolve intergroup conflicts thrive or wither away. And while she emphasized the importance of deliberation in these spaces, she implicitly noted its limits and stressed that understanding “affective processes” and “cultivating collective feelings” is also crucial. This is a key issue I intend to discuss with my students, for if polarization affords us any insights about political conflict, it is its irrational character, motivated by feelings and myths–about “us” and “them.” I look forward to further discussing these issues with my students and learning about their conception of the political and how it motivates their social action at work, in my courses, with their friends and family, and in the many social spaces where they are attempting to build the moral horizon Prof. Carter sketched out.

Mary Pattillo: My teaching this quarter runs the gamut: a course that uses the work of Zora Neale Hurston to help acclimate entering first year students to college; a required graduate course on race, racism, and resistance; and a course on qualitative field research methods to incarcerated women in our university prison education program. In her remarks, Prof. Carter challenged us to not discount “the breadth of heterogeneous thought and behavior within social groups.” Each of these groups of students is in some ways homogeneous – first year students, graduate students, incarcerated students – but those labels mask significant heterogeneity of experience, perspective, and thought. These small seminar-style courses are the best context in which to put into practice some of Prof. Carter’s provocations to realize integration. In these settings, students are able to share, listen, and consider deeply what their peers bring to and think about the readings and course content. The classroom can be a laboratory for the kind of realized integration that Prof. Carter envisions.

In my view, the classroom is the most immediate setting where sociologists have the opportunity and responsibility to render these macro-structural inequalities vulnerable and the tactic is strictly a question of pedagogy.

– Michel Estefan

Dan Chambliss: First, Prof. Carter describes the difference between official acceptance into a group (or organization, such as ASA) and full, cultural, “true integration.” Marginalized groups often experience “being accepted, but not really,” while excellent books and articles support this point. Prof. Carter’s examples are mainly of race/gender exclusion, even within the ASA itself. She raises a fundamental issue. Many sociologists recognize it. But to encourage student discussions, rather than address a volatile moral question directly, I would ask how such an “official/true integration” distinction can be precisely made. How do you tell if people truly are accepted? How do we recognize “full integration”? Is self-report sufficient? Are there visible signs or behaviors? Goffmanian ethnography could be helpful here. 

The best way to introduce students to emotionally charged topics may be to relate them to their own experiences, but beginning with lighter examples and a more theoretical approach, then move gradually towards more volatile cases. For instance: more (cishet) young women say they have a boyfriend than do the corresponding men; an official “boyfriend” may not be “truly” a “boyfriend.” (Or talk about marriages!) How does one recognize such failures of formal contact to become informal “true integration” as well?  Having students discuss the more general issue, I find, can be a more effective way of encouraging discussion than simply hitting scary topics head-on.  

A second, also fascinating, question from Prof. Carter is how different groups have different “epistemic styles.” This goes beyond different opinions, to how groups use logic and evidence differently, consider different kinds of evidence, or see “truth” differently. A classic case, widely hypothesized in sociology, is the different way that upper-middle class professionals tend to honor precise, carefully planned speech as more “true” (to exterior reality), whereas members of the working classes are often more likely to see truth in spontaneous, more “authentic” speech, that more closely aligns with people’s genuine feelings.  Do other groups (different genders, ages, ethnic groups) also have different styles?

Nancy Lopez: President Carter’s invitation to be more reflexive and reflective as we strive to do no harm in our knowledge production and praxis is a generative and transformational insight that I will share in my combined undergraduate/graduate course, “Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class for Social Policy.” What would that mean for this class? Better disaggregated data does not conflate race and ethnicity data, which is the status quo of educational statistics. For example, my colleague and co-principal investigator, Dr. Yasmiyn Irizarry, shared a 2007 memo from the US Education Department directing educational institutions to collect both Hispanic origin and race in separate questions, but to only report Hispanic ethnicity as an aggregate ethnic category “to minimize the reporting burdens for educational institutions and other recipients.” This begs the question: How will we know if have achieved what President Carter calls “unrealized integration,” if we nullify baseline analysis of whether there’s a color line in discipline, access to college curriculum, or graduation outcomes, among Hispanics by racial status. Are Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, white or other racial status Latinx experiencing the same levels of racial discrimination and barriers to educational opportunity? Are there inequities that remain invisible when we assume that Latinx people are part of a racial monolith? How could their experiences in the elementary schoolyard, middle school history class, high school STEM lab or graduate program, differ according to their  street race — the race others would automatically assume they were based on social meanings ascribed to their physical characteristics, including skin color facial features and hair texture in educational institutions, from preschool to graduate school. Imagine if instead we employ intersectionality as inquiry and praxis and cultivate what Patricia Hill Collins, which leads to more accurate diagnoses and better, targeted, equitable policymaking needed to close the complex social inequalities faced by Afro-Latinx and other racially stigmatized groups.  How else would we know if we have unrealized integration or social progress? What will you do to advance organization change in the service of our ethical and professional responsibility to do no harm and eliminate discrimination in our federal race and ethnicity data collection guidelines that shape the future of equity and distribution of power to those at the margins of society?  

Myron T. Strong: Maybe the most profound moment [of Prof. Carter’s] speech happened at the beginning when she framed her address by dedicating it to ten Black women as pioneers of intellectual thought. I often tell my students how Eurocentric traditional sociology is. I have heard many speeches and lectures that reinforce narrow, oppressive approaches to the discipline. The dedication represented an important acknowledgement of the intellectual tradition of our mothers. 

More than anything, the biggest takeaway for me was how Prof. Carter’s address on unrealized integration was a critique of the ways that the discipline [of sociology] has an unrealized integration of thought. The constant exclusion of BIPOC is in many ways due to the inadequate resource distribution and management at all levels of education as well as other factors. Having the students listen to the address and write responses is a great way to engage their understanding. My hope is that by connecting life chances to the unequal educational structure, it empowers students and gives them the tools that allow them to imagine new possibilities. I think of the Robin D. G. Kelly quote in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, “It is not enough to imagine a world without oppression. We must understand the mechanisms that reproduce and naturalize exploitation and subjugation.”

First Publics: In her address, Prof. Carter offered a set of critiques about our discipline and challenged us to be more reflexive and reflective. How might you personally take up this challenge in your undergraduate classrooms, in your training and mentoring of graduate students, or in your department? 

Michel Estefan: Prof. Carter called on sociologists to ameliorate the inequalities in micro social contexts in order to render vulnerable and more fragile the policies, laws, and forces that shape the macro-structural terrain. In my view, the classroom is the most immediate setting where sociologists have the opportunity and responsibility to render these macro-structural inequalities vulnerable and the tactic is strictly a question of pedagogy. The classroom is a microcosm of society, already structured with its many hierarchies and inequalities before the first day of class. It is not, however, an overdetermined social space destined to reproduce those social relations. It is a pivotal arena wherein the political potential lies to alter, reconfigure, and transform these social relations. This possibility calls for a values-centered pedagogy that views the classroom as a moral community and envisions education as a transformative process that recognizes the unique life experience of each student and, on that basis, nurtures their intellectual, moral, and creative capacities.

As such, I would argue that the first day of class should begin, not with a list of authors, books, or content-oriented learning goals, but with a conversation about the values and moral norms instructors ascribe to and the hope of building, alongside students, a culture of dignity that welcomes them, nurtures a safe and collegial space, and strives for equity. When effectively combined with a sociological understanding of classroom dynamics and evidence-based pedagogical practices tailored to the specific student population in the room, this values-first approach can elevate learning to a genuinely transformative journey for students. 

Mary Pattillo: Prof. Carter’s critique of sociology is, in part, that we have not wrestled with the fact that our discipline is just as susceptible to the anxieties around the so-called “tipping point” as are the people on the “far right.” The tipping point is when demographic – and thus experiential, ideological, and political – diversity begins to upset groups who had once enjoyed relatively uncontested power and influence. To be more specific, the tipping point can be manifest in questions that lurk in the minds of some sociologists, but remain unspoken: Has the preponderance and leadership of women, Black people, LGBTQ people, agnostics, first-gen scholars, etc. in sociology gone too far? What will the “browning” or “feminizing” of sociology mean for our status in the academy, our attractiveness to students, and our pay? My answer is to lean into these changes. Call me blindly proud, but I think we have so many answers to what ails society that I think we can be the discipline of the future. Climate change, artificial intelligence, and water scarcity (just to name a few of the big preoccupations) are not solely technical problems, they are also social problems. More importantly, they are social issues whose solutions require the brainpower of people of all genders and colors, people who are not always represented in the hard sciences. So, our “browning” and “feminizing” is actually our edge. I think we can attract students and maintain our relevance by making this case.

Dan Chambliss: I disagree with Prof. Carter’s suggestion that we need more reflexivity. Reflexivity and reflection are in some sense raging like wildfires in sociology. Everyone is thinking about what topics to teach; what definitions to use (“what is theory?”); what readings, and with what vocabularies, to assign; which research methods to rely upon or even respect; and what scholars to honor. The discipline of 1960 is now deeply fragmented. But controversial opinions are often shared only privately, or even underground; honest discussions happen mostly within, rather than between, factions.  When debates do happen, they can become fiercely contentious, to the point of destroying relationships – again, fragmenting the discipline. 

Such angry debates can make undergraduate teaching, in the meaningful sense of changing minds, almost impossible.  A less threatening approach might introduce contentious topics with more distant examples and more theoretical arguments. I like, for instance, using Jean-Paul Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew in discussions of the social psychology of racism. This short but sophisticated book describes France in the 1940’s – a very long time ago, to students – and details the fallacies of antisemitic logic among people Sartre personally knew: their convoluted reasoning; the ways they ignored non confirming evidence; how they constructed stereotypes – and where specific stereotypes originated; and finally, the appeal of anti-Semitism among particular (sociological) groups. Students can talk energetically about the broader questions with little apparent animosity or fear, while still quietly coming to understand the contemporary applications. 

Our classrooms are powerful forces in allowing students to explore the data, the archives, the books and articles, and the stories that prove that there is a lot of work to be done to respect and uphold the dignity of all people.

-Mary Pattillo

Nancy Lopez: As a Black Latina, US-born Dominican daughter of immigrant parents with a second grade education, rich in cultural wealth, Prof. Carter’s invitation to embrace critical and self-implicating reflexivity and reflection as normative principles in knowledge production and practice resonated with me. Recently, I co-authored a report from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute that reveals complex social inequalities faced by Afro-Latinxs – people who are ethnically Latino and racially Black. We used Census data that kept race and ethnicity queries separate and made a crucial discovery. Despite possessing higher educational attainment, Black Latinx communities experience greater poverty rates and lower rates of homeownership compared to their non-Black Latinx counterparts. These disparities are especially concerning for Black Latinas like myself, who exhibit higher labor force participation than non-Latina Black women and non-Black Latinas. These inequities would have gone unnoticed if race and ethnicity had been combined into one question. 

It is my hope that the status quo of credentialed knowledge production will change. We must act and cultivate communities of practice anchored what Patricia Hill Collins calls flexible solidarity – action and reflection on power relations – grounded in a commitment to healthy, loving and more just communities​. Fostering solidarity and unity in our communities and struggle for justice with others who are different — among & across political communities​ will advance what President Carter calls a “revolutionary unrealized integration” and social progress.

Myron T. Strong: [Prof. Carter’s address] made me think of the importance of having vision. I have often used this metaphor to explain what vision means in sociology. As a kid, I watched the cartoon ThunderCats and each time the leader, Lion-O, wanted to see both physical objects (such as buildings, vehicles and people) and symbolic manifestations, he would pull out his sword and say, “give me sight beyond sight.” Sociology is essential to giving one vision to see, analyze, and critique the world. So, to me the question is, how do I continue to help in my college and colleagues’ vision of the future? I work at a community college that serves mostly minority students, many of whom are international. So, in my particular circumstance, providing opportunities for my colleagues and students to directly interface with the discipline is important. Getting my colleagues and students to read, review, and/or publish in journals, present at sociology conferences and engage in discussions in which they share ways to be innovative in the ways we teach and approach sociology.

First Publics: The concerted movement to roll back rights, violent and racist attacks on our students and colleagues, and the uncertainty about the future of higher education affects us all. How can sociologists work toward integration and harness the “educative power of sociology” given the challenges of this particular political moment? You might reflect on the specific sociopolitical, institutional, or personal and professional context in which you work. 

Michel Estefan: In my view, the path to upholding the principles championed by Prof. Carter and pursuing the political goals she envisions for sociology begins with the recognition that the sociologists best positioned to catalyze social change are those in the front lines of our discipline: community college professors and faculty at large public universities that serve as engines of social mobility. These educators are working with student populations that more closely resemble the diversity in the broader American public. And they are doing phenomenal work with severely constrained resources and in many cases under enormous political pressure from state and local officials. It is imperative that we make greater efforts to valorize, promote, protect, and reward their work within our discipline and beyond. This begins by dismantling the status hierarchy between “teachers” and “researchers” and acknowledging the need for both. It takes the form of concrete expressions of solidarity that fight to defend the rights of our colleagues at institutions besieged by political efforts to corrode their autonomy and censure their work. It requires that we embrace and honor teaching as the preeminent form of public sociology and treat our students, pedagogy, and classrooms with the respect, care, and thoughtfulness they deserve. If we do not uphold within our discipline the values we strive for publicly, sociology’s broader influence will rest on shaky ground, propped up solely by the narrow bickering of ivory tower discourse. 

Mary Pattillo: I am definitely in a bubble. I work at a rich private university, in a liberal state, in a liberal metropolitan area. I watch from afar the censorship of teachers from kindergarten through graduate school in far too many states. I have the job security to be able to comment on and critique these developments, on the record. And, still, I know I am not safe. We are not safe. The Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action affects all of higher education and reverberates across the labor market that our students are entering. And several Republican presidential candidates are running on agendas that mischaracterize and malign our work. In her remarks, Prof. Carter reflected on the meetings being in Philadelphia, the location of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. Looking out at the ASA crowd gathered for her speech, Prof. Carter quipped that we were likely “the founding fathers’ worst nightmare.” That’s exactly how I want to approach this moment of backlash and intellectual witch hunting. We have to continue to haunt the dreams of reactionary forces. Those of us who still have the liberty to do so must not self-censor in fear that our states or our schools will be next, or that our students will turn on us. We cannot shy away from teaching about racism, sexism, and homophobia, the social movements that resist them, and the resilience of their targets. Our classrooms are powerful forces in allowing students to explore the data, the archives, the books and articles, and the stories that prove that there is a lot of work to be done to respect and uphold the dignity of all people. I stay committed to these efforts in my teaching and mentoring because there is no doubt that the pendulum will swing again.

Dan Chambliss: I’m not sure – but this is not my specialty, at all – that there are obvious answers here, even at the larger scale where most political action occurs: national policy, or social movements, or even at the ASA, although “race/class/gender neutral” policies seem reasonably effective in some settings. At this macro level, of course, we also face the challenge that some actors gain from “divide and conquer” strategies: many people benefit quite directly from oppressing minorities. But in face-to-face teaching, I suspect that the indirect approach I suggested above works better, i.e., an approach in which race/class/gender integration itself becomes less, rather than more, immediately salient. The “lower salience” approach succeeds in part by reducing backlash or framing benefits as zero-sum (“neutral”). Indeed, that’s the essential method proposed by classic work in social psychology, including “pursuing superordinate goals” (Sharif) or more recently, “cluster hiring” (Kanter). Simply put, we should be careful with making, say, contemporary racism or sexism the immediate, explicit focus of early class discussion (see recent studies of diversity workshops, e.g.), especially when only token representatives of a group are present. 

Teaching touches more lives than any other aspect of sociology. The best way to fight the attacks is to give students the tools to process information and reject problematic and dangerous arguments.  It always fuels their innovation and intellectual curiosity.

-Myron T. Strong

Nancy Lopez: In the aftermath of the June 2023 Supreme Court rulings (Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College; Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al.) banning race-sensitive (but not gender-sensitive) affirmative action in higher education, I wonder how cultivating intersectional critical reflexivity and reflection for action at the individual and institutional levels can change the conversation and distribution of power for the future of equity in higher education.  In her dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor quotes our ancestor Dr. Martin Luther King “’The arc of the moral universe’ will bend toward racial justice despite the Court’s efforts today to impede its progress.” I invite everyone to think about one or two actions you can take on this journey. President Carter shares some possibilities, including contributing to legal cases and action, as well as partnering with local and state level groups including civil rights agencies committed to social justice, and helping to create new knowledge that informs equity-based policy and distribution of resources.

Multi-faceted interventions, no matter how small, can make a difference. For example, here is a sample optional and potentially transformative essay prompt that could be used not only for potential student applicants to our undergraduate and graduate programs, but also for staff and faculty hires in academia and K-12 educational institutions: “Please share any experiences that shaped your individual character and/or unique ability to contribute to the university [k-12] setting. This may include discussing your experiences with race (both self-identified race and/or perceived race), tribal status, gender, ethnicity/cultural heritage, language, veteran status, sexuality, disability, growing up in family where no parent/guardian earned a four-year college degree in the U.S. or abroad when you, the applicant, were 16 years of age, nativity, and/or other individual experiences.” My hope is that this essay prompt could plant a seed for imagining a different future where the status quo is questioned and reckoned with. It could also nurture distributional and relational equity, advance epistemic equity and provide the basis for working toward cultivating understanding, compassion for those who are different from you and ultimately what Patricia Hill Collins calls “flexible solidarity.” It can also help advance social progress and dismantle and what President Carter calls “unrealized integration.”

Myron T. Strong: In a lot of ways, these attacks have served to remind the discipline that teaching sociology is as important as research. Historically, teaching has occupied a lower position in the discipline, it is seen as a necessary evil and an unwanted chore. In 1959, Talcott Parsons argued that the major role of the ASA was to share members’ research and train graduate students.  I have long felt that among sociologists and academics in general there is an idea that those who can research and those who can’t teach. A sort of valorization of those who teach, like “thank you for your service.” Teaching touches more lives than any other aspect of sociology. The best way to fight the attacks is to give students the tools to process information and reject problematic and dangerous arguments.  It always fuels their innovation and intellectual curiosity. This is an opportunity to challenge the systemic inequalities like the credentialism, academic caste systems, and our graduate school training that exist within our discipline and place emphasis on well-rounded approaches that encourage diverse scholars who are prepared for the challenges of the moment.

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Michel Estefan is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of California, San Diego. His teaching and research focus on making classrooms more equitable for historically minoritized students. His work has appeared in Teaching Sociology, Inside Higher Ed, and Teaching/Learning Matters and has been covered various times in The Chronicle of Higher Education. His results in the classroom have been recognized with awards from the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, SAGE publishing, and the section on Teaching and Learning of the American Sociological Association.

Mary Pattillo is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Black Studies, and Chair of Black Studies, at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching are in the areas of Black urban life, politics, housing, education, and the criminal legal system. She is the winner of the Community Builder Award at Northwestern, and is the Membership Chair of the Association of Black Sociologists.

Dan Chambliss recently retired after forty years of teaching at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. Author or co-author of four books and a variety of articles, he is the recipient of ASA Section Prizes in Theory, Medical Sociology, and Teaching and Learning. In 2018, he received the ASA’s career prize for Distinguished Contributions. to Teaching.

Dr. Nancy López (nlopez@unm.edu) is professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Dr. López directs and co-founded the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice (race.unm.edu), an unfunded academic and research Institute at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Dr. López’s scholarship, teaching and service is guided by the insights of intersectionality –the importance of examining race, gender, class, ethnicity together–for interrogating inequalities across a variety of social outcomes, including education, health, employment, housing, and developing contextualized solutions that advance social justice. Dr. López is the first woman of color tenured in the Sociology department and the first woman of the African Diaspora (Black Latina/Dominican) tenured in the College of Arts and Sciences (2008) and promoted to full professor (2018) at UNM. 

Myron T. Strong is an award-winning sociologist, who is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Community College of Baltimore County in Baltimore, Maryland. He frequently writes and lectures on Afrofuturism, race, gender and other social factors in modern comics and popular culture.   

According to Jesse Stommel (2021), “’Ungrading’ means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply ‘not grading.’” The COVID-19 pandemic pushed me to consider alternative approaches to assessment to increase flexibility and decrease stress during the crisis.  I also wanted my assessment practice to explicitly acknowledge diversity, equity, and inclusion, knowing that students start from different places, represent diverse publics, and bring valuable ways of knowing to the classroom beyond traditional markers of academic “success.” I was already disillusioned with grading and its perpetual power to distract from students’ learning and my teaching. But more than that, I wanted my students to engage more deeply with the pressing public issues of our times (e.g., the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder and ensuing unrest). As Susan Blum (2020) writes, “my grading practice was driving a wedge between the teacher I was and the teacher I want to be” (p. 45). When I heard about “ungrading” in the summer of 2021, my interest was piqued. There are many approaches to “ungrading,” with common goals of prioritizing student learning and enhancing intrinsic motivation.

I have now “ungraded” in four courses. For context, I typically teach classes of 40-45 upper division students and assign a combination of low and high stakes analytical and reflection essays. I considered several alternative assessment methods, but ultimately decided on a self-assessment approach. I do not grade individual assignments, but instead provide qualitative feedback to prompt further thought or revision.  In three essays throughout the semester, students identify their learning goals and then reflect on the progress they made at the midterm and the end of the course. In the final self-assessment, students  reflect on changes in their curiosity about the subject matter, what they learned about how they learn, and how the course format affected their learning. They also propose their final grade and to elaborate the criteria they use to assign it. I include this statement in the syllabus: “I’ll review the grade that you suggest and either accept or revise your grade.” Do all of my students give themselves “As?” They do not. My grade distribution has remained  the same and all of the (few) grade modifications I have made have been to adjust grades up, not down. 

The benefits of “ungrading” have been twofold. First, students express that the freedom from stress over grades is profound and allows them to focus on their learning, which as one student put it “is why we’re here.” Second, “ungrading” has turned assessment into a conversation with my students about what they’re learning and how they’re learning it instead of a contentious game of points. Through feedback, I can still correct errors and press students to take their thinking further, but without the punitive effects of points. My assessment practices now better reflect the diverse publics my students represent, since students can begin and end at different places but learn and grow at their own pace. As a result, I am able to recognize my students in new ways; as bell hooks (1994) writes, “To hear each other…to listen to one another, is an exercise in recognition.” 

Adapted from a longer essay published in the January/February issue of The Criminologist.

“…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.

In advance of the 2023 ASA Annual Meeting we at First Publics were thrilled to chat with ASA President Prudence Carter about the “educative power of sociology”, doing public sociology, and teaching during these politically charged times. Here we share the conversation, edited for clarity.

Sarah Shannon: You have experience teaching in various institutions and departments, including sociology and schools of education. How has that aspect of your scholarly trajectory shaped your emphasis on the relevance and potential of sociology to address public issues?

Prudence Carter: Yes, straddling both the educational research and sociology fields has had a tremendous impact on not only my understanding of sociology as a discipline but also on what I perceive as its current status and not fully realizing the educative power of the discipline. I have loved carrying sociology into the educational research field. There are many sociologists who work in schools of education and other policy schools, and applied fields. What I realized very early on in my career is that if I were writing about schools as organizations, and the work was going to have either impact or some implications for the lives of students and educators, then I needed to be speaking to those people as well. And my switch to a faculty of education was unplanned. I was trained as a sociologist and anticipated that I would be in a sociology department the entire time, and when I went into the school of education at Stanford, I think that was a pivotal moment when my career took off. I was both reaching, speaking, and writing to a wider audience, and I was being invited to speak to superintendents, principals and teachers, policymakers, as well as social scientists and graduate students. The work was not just limited to writing books and journal articles. My first book, my little train that could, as I say, captured a wider audience. And that’s primarily because I think the way I wrote it spoke to more than sociology, to its paradigms, to frameworks, and it really resonated with educators. So, to sum it up, I would say that I know that the trajectory of my career would not have been what it was, or what it currently is, if it had not been for my straddling and bringing the practice and the academic research of the two different fields together.

Sarah Shannon: You’ve written about your experience, not only straddling these different disciplines, but also within sociology, straddling professional, critical sociology and this more public, policy focused sociology. We’re wondering how that experience has filtered into your teaching, or even vice versa. Have there been times where your teaching has prompted some of your moves to a more public, problem solving, or policy sociology.

Prudence Carter: The journey has been really organic. It’s not been planned or intentional. I will say that everything that I write and research shapes how I teach. And, in fact, what I’m teaching in the classroom ends up shaping how I actually craft or even analyze and write.  

I’ve always enjoyed teaching. You should know that I am the offspring of educators. I grew up in Mississippi. My grandmother went back and got her teacher’s credential at age 40, after having about a dozen kids. My aunts and both of my parents were K-12 educators; one aunt taught at a rural community college. I really thought I was going to get away from education itself and do something that I thought was more glamorous when I was an undergraduate, but I believe and I see that being an educator is just in my bloodline, you know. I don’t mean that literally. I mean that figuratively. I was just looking at a picture of myself speaking about three years ago, giving a keynote to an audience of policy makers, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and so forth. And I saw what I wrote underneath it when I posted to Instagram–and I wrote: “I know what my passion is, and that is teaching to the public,” but having it be evidence-based and supported by others’ and my research. I have gotten away, in my years of being in academia now, from just writing for journals and books. I aim for my research, writing, and public speaking to lend themselves to seeding ideas and influencing some change in policy and practice that will ameliorate the social and educational problems of our society. Part of that means actually articulating, elaborating, laying it out for audiences. So, I find that I enjoy speaking way more because I reach people with the arguments. I have given many talks, and it’s not just performance when I’m doing it, I’m teaching. And the classroom is the same way for me. One of the things that I learned early on when I was at the Stanford School of education, a number of our undergraduates and our master students were going into the nonprofit realm, government, and other fields, and they were taking ideas with them. And I view that as critical to our roles as academics:  that the generation of change agents, whom we’re teaching, while they may not become sociologists, they are taking away the knowledge that we provide in the classroom. Therefore, I take teaching very seriously because I have students who’ve ended up in the governor’s and mayor’s offices, or have ended up on Capitol Hill, who ended up in internships, or they’re in state departments of education or their local boards of education.  Those are the folks who either become policymakers or who the ones who policymakers and other public officials look to for help to write briefs and laws. For me, the teaching is really critical to how we help students and emerging leaders understand the world, understand how sociological knowledge actually translates into practice and policies, which may emerge and affect all of our lives. Although that is not a strong consideration for how we are evaluated in terms of our status as sociologists, being a good teacher is critical for our discipline and society. For me it is one of the most fundamental parts of my career. I cannot care less if I am not publishing regularly in ASR or other journals, and I mean no disrespect here. But if I can reach hundreds or thousands through teaching, which I’ve done in two decades at this point, and through speaking and sharing those ideas, then I’d rather get them out quicker that way than to have to go through a five-year process trying to get an article done.  This is a crucial area for the educative power of sociology. 

Steph Hanus: As I was reading your work, I thought about how, as individual instructors of higher education, are we able to be a part of this larger solution that you discuss, that recognizes the layered systems that our students are situated in. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how your research regarding cultural capital and the achievement and opportunity gaps in secondary schools has informed your own teaching practices at the university level.

Prudence Carter: Well, so you know, it’s really ironic that the co-edited volume, Closing the Opportunity Gap, in which Kevin Welner and I invited a number of social scientists across disciplines to participate, has done better than my other books, I think. In fact, I know for Oxford University Press, it came out as one of the top sociology books. We spotlighted how opportunity gaps in housing, schooling, and teaching, economic policies, and inequitable funding, all ensconced within a history of cumulative disadvantages for racially minoritized groups, drive enduring achievement gaps. Some sociologists may not even consider that book a sociology text.  It is one of research-based essays that has been read by policymakers and practitioners. I went to Capitol Hill some years ago and was in a senator’s office, and his chief of staff actually had that book on her bookshelf. I was astonished. So, to me that’s the reach of teaching and the educative power that I really love, and because it was a team effort, and also, it was not just limited to sociology. My argument, and what I say to my students, is that multivariate social problems in our society require multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary engagement, dialogue, and production of knowledge and methods. Schools of education and policy schools have faculties with sociologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists, historians, educational researchers. In my case, I learned so much from them. I had no idea how little I knew, and my reading across disciplinary boundaries really expanded.  Those experiences really shaped me as a scholar, researcher, and teacher.  Hence, the opening plenary for this year’s ASA conference features leaders from multiple disciplines, speaking (hopefully) about how we do that more intentionally, proactively, how we do it better. How do we model interdisciplinary research collaborations? We can’t solve most social problems within our respective epistemic boundaries and disciplinary boundaries only. One of the things that I do consciously when I teach is to make sure that my syllabus is very multidisciplinary.  I tell my students that mine is a sociology class.  I speak like a sociologist, but I’m going to also talk like a sociologist who loves history and will draw on history. I’m going to talk like a sociologist who has been trained in economics as an undergraduate, who has some problems with some of the econometric methods and some of the things that economists write, but they also provide substantive insights into some of the contours of the material conditions in our society. I find that useful. I find that we have to also think about agency, politics, and social movements, so political science is needed. I try to integrate some knowledge from various disciplines in the classroom, particularly at the graduate level. It’s a bit more complicated, but the undergraduates get it too. I taught a first-year seminar this year, and my students were like “Whoa! That’s a lot. No, I didn’t know that.” They don’t know some of our history or key social facts half the time. When we start talking about how we got to where we are in terms of cumulative inequalities at the macro-level and in terms of group disparities, I find that various disciplines help me with explaining that. Also, I found that in a school of education, and this has been another benefit of my straddling the two disciplinary fields, there are scholars whose research expertise is on teaching and pedagogy. I had to focus on how well I was teaching because I was also instructing former teachers, which compelled me to be more thoughtful about how I conveyed the scholarship and research on my syllabus.

Steph Hanus: In your 2022 reflection in Critical Sociology, you talk about the parochial nature of U.S. sociology and end with a call for a new generation of engaged sociologists who value the nexus of research, practice, and policy while considering global and interdisciplinary possibilities. Graduate students sit in a middle rung of the academic hierarchy both being academically trained, but also approaching a time where we become instructors ourselves and we’re having to choose between various opportunities and ways of framing our teaching and research. I’m curious how you see your call for more global and interdisciplinary approaches, translating into graduate classrooms and training and what you might recommend for graduate students regarding their position, their training, and their choices.

Prudence Carter: Yes. I view those of us inside of universities as first and foremost educators. If we’re in the classroom, that’s our first job. That’s why universities and colleges hire us, I assume. I see the construction of the syllabus and also the lecture, and notes for teaching, as all a part of the practice of sociology. We are also conceptualizing as we prepare our syllabi, lectures, and commentary while teaching. For example, if I’m going to teach about social and economic inequalities beyond and inside of schools and take an ecological perspective, then I have to conceptualize and develop a framework, which reveals itself in the layout and flow of the material for the semester or quarter. What are the different dimensions and domains of social inequalities? And how do I get that reflected in my syllabus and in my teaching? What’s the particularistic in communities? What’s more universal, according to research? Can we see how context matters? Can we see the same patterns across regions in the nation? Why or why not? Do these inequalities span national borders? What are some of the solutions that we know? Can we learn from other countries? Can we learn from other states? Do we need to think about how things work intersectionally? How do these forms of inequality manifest from the macro- to meso- to the micro-levels? That’s a lot, and I have about 14 weeks to do it. I am really trying to braid those different dimensions in my teaching. Now, I’m not saying I did that immediately after graduate school as an assistant professor.  Some development came with maturity as an educator and scholar. I think what those of us who are in the classroom training graduate and undergraduate students can do now, because we know more today, is to at least model some of this. That is what I wish for my graduate students who take classes with me. That’s why I start talking about macro/meso/micro levels a great deal in my writing.  I find that when we teach, commonly we tend to teach at the level of analysis where we situate our own research. I had to stretch myself to try to figure out how to incorporate other levels of analysis. I turn to social psychology. I’m not a social psychologist, but I know that micro- and individual-level processes actually matter and feed into the meso- levels and macro- levels of inequalities too. And so, for me, this is a framework of teaching that has become a part of my orientation as a professor, and my teaching and research shape each other as they evolved. It’s an iterative process. Also, even within our field, epistemically, there are different branches of sociology. We have to contend with that also and make it interesting. I mean, these are complex problems. It can be overwhelming for our students at times, and as educators, it’s important to know how to distill the information in a way that is digestible and understandable. That’s where the teaching practice comes in. I don’t think that I was as successful when I was younger professor. This information really came to me observing how educational scholars, especially teacher educators, design classes. I don’t think we put enough emphasis on actual teaching within the disciplines and so that was another benefit of moving to a school of education. I learned so much.

Diana Graizbord: In a recent 2018 piece in Contexts, you write about some of the political challenges facing students and faculty on university campuses where, “people of color, LGBT, Jewish, Muslim, and immigrant people bear the disproportionate psychological burden as hate and terror brandish in the name of protecting [ so-called] free speech.” This really resonated with the experience of our students and colleagues here in Georgia, Florida, Texas and beyond. We think of our classrooms as spaces where we ostensibly want to encourage free speech, work towards anti-racist goals, encourage multicultural democratic values and yet we’re working in a reactionary and dangerous context, that you so well describe. In your view, how might we harness this educative power of sociology to speak to all of our students, while mitigating hate and promoting democratic values and anti-racist goals?

Prudence Carter: It’s a big question. It’s a hard question, and I can’t guarantee you that I am going give you a right or a satisfying answer. But the first thing that comes to mind, and this is actually leading now into my presidential address and what motivated the topic.  This is fascinating sociological terrain. When you think about societies, and it’s not just ours, which is why I’m very internationally focused…when you think about modern societies and their origins, which for many are predicated on oppression, violence, marginalization, and the denial of humanity, and then how those societies evolved to become more open, and to then to offer human and civil rights. And then think about the expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction of these societies across time in terms of freedoms and justice. All of these are sociological forces at work with political and economic forces, the confluence of it all. For me, it’s fascinating to teach about these and ask philosophical questions about the moral injury engendered in the everyday social practices in which we engage? What’s the common good? What are the values that actually undergird a multicultural democracy, and do we practice them? We debate about it, whether we see ourselves at the center or left, or the right ideologically. I think all of that can be talked about in the classroom. This is the essence of academic free speech, so that when I assign things that make my students uncomfortable, and I did this some this year, I say to them that it is important for us to know what people are thinking and why they are thinking that, even if we don’t agree with and believe that we need to change their attitudes and behaviors. By that, I do not mean to include works that actually harm people symbolically.  In the classroom, we have choice over how we speak and how we talk. I love C. J. Pascoe’s work, and my students and I discussed gender inequality and sexuality this past semester. I teach her article, “‘Dude, You’re a Fag:’ Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse.”  My students did not want me to use the f-word.  I wasn’t aware that it was a problem, since I had been teaching this article for years, and prior to that, none of my students had ever declared a problem with the title of the article. So, for the first time this past year a new cohort of student comes in, and they were very polite, very diplomatic, and suggested to me “You might want to be cognizant of how you speak about, how you use the title.” So, we talked about it. Do we say the article’s title name, or do we not? They voted not to say the title. So, we didn’t use the title name in speaking. I can accommodate the democratic process. I viewed this as a pedagogic moment. Why was it so problematic? What was it that was making them uncomfortable or decentering their understanding of themselves or others? We have to put all of that out there, and then my job as an educator is to figure it out.  I think that the only way that we’re going to really in practice reduce the polarization, and the palpable social divisions among us is to go into places of discomfort and at least try to figure out what people are saying and if we disagree, offer alternative perspectives respectfully.  As you know, at ASA we released some statements this year. When you see professors who can’t show images of the prophet Muhammad, speaking to the angel Gabriel, and students protesting, I understand that may be in the orthodoxy of one’s religion, but there were trigger warnings from the instructor. That’s what we should do today: to warn that there may be some uncomfortable things shown or discussed, and then offer students an out, if it really disturbs them. That’s what we can do as educators.  But it is incumbent upon us not to suppress the learning of other groups or individuals who really want to learn that knowledge. I fear that we can swing too far in the opposite directions with our needs, our self-interests, our orthodoxy, and idea systems.  I’m not on both sides now, because I do think that there are objective truths, rights, and wrongs about things. Still, I believe that inclusiveness is not just about those who have been historically disadvantaged. Inclusiveness is also about trying to actually know more about those with whom we don’t agree. And that’s why I’m talking about unrealized integration in my presidential address.  I don’t think that we can really realize integration, and I’m not just talking about education and schools in a society when we have not figured out the models of engagement discourse and peaceful coexistence along boundaries of difference.

I don’t think we can underestimate the power of the strong movement that’s been going on for 50 years to turn the country back towards the right. It has been very concerted. It was very well planned, and it has been very well executed. So you are in a context, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, I mean, 36 states actually developed some legislation, against minoritized racial and gender groups. They weren’t all successful. I have realized that there are politics, the hard edge rightwing, and then there are the young people whom we are teaching, many who grew up in communities, and conservative churches, I don’t think we that we center religion enough in sociology, to be honest; it’s an integral social institution. When you’ve been socialized and brought up in that bubble, how do you penetrate it and how do you do it in a way that those individuals also feel respected and seen, but not to the extent that they actually reproduce oppression and marginalization?  I spend some time talking about norms in the classroom and about discomfort. If you can’t do it, then maybe this is not the class for you, unless it’s required. But you know, that’s why we spend time in the beginning around their discomfort. Yeah, it’s very hard. And you have laws now, too, outlawing student discomfort.  I read of a situation in Florida where a professor had to cancel a class because a student was uncomfortable with the material. I mean, we know that our colleagues can’t teach certain things. But I’m very sad about what’s happening in certain states right now.  Now you have to move to more abstract language, perhaps not specific language, to discuss sociological phenomena about race, gender, and sexuality.

Diana Graizbord: It seems you’re always thinking about your publics!  This year’s ASA theme that the “the educative power of sociology” has been great to think with as we’ve been developing First Publics and reflecting on our own teaching as public sociology. We’re really looking forward to your ASA presidential address next month, and to the roundtable we’ll publish in response. To conclude the interview, we’re wondering if you could give the readers of First Publics a preview of your talk? Could you give us a hint of what your address will offer those of us who are interested in teaching, public sociology, and teaching as public sociology?

Prudence Carter: So, my talk really comes out of my thinking about what I have been doing throughout my career as a researcher. What I’ve done as an instructor. It also comes from my experience as a higher ed administrator. It comes from my experiences of traversing the two social fields of educational research and sociology, and it comes from my experience of having actively worked in national organizations. The address will encompass ideas that have been generated by my research and also the limitations of what others and I have been able to glean from research The address takes off from my book, Stubborn Roots, my last major research monograph, although I’ve since done a ton of research in school districts that hasn’t been published. I’m in and out of schools and districts and communities around the country in a consulting role. And I’m living just like you in this current, political, historical, cultural moment where there is so much polarization. I’m trying to understand, what haven’t we predicted with our theories and frameworks?  Where are we myopic as a discipline? Then I realized, Prudence, this is actually what you were trying to think about when you went between the US and South Africa, and you were inside of schools, and you observed one country do something distributionally very different than another. South Africa rapidly opened up their schools. They didn’t have the push back that we had with Brown v. Board of Education. But there were all these other kind of micro-level, microsocial processes that were less tangible and impactful there. And so, what I’m going to argue in this talk is that we have spent a lot of time in the social sciences, thinking about the material conditions, the historical, political conditions, the distributional, what causes or drives inequality. And there is a subset of sociologists who have focused on more microsocial processes, relational ones, even calling it “relational inequality.”  But I don’t think that they have engaged with each other sufficiently enough in discussions of how we develop organizations and various institutions of society better to represent an inclusive, multicultural, and multiracial democracy. I will argue that an imbalance of distributional and relational inequality is what has led to our society’s inability to fully realize integration throughout the various facets of our society. And because we’ve had that vulnerability, it lends itself to this destabilization in the democracy. I’m going to suggest that until we contend with both relational and the distributional issues in our society, because we haven’t attended to the intergroup relationships, particularly along the lines of race, in deep ways, we will have very modest social progress. The things that stick in our society and facilitate change in our society, arguably, pertains to how people feel about each other.

So, Stubborn Roots was about the tangible/intangible and the material and the sociocultural. This is like trying to flesh out my framework fully about why integration was unrealized. And here’s where I can give you an example if you want it. This is what I’m working on right now. It’s likely a provocative take, but I said this publicly in a talk earlier this year about where the Supreme Court left us on June 29th with the ruling on affirmative action. I was just down in Brazil where they actually have formalized affirmative action and tied to their constitution. Brazil is very different in that it frames affirmative action as a compelling state interest to redress and repair past historical injustices, economic injustices. For the United States Supreme Court, historical reparation is not a state interest. Rather, diversity is. Thus far, it has not either mattered to many lawmakers or been compelling in this country to redress state-sanctioned accumulation of disadvantages. But here is where it worked, and we are not talking about it. It worked for gender. In the 1960s under President Johnson, an executive order came out to include the inclusion of women in affirmative action practices. Prior to that, the academy and selective colleges and universities had excluded women across the board. We were not admitted to programs in the various disciplines, nor did we hold leadership roles in universities and professional and managerial spaces. Fast forward 50 years, and women constitute the majority in our discipline, in many colleges and universities, and some organizations. And I would suggest to you that one of the reasons is because men in the patriarchal order had more depth of ties and relationships to their spouses, sisters, cousins, girlfriends, friends, neighbors.  They had social attachment.  Relational inequality was reduced in a way that they could actually entail a different mindset around the inclusion of women and girls in the various parts of society. I was an admission officer prior to going to graduate school, and I recall that we were practicing pro-active affirmative action around gender in the STEM fields, in admission to college. Overall, these practices, emboldened by the feminist revolution, and stronger personal ties, led to a transformation of higher education; but we couldn’t do it similarly for race because of a lack in the depth of care and social attachment to Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples, in addition to racist discourse about lack of merit. Race-based affirmative action did not turn out like gender.  Instead, there was a lot of resistance. And here we are. What I’m suggesting to you is that until we can deal with the microsocial and relational, from status relations to group threat and fear to social closure or social intimacy, all of those different things, it’ll be harder to fully actualize the impact of distributional policies and practices. Inattention to the imbalance between distributional and relational inequality engenders unrealized integration.

Diana Graizbord: Thank you, Prudence. 

PRUDENCE L. CARTER is the Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology at Brown University. Prior to joining Brown, she served as the E.H. and Mary E. Pardee Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley from 2016-2021. Carter has also been on the faculties of Harvard University and Stanford University. Her research focuses on understanding and addressing persistent racial, class, and gender inequalities in education and society. Carter is the author of, Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White, published by Oxford University Press, which won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association for its contribution to the eradication of racism and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. She has also written Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. & South African Schools and co-edited Closing the Opportunity Gap: What American Must Do to Give Every Child an Even Chance with Dr. Kevin Welner, both published by Oxford University Press.  She is the current President of the American Sociological Association.

In a major victory for Native American rights, the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld key provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law enacted 45 years ago to remedy decades of past government abuse. Megan Krausch (2019) provides a model for discussing this timely issue with students without overburdening them.