In our paper on public criminologies, Chris and I wrote about some of the perils of making your research accessible to a wide audience:
We also should acknowledge the potential costs of practicing public criminology. Making one’s work and perspective visible in the media opens the possibilities for threats and hate mail, loss of credibility, or worse from detractors. It can lead to close identification with the populations one studies; for example, attempts to discuss the low recidivism rates of sex offenders can be derailed by venomous attacks from a fearful public. (Uggen & Inderbitzin, 2010: 743)
The latest – and perhaps scariest – example of vitriolic threats and electronic hate mail is the targeted attack against sociologist Frances Fox Piven. Based largely on a piece of work that was published 45 years ago, Glenn Beck has suggested that Frances Fox Piven is an enemy of the Constitution. Examples of the threats made against Dr. Piven can be found in this article; the author then points out: “One thing that I think has not been adequately highlighted amid this fiasco is Piven’s own response: the professor has been calm, fearless, and articulate, providing a model of how a public intellectual should behave in such a situation.”
Officers of the American Sociological Association issued a public statement, ending with these words:
Thus, the right to free speech does not ever include rhetoric that encourages violence against one’s opponents, especially in the current atmosphere of heated political mobilization. We call on Fox News and other responsible media to set the appropriate standards of accurate and honest debate.
Frances Fox Piven, herself, has been graceful under pressure, and as a true public intellectual, she is using this unwanted publicity to point attention back to the larger structural issues. She offered this comment:
It’s hard for people to understand what’s going on in a complicated society. Democracy requires that people have some understanding of what’s going on, of what their own interests are, who their enemies are. But it’s a very complicated society. And moneyed propagandists have taken advantage of that to create a demonology in which it is the left, the Democratic left, that is the source of many of our troubles.
And, one more thing, in case you haven’t heard much about this case or followed any of the links in this post, Frances Fox Piven is 78 years old…and apparently more relevant than ever. With her her courage and continuing efforts to educate the public, Dr. Piven offers a positive model for public sociologists/public criminologists to learn from and emulate. It is appreciated.
Comments 2
Arturo — January 28, 2011
Great post...but just curious, how do you see Francis Fox Piven as a Public Criminologist as you have to come to define it?
I'll have to re-read your piece but thinking of Burrawoy's framework of different sociologies I sometimes see her as a "Critical Sociologist" more than a public one. Her work on social movements certainly set's up an analysis of why they often fall apart, or fail to achieve long term goals. But is this type of knowledge production really done for the benefit of the public?
There are indirect benefits for sure, when scholars challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of how policies are formed and changed, but is this knowledge intended to be accessible or really directed at people doing grassroots movements.
I may be a little out-of-date with my knowledge of Piven, so I may be way off base, so don't take this as a challenge, but more of a question. Since this Piven thing has come up, I've gotten a couple of emails from people who work for unions/grassroots movements/housing rights/social work and so forth...asking me who Piven is--which has been great to direct to her work. But I was a bit surprised to see that not many people knew her
Michelle Inderbitzin — January 28, 2011
Thanks for the response, Arturo. I am certainly not an expert on Dr. Piven's work (and, in fact, am much more familiar with her husband, Richard Cloward's work), but the uproar surrounding these threats against her really made me think about what Chris and I tried to identify as one of the potential costs of practicing public criminology. It was important to me that we represent the darker side of pubcrim for practitioners as well as cheerlead for the cause.
In our paper we argue that Burawoy's 2x2 table is too rigid and doesn't fit the reality of what public scholars actually do. Here's the actual quote from page 709:
Because it tends to reify abstract and artificial boundaries, the two-by-two table presented in Table 1 is a poor reflection of the actual activities of criminologists (see Ericson, 2005, for a similar argument about public sociology). Figure 3 represents public criminology, policy criminology, professional criminology, and critical criminology as interconnected Venn diagrams,with the first panel assigning equal weight to each quadrant and the second emphasizing professional and public work more explicitly. In truth, many criminologists work with a hand or a foot in all four cells, whereas others would self-identify as pure professional criminologists or policy criminologists.
From my somewhat limited knowledge of her career, I would say that Frances Fox Piven had a hand and foot in each cell. She has had a wildly successful career as a professional sociologist (former President of ASA); has done important critical and policy work; and has contributed for more than 40 years to The Nation.
I would classify Dr. Piven as a public criminologist for that work in The Nation. While that publication is targeted to a particular audience, it reaches a public outside of the academy. The original piece that started the Beck & co. attack, "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty," was published (with Cloward) in The Nation in 1966. I suspect if that piece had been published in ASR or AJS or Social Problems or another academic journal, it would only be reference by other academics, and we wouldn't be having this conversation...