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- Author or Editor: Eurig Scandrett x
Leading academics take a distinctive new approach to the understanding of public sociology education in this perceptive new resource. Through pedagogical case studies and inter-contributor dialogues, they develop and challenge thinking in the field.
Divided into three sections on the publics, knowledges and practices of public sociology education, it looks beyond the boundaries of academia to deliver fresh responses to key disciplinary questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge.
For students, academics and practitioners, it is a timely and thought-provoking contribution to debate about public sociology education.
This collection makes an argument for understanding public sociology more dialectically. The focus of our practice is on dialogue, and the dynamics of knowledge production involves dialectical relations: between teachers and students; researchers and publics; practice and theory; between different practices of sociology reflected in Burawoy’s ‘quadrants’; between the parochial and the universal; the local and global; and between the neoliberal university and the spaces that public sociologists find to engage in dialogue with subaltern counterpublics.
Through a process resonant with Burawoy’s extended case method aiming to stimulate a dialectical process through provocation, case studies and dialogue, this book has foregrounded questions about the publics with which public sociologists engage. Nancy Fraser’s concept of the subaltern counterpublic is used as a heuristic device for understanding the counterpublic spheres that public sociology as educational practice helps to create. It has also encouraged interrogation of the subalternity of the publics with which we engage. Through a series of dialogues, it has attempted to explore the extent to which public sociology as educational practice contributes to social processes in which mechanisms of exploitation and oppression can be challenged. This has helped to clarify that the ‘subaltern counterpublic’ device has heuristic, rather than definitional value for the practice of public sociology. It has helped to shape how we interpret the tasks of public sociologists as well as how publics interact with the social world and its negotiations over power, meaning and practices. This is a dynamic process. The subaltern counterpublic is not a fixed category of the social world, but rather always contingent, relational and subject to realignment.
This chapter focuses on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology developed and popularised by public sociologist Michael Burawoy, which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It also discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. The chapter explains how the dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education and the dialogical pedagogy of Paulo Freire, whose influence is fundamental to diverse forms of radical education. It describes the value of the knowledge that the poor bring to the educational context and challenges the oppression that kept them in poverty.
Through pedagogical case studies and dialogues, this book sheds new light on concepts and boundaries in public sociology education. With sections on publics, special knowledges and practices in the field, the book offers bold thinking on important questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge. The book begins with a focus on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It then discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. Dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education, and it is through this means that the book reflects on concepts and aspects of public sociology education linked by critical dialogue.
Through pedagogical case studies and dialogues, this book sheds new light on concepts and boundaries in public sociology education. With sections on publics, special knowledges and practices in the field, the book offers bold thinking on important questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge. The book begins with a focus on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It then discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. Dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education, and it is through this means that the book reflects on concepts and aspects of public sociology education linked by critical dialogue.
Through pedagogical case studies and dialogues, this book sheds new light on concepts and boundaries in public sociology education. With sections on publics, special knowledges and practices in the field, the book offers bold thinking on important questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge. The book begins with a focus on public sociology that demonstrates affinities with radical education practice and debates in the dialogue between public sociology and radical education at the edges of academia. It refers to a methodology which facilitates the critical dialogue between practitioners of public sociology and education. It then discusses the constitution of 'publics', production of sociological knowledge, and different contexts of pedagogical practice. Dialogue is central to the practices of public sociology education, and it is through this means that the book reflects on concepts and aspects of public sociology education linked by critical dialogue.
Environmental policy is only one contributor to socio-environmental change. Other factors include ecological changes, ideological shifts and other policies in the context of global and local economic trends. This is not to underplay the significance of policy in relation to the environment, but to locate it in relation to these other factors. Where policy aims for social justice in relation to the distribution of environmental factors we can refer to ‘environmental justice’ policy. The high point of such environmental justice policy in Scotland was the Labour – Liberal Democrat Coalition government under First Minister Jack McConnell, from the end of 2001 to May 2007, which succeeded in attenuating aspects of environmental policy onto a narrative of social democracy. However, it can be argued that the policy ultimately failed to influence the causes of environmental injustice in market-led economic policy (Scandrett, 2010).
Scott and Mooney (2009) argue that the minority Scottish National Party (SNP) government of 2007–11 successfully managed to position itself to the left of Labour on poverty policy, while continuing to hold the tension between social democracy and neoliberalism in practice: indeed, this Janus positioning may have contributed to its subsequent success in the May 2011 elections. It is argued here that the first SNP government similarly adopted a public position as ‘more environmental’ than Labour, while in practice its environmental policies have lacked cohesion, and are divorced from social policies. Having positioned itself as pro-business but with a clear social agenda and with less need to win support from other parties in Parliament, it remains to be seen whether the majority SNP government is able to bring more coherence to its socio-environmental policies.
This chapter identifies who are the 'publics' of public sociology education by referring to Nancy Fraser's formulation of the subaltern counterpublic. It explores who constitutes a 'subaltern counterpublic' and produces curricula in public sociology education. It also mentions who is included and excluded by the practice of public sociology education. The chapter analyses the provocation that makes the case that public sociology primarily engages with subaltern counterpublics, such as those engaged in resistance, resilience, or building alternatives to some form of oppression, exploitation, or injustice. It explains what constitutes a 'counter public' that emerges, for the public sociologist, from dialogue with the praxis of those engaged in struggle against structures and representations that oppress, exploit, and exclude.
The rationale for this chapter is different from the others in this collection. Firstly, as editor, I was struck by the paucity of explicit references to class – whether in terms of identity, structure or as a category of analysis – in the various cases in this collection. The authors of the various cases are practising public sociology focused on gender, ethnicity, refugee status, mental health, age, and issues ranging from alcohol to migration, environmental pollution to violence – and even around trade union organising – without explicit reference to class. Many of the people with whom our authors are practising public sociology are working class, yet class was not being explicitly referred to as a category of public. This struck me as surprising, especially since class is a major (and for some sociologists, the major) systemic cause of injustice and exploitation, and increasingly so under the austerity regime of neoliberalism, as well as a significant (or the significant) collective agent for transformation. I therefore decided to include a chapter specifically addressing this issue.
Secondly, Paul Gilfillan’s work (Case I.4), which does focus on class explicitly, raised some interesting and difficult questions. Whilst his chapter analyses the issues faced by the Workers Education Association, his ethnographic research in a working class community in Fife also generated some narratives from white working class men which were highly resentful of what is perceived as the imposition of ‘diversity’ by a cultural elite, onto an established, Scottish working class culture. Paul illustrated this with a particular quotation from an interview with ‘Alec’, which drew on narratives of misogyny, racism and homophobia.
This chapter describes special knowledges that public sociology pedagogies can generate and the theoretical point of departure in the nineteenth-century working class that demand for control of educational curricula. It points out how public sociology knowledge is be validated as 'really useful' by the participants in public sociology education. It also addresses the 'what' of public sociology education and the political, and epistemological status of public sociology knowledge. The chapter refers to the concept of 'really useful knowledge' that has been used in radical adult education theory. It explains knowledge that is selected, critiqued, and generated by communities and groups engaged in struggles against oppression.
