Corey Dolgon

Civic Engagement and Public Sociology: Two “Movements” in Search of a Mission

While the tools of civically engaged higher education (service-learning, community-based research, etc.) existed in sociology classes well before the onset of what some call the “civic engagement movement,” they have quickly shifted from margin to center as key building blocks for sociology’s own trend toward public sociology. While we examine the precarious rise of both civic engagement and public sociology, we argue that lacking strong social movements as shaping forces, the social justice potential for both civic engagement and public sociology must come from practitioners’ links to community-based politics and social movement organizing. Such connections still ground teaching and scholarship in the real politics of everyday life: people, institutions, and communities.

Revisiting the Three R'S—Reading, Writing and Revolution: The Role of Humanist Scholars and the Future of Humanity and Society:

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail message suggesting that I sign a petition to impeach the Five Supreme Court justices who gave George W. Bush the election last November. Despite the righteousness of the cause, the endeavor struck me as almost quaint. After all, even before the bombings of September 11 th, the general public (at least as it is represented in the mainstream media) had all but forgotten Bush’s “legitimacy” problem. The call to war seems to have reaffirmed this legitimacy with 90% approval ratings. The clamor for learning important lessons about democracy that followed last year’s electoral melodrama had subsided. Even before the September attacks, the progressive, alternative media had settled into oppositional mode, critiquing current administration policies and cautioning Ralph Nader about the damage of another “spoiler run” for President. Now, the liberal media has fallen even further into a lock-step behind the war efforts and its “civil liberties for national security” swap meet, while progressive pundits and scholars debate possible strategies for (and even the merits of) a peace movement. But the voices of public intellectuals and activists demanding the restoration or creation of democracy in government seem relatively silent. Some of the real “civics lessons” demonstrated by the 2000 contest should be re-visited, though. Progressive scholars and public Intellectuals should stress the contradictions of U.S. Democracy that were exposed by the Presidential fiasco:

Twenty-First-Century Workers’ Education in North America The Defeat of the Left or a Revitalized Class Pedagogy?

The main response (Mantsios 2015) to neoliberalism and the marginalization of labor studies in higher education has been the call for a “new” labor college—one that integrates “workforce development” and liberal arts, yet separates worker education from its working-class roots. This article interrogates the state of worker education and the impact of neoliberalism on various civic engagement efforts at colleges and universities. The authors argue for a critical reevaluation of workers’ education and labor studies programs, calling for organized workers to retake control of such projects to avoid the deradicalization of class politics now ascendant in neoliberal institutions.

Globalizing the Classroom: Innovative Approach to National and International Learning

This essay examines an innovative approach to teaching across international and cultural boundaries and evaluates the experience in a course on Globalization, Social Justice, and Human Rights, co-taught collaboratively by faculty from different campuses and countries since 2011. This course was created to address unmet needs in the traditional higher educational systems. These include, but are not limited to, lack of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaboration among students, faculty, and institutions. Although economies, polities, environments, and human societies are experiencing great connections across the globe, educational systems continue to be modeled on nineteenth century assumptions and structures. In this course, faculty teach at their respective universities but use an online platform to allow for cross-campus communication. In addition to the classroom rooted in a physical place, a major component of student work is to interact online with students on other campuses, including undertaking collaborative group work across borders. A shared core syllabus can be modified by institution to satisfy local needs. In this essay, we examine the following: the history and logistics of this course; the facilitators and barriers in its implementation, including the use of technology; the role of language and communication; and the mechanisms necessary for faculty to adopt such a collaborative, global effort to local curricular guidelines. We also address the benefits of the course for students, including exposure to global diversity (culture, worldviews, and pedagogy); developing teamwork skills such as leadership and flexibility; accepting and accommodating diverse educational needs/approaches; and promoting interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. Finally, we assess the challenges for faculty in designing and managing a course across different time zones and academic calendars, facilitating transnational group service learning projects, and the greater time demands required to coordinate and monitor students’ online interactions. Our objective is to help improve and encourage innovative approaches to teaching globalization, social justice, and human rights.

Teaching Humanist Sociology

Most members of our association were drawn in large part to academia because of teaching. We have watched with despair and heartache as teaching at many institutions has become a distant priority. The specter of ‘‘publish and perish’’ that haunted ‘‘research one’’ institutions for the last few decades of the 20th century now has liberal arts colleges firmly in its grasp. Likewise, in some of the institutions where teaching was most sacrosanct, service and grant work now have measurable weight. In an age of changing expectations where education has simply become a cost–benefit analysis and spending for the humanities and social sciences is constantly being reexamined by trustees, teaching in a way compatible with our humanist beliefs is increasingly difficult to do. At the same time, we are witnessing the corporatization of the academy. Consequently, we are constantly pressured to ‘‘prove’’ our value in quantitative and cost– benefit assessments. For many of our colleagues, teaching has become a means to some evaluative end. The sociology for people (Lee 1978) that we cherish has increasingly become the ‘‘sociology for the institution.’’ For the humanist sociologist, dedicated to social activism and public sociology, these trends have placed serious constraints on what we do and who we are. Rather than retreat, however, many members of the Association for Humanist Sociology have continued to ask the question ‘‘sociology for whom’’ by finding new ways of teaching sociology to ‘‘solve problems and improve lives,’’ thereby

Co-Constructing Knowledge Spheres in the Academy: Developing Frameworks and Tools for Advancing Publicly Engaged Scholarship:

Publicly engaged scholarship (PES) has emerged as a powerful force, yet institutional policies and cultures have often inhibited its acceptance in the academy. This article considers the benefits of PES for higher education as well as the obstacles to its enactment. It identifies the college level as a critical site for change and offers a rubric for institutional change agents to use to assess support for community engagement at the college level and identify avenues for further progress. The authors also grapple with tensions inherent in promoting PES at institutions that have historically served as agents of domination and oppression.

Against the “Institutional Real”: The Structural and Cultural Foundations of Corporate Higher Education and the Challenge to Developing Politically Engaged Students

The classic investment opportunity involves a company that has a systematic solution to a problem and how successful that company may become depends on how big the problem is and how well the company solves it… The shift we see [in education] is a system going from a government-run monopoly with little accountability and, by definition, no competition, to a market driven system that competes on price and quality. As in health care, the delivery of service and the change in funding sources will be critically interactive as an investment driver. [These shifts] do not occur overnight, but with the increasing discussion, consideration, and implementation of charter schools, school choice, private management of public schools and vouchers, we are certain that the traditional way education and child care have been delivered and funded will continue to change, and there is no going back (Lehman Brothers in Investment opportunity in the education industry. Lehman Brothers, New York, 1996).

Roll Over Sam Gompers: Race, Class, Culture, and Revolution

does to the cultural practices and emotional experience of family life. In this study, Clawson and Gerstel put schedule unpredictability on the map, helping to analyze and evaluate a crucial feature of contemporary work. Unequal Time investigates the intersectionality of class and gender in how people interpret and manage unstable work-hours and, along the way, raises important questions about how people and institutions use culture to impose, express, and manage inequality. References

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 Miles in the City by William B. Helmreich, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013, 480 pp. ISBN: 0691144052

What is it like to be a member of an urban, poor, African American community in America, transformed by unprecedented levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision? Alice Goffman seeks to answer this question in On the Run—a book based on a multiyear ethnographic study of African Americans in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. As a resident and participant in the community that she calls 6th Street (pseudonym), Goffman explores the lives of a group of young African American men and their families who are engaged often with police and the criminal justice system. Goffman presents an intriguing narrative told within the context of the effects of “tough-on-crime” policies implemented by state and federal governments beginning in the mid-1970s. These policies increased penalties for possessing, buying, and selling drugs; instituted steeper sentences for violent crime; and expanded the number of police on the streets and the number of arrests these officers made. Goffman describes vividly the lives of young African American men like Mike, Tony, and Alex, as well as brothers Chuck, Reggie, and Tim, all of whom spend time in and out of prison, attending court hearings, and avoiding police. She suggests that not only are these men in effect on the run, but also that “the fear of capture and confinement has seeped into the basic activities of daily living” such that the entire community is “on the run” (p. xii). On the Run opens with an engaging prologue that puts names and faces to individuals who are often simply thought of as anonymous and dangerous black males. Goffman quickly makes real, for some readers, the young men’s humanity by sharing a recollection about a group of young men, one of whom becomes a victim of a crime himself and cannot seek medical attention because of his own fears that he will be arrested given his parole sentence. She describes the young man’s status in the parlance of the 6th Street Boys as “dirty”—when a person is likely to attract police attention at some point in the future because of their existing legal entanglements with the criminal justice system. She uses “clean” to describe those individuals who have no pending legal entanglements—that is, they are not on probation, parole, or do not have outstanding warrants. These concepts are usefully employed throughout On the Run to demonstrate how an individual’s legal status affects how he interacts with others and others with him.

Min(d)ing Realpolitik and the Politics of Public Reality

he 2010 Midterm elections are upon us and will undoubtedly be creating more heat than light by the time this special issue reaches your doorsteps and databases. As we go to press in late Spring, one might predict that what the Summer of 2009 gave to the Tea Party activists and astro-turf operatives (a lukewarm and poorly articulated health care plan that progressives couldn’t muster much motivation to defend), the Summer of 2010 may already be taking away (draconian anti-ethnic policies in Arizona that even most republicans admit are unconstitutional and have already alienated burgeoning numbers of Latino voters, and a Valdez-sized oil spill that threatens to beach not only Bayou shrimp boats but also Sarah Palin’s most popular rallying cry, “Drill baby, drill!”) Of course something else could happen. It usually does. A few months in political spin time are like dog years for the rest of us. The historic elections of 2008 already seem just that—historical. And, despite a relatively impressive record of moderately progressive legislation and policy initiatives (with exceptions made for continued militarism and pandering to off-shore oil drilling advocates), the first Black President, Barak Obama, has been in office for about a year and a half (18 months) and it already seems hard to recall life under Bush. When the Association for Humanist Sociology held its 2008 annual meeting in Boston, it was only 2 days after the election and much of the membership was still celebrating what seemed a tremendous triumph. Not only had the a majority of American voters elected an African American to be President of the United States, Barak Obama himself seemed to be the anti-Bush. After eight years of an aggressively conservative and reckless imperialism put forward by a master of provincial malapropism, the country now had an intelligent, internationally respected leader who promised a measured sense of repairing irresponsible fiscal policies at home and healing the bitterness left by neo-colonial arrogance abroad. It made perfect sense that our plenary speakers (as well as many of our session presenters) would focus on both the significance and the potential of this political sea change. Both Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Corey Dolgon argued that, while we might celebrate aspects of Obama’s ascendancy, too many people had seemed swept away by the moment. Too many potential critics who might push Obama from the left and potentially organize to pressure him towards a more INTRODUCTION