“To take or not to take a stand”: Can Sociology Thrive without Addressing Public Controversies?

In 2003, ASA passed an anti-war resolution. This resolution generated a controversy between those who thought this was a “political” act and those who believed that all sociological interventions are “political.” In this session we will debate the question: what ought to be the role of sociologists in public controversies?

Organizer: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Texas A&M University
Panel: Andrew Abbott, University of Chicago
Judith Blau, University of North Carolina
Stephen Cole, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Barrie Thorne, University of California, Berkeley

Activist-Intellectuals in the Media Spotlight: Is the Whole World Watching?

How, in age of media concentration, can we expand the scope of public discussion and debate? In this session we will hear from people who have engaged diverse publics in debates on critical social issues. They will focus upon their experiences in speaking with, through, and to different forms of media.

Organizer: Arlene Stein, Rutgers University; and Greg McLauchlan, University of Oregon
Panel: Joan Acker, University of Oregon
Medea Benjamin, Director of Global Exchange
Barry Glassner, University of Southern California
Colin Samson, University of Essex, England

Are We on the Same Page?: Bridging Media Research, Activism, and Practice

This panel brings together scholars of media and popular culture, an alternative media practitioner, and a media scholar-advocate, to consider two core questions: First, what issues does each see as critical to consider at this moment in media culture? Second, how can media scholarship, activism, and practice be most usefully bridged?

Organizer: Denise Bielby, University of California, Santa Barbara
Panel: Andrea Press, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaigne
Richard Gonzales, National Public Radio
Suzanna Walters, Georgetown, author of All the Rage
Charlotte Ryan, Boston College

Being a Public Intellectual: Bringing Research to the People

Can social scientists be effective intellectuals outside the academy? Each of the presenters will offer their own experiences to help define just what it mean s to be a an academic and public intellectual. What is it that we have to offer in the public sphere and to what publics? Is there a moment when we cease to be public sociologists and simply become political or community leaders or media stars?

Organizer: Barbara Risman, North Carolina State University
Panel: Pepper Schwartz, University of Washington
John Stanfield, Indiana University
Claude Fischer, University of California, Berkeley
Diane Vaughan, Boston College

Community Organizing in the Era of Globalization: Why? How? For Whom?

Sociologists who are organizers and grassroots organizers who are scholars will share their community organizing experience – theory and praxis – within the context of social history and power relations, especially today’s digital globalization and empire.

Organizer: Walda Katz-Fishman, Howard University and Project South
Panel: M. Bahati Kuumba, Spelman College
Mark Levine, Western Service Workers Association
Andrea Smith, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Incite! Women of Color Against Violence
Jerome Scott, Project South

GLBT Sociologies and Public Issues

This panel will discuss the relationships between the knowledge constructed within sociology and related disciplines and the politics of queerness that exist outside of the academy. Each participant will focus on how and where lesbian/gay/bi/transgendered sociologies have intersected with public knowledges in useful and problematic ways.

Organizer: Jennifer Eichstedt, Humboldt State University
Panel: Margaret Cerullo, Hampshire College
Steven Seidman, State University at Albany
Melissa Embser-Herbert, Hamline University
Tomas Almaguer, San Francisco State University

How Journalists Bring Social Science to the Public

A good journalist is often a social scientist without a license. He or she has to read the complex messages of group dynamics, individual dreams, social and economic pressures, and to understand how these all interact to make a community behave as it does.

Organizer: Adam Hochschild
Panel: Adrian LeBlanc, journalist and author (Random Family)
Mark Kramer, Neiman Foundation/Harvard University
Susan E. Eaton, journalist and author (Writing about Race, Class and Fellow Human Beings: Why Journalism and Social Science Need Each Other)
Orville Schell, University of California, Berkeley
Discussion: Katherine Newman, Harvard University

Producing Public Ethnographies: On The Politics and Ethics of Field Inquiry

Drawing on their own past and ongoing research, the panelists will engage the political and moral issues raised by conducting, writing, and disseminating ethnographic research on topics of urgent civic importance. They will consider the role of theory, policy, and practical engagement, as well as how the specificities of fieldwork as a mode of data production and analysis mitigate, exacerbate, or renovate the perennial ethical dilemmas faced by all social inquiry.

Organizer: Loïc Wacquant, New School for Social Research and Centre de sociologie européenne-Paris
Panel: Nancy Scheper Hughes, University of California, Berkeley
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California
Omar McRoberts, University of Chicago

Public Sociologists in Pursuit of the Ph.D.

The pathway to the Ph.D. – and the structures, practices, norms, and institutions that shape it – is an essential rite in the life of nearly all would-be sociologists. As transformative producers of professional status, and key sites of disciplinary reproduction, how do graduate programs promote or subvert, enhance or inhibit, the development of public sociologies?

Organizer: Jonathan VanAntwerpen, University of California, Berkeley
Panel: Jennifer Bair, Yale University
Kimberly Da Costa, Harvard University
Eric Klinenberg, New York University
Discussion: George J.A. Murray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Public Sociology and Disciplinary Sociology

What implications does strengthening the public mission of sociology have for disciplinary training and careers? In what ways do current graduate training practices encourage and discourage the practice of public sociologies? What about early career and tenure processes? Panelists will comment on these issues, prior to extensive audience participation.

Organizer: Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, North Carolina State University
Panel: Raka Ray, University of California, Berkeley
George Ritzer, University of Maryland, College Park
Joey Sprague, University of Kansas
Gregory Squires, George Washington University

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Meeting the Needs of Our Primary Public--Students

How do we make teaching a scholarly endeavor central to our lives as sociologists? What is meant by the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)? What is its relationship to traditional research? How does it enhance student learning? What is the future of the SoTL in sociology?

Organizer: Kathleen McKinney, Illinois State University, Normal
Panel: Kathleen McKinney, Illinois State University, Normal
Pat Hutchings, Carnegie Foundation
Eugene Rice, American Association of Higher Education
Dennis Rome, Indiana University

Science and Politics: Classical Theories and Contemporary Dilemmas

Sociologists and the discipline of sociology confront tough challenges as they address today's complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between science and politics. How can classical theory help illuminate our questions and dilemmas? The premise of this panel is that the works of Durkheim, Freud, Weber, DuBois and Marx still have much to say to our contemporary projects and to sociology's many publics.

Organizer: Julia Adams, University of Michigan
Panel: Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
Christine L. Williams, University of Texas, Austin
Lawrence King, Yale University
Ivan Szelenyi, Yale University
Alford Young Jr., University of Michigan
Maurice Zeitlin, University of California, Los Angeles

Successful Failures: Contested Opportunity Policies in Higher Education

A paradox of educational success but political failure is evident among opportunity policies in higher education. Both affirmative action and “open admissions” policies are illustrative. Research suggests such programs have been generally successful. Nonetheless, political leaders have attacked and undermined them. Panel and audience will discuss processes of mobilization and countermobilization in relation to opportunity policies.

Organizer: David Lavin, City University of New York
Panel: Walter Allen, University of California, Los Angeles
Jerome Karabel, University of California, Berkeley
Paul Attewell, City University of New York
David Karen, Bryn Mawr College

The Media and the Making of a War Culture

How has the presentation of war and terrorist threats in the U.S. media affected U.S. public acquiescence of military offensives? Can cultural theories and sociological analysis of media institutions and ownership yield insights and strategies to promote a critical reading of media representations, and a broader public discourse?

Organizer: Clarence Lo, University of Missouri, Columbia
Panel: Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles
Robert W. McChesney, University of Illinois
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University

Stigma, the Media and Mental Illness: Can Sociology & Telecommunications Collaborate on a Public Problem?

Sociology has been front and center in conceptualizing and empirically documenting the nature and impact of the stigma associated with mental illness. Given the prominent role of television on contemporary culture, how can sociologists draw from and work with others inside and outside of the discipline to understand and change media influences?

Organizer: Bernice A. Pescosolido, Indiana University

Images of Mental Illness in the Media.
--Patricia A. Stout, The University of Texas at Austin

Can Images & Effects Meet? Sociology Meets Cognitive Psychology.
--Bernice A. Pescosolido, Indiana University

What Can Sociological Research Do? The Backdrop of the Real World for Public Sociology Efforts.
--Barbara Demming Lurie, Mental Health Media Partnership

Stigma, Media and Research: Insights and Intuition from the Sociology of Culture.
--Joshua Gamson, University of San Francisco

The Place of Values in Public Sociology: The Case of Family Policy

Debates surrounding welfare reform, marriage promotion, and teenage sexuality have become overtly “political.” Although family policies and research have always been shaped by values, professional norms discouraged their public disclosure. More researchers now acknowledge values underlying their research and advocacy. Is this a good thing? What moral issues do sociologists face when their research findings are used to promote political and religious agendas?

Organizer: Scott Coltrane, University of California, Riverside
Panel: Barbara Risman, North Carolina State University
Linda Waite, University of Chicago
Frank Furstenberg, University of Pennsylvania
Kristin Luker, University of California, Berkeley