Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Reflecting on Michael Burawoy’s classificaton of sociology into professional, critical, policy, and public types, and the adoption of the latter as the theme of the ASA’s 99th Annual Meeting, in this paper I argue that the drive towards increasingly global and world-historical public sociologies may prove hazardous in the absence of a parallel emphasis on the development and practice of private inter/intrapersonal sociologies. This requires self-critical revisitation of our basic definitions and theories in sociology in order to develop unified theoretical frameworks that meet the challenges of understanding and practicing the dialectics of public and private social processes in the twenty-first century. We need to move beyond Newtonian definitions and theorizations of sociology and embrace new quantal sociological imaginations that integrally engage our macro and micro sociologies in favor of simultaneously world-historical and inter/intrapersonal frameworks. Public sociologies can not advance our theoretical and applied sociologies of what is or what can be in the absence of parallel efforts in invigorating our sociological imaginations in our private, inter/intrapersonal social landscapes. Although personal troubles can best be understood in relationship to broader public issues, the latter themselves can most effectively be addressed and resolved through the action of specific individual agencies who champion the need for broader socio-historical interpretation and change as deeply personal exercises in self-knowledge and self-liberation. As Mills reminded us, what sparks the sociological imagination is the meeting of public and private sociologies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although sociology is now firmly entrenched in academe, a century ago various strands of sociology vied to define the discipline. A vibrant community-based, women-centered public sociology coexisted with academic sociology and offered an alternative vision of sociology and sociologists. Women such as Jane Addams and Caroline Bartlett Crane raised feminist concerns regarding research methods and the goals of social research. Their story, and the vast numbers of other women they represent, have largely been lost in the history of sociology. In this paper, I present an alternative version of the history of American sociology and suggest how the lost legacy of a democratic, public sociology has important implications for sociology in the 21st century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The securitization of an ever-expanding number of realms is a distinguishing feature of the contemporary political landscape. This paper summarizes the perspectives on securitization offered by three existing approaches: Critical Security Studies, Foucauldian state analyses, and repression frameworks from the collective behavior and social movements literature. It considers the contributions and limitations of each of these perspectives in the sociocultural analysis of securitization. It then draws upon a case study of securitization in Spain at the turn of the 20th century and a look at what is new in order to investigate the provenance of contemporary securitization, to develop the critique of existing perspectives, and to demonstrate how these approaches can be synthesized and built upon in developing a sociological approach to the phenomenon.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this paper, I view the research interests of sociologists as forming a cognitive structure of sociology. This research probes quantitative and qualitative aspects of research interests among American sociologists. Using a sample of sociology faculty members at Research I universities, I investigate some factors that influence the total number of research interests an American sociologist may have, and the number of interests that correspond with specialty areas provided by American Sociological Association (ASA, in the rest of this article). Such factors include individual attributes like academic rank, gender, and group attributes like departmental prestige. Because some faculty members in the sample share a department, the data structure contains variables both of individual level and group level. Both total number of interests and ASA-type interests have only non-negative integer values, so Poisson regression and Zero-Truncated Poisson are applied to the analysis of effects of the factors. Adopting clusters of sociologists’ interests developed by James Ennis (1992), I also investigate if sociologists of different groups (academic rank, gender) have different research interests—this is more of qualitative aspects of research interests, I use chi-square tests to the independence of groups and clusters.
I find that the research interests of male and female sociologists are not significantly different in number or in content areas that are measured by Ennis’s interest clusters (1992). Full professors have fewer total number of research interests. Along with associate professors, they also have fewer number of ASA specialty-type research interests. Departmental prestige does not significantly influence the total number of interests, but it positively influences the number of ASA specialty-type interests.