What is Public Sociology?
According to the 2003-04 ASA President Michael Burawoy, who devoted the theme of the Association’s 2004 meeting to public sociologies, public sociology is a sociology that “defines, promotes and informs public debate about class and racial inequalities, new gender regimes, environmental degradation, multiculturalism, technological revolutions, market fundamentalism, and state and non-state violence.” Additionally, “public sociologies should challenge the world as we know it, exposing the gap between what is and what could be…” In other words, public sociology is limited to a few specific areas of research. It is not a science oriented at analyzing all of the social world’s structures and processes in their complex relations. Public sociology is fractioned sociology. Public sociology is utopian. It is para-normal science as it seeks to challenge the world by an imagined unreal world of “what could be…” Who is to say what could have been… Why Public Sociology is Neither Public nor
