Engaged scholarship has become a buzzword in academia in recent years. But active engagement with the critical issues of the day has long been part of the sociological enterprise starting with the discipline’s “big three” (Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber) to Jane Addams, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and many more. As Craig Calhoun, former president of the Social Science Research Council, observed, “Thinkers have been doers (contrary to stereotype).”
Doing Good and Doing Well
Scholars have long seen social scientists generally, and sociologists in particular, as leading “thinkers and doers” when it comes to longstanding social problems, and the growing number of sessions at professional meetings and the creation of new programs within academic departments as well as independent of traditional academic institutions attest to the emerging interest in social justice engaged scholarship. But mainstream academic sociology has been an inconsistent friend of such work. In fact, the profession often constitutes a significant barrier to social justice scholarship. The conduct of presumably objective, value-free, detached scholarship, often explicitly mimicking the natural sciences, with the aim of publishing in prestigious peer-reviewed outlets, has generally been viewed as the most laudatory role for sociologists, particularly in the U.S. Promotion and tenure practices and award systems generally provide the most concrete evidence of this tradition, which often undercuts engaged scholarship.
But in recent years there has been a reemergence of a more activist sociology and social science generally. It goes by various names: public sociology, community-engaged scholarship, countersystem research, liberation sociology, social justice research, and more. More scholars are asking the age-old question, “Which side are you on?” as they attempt to address the most serious, often existential, questions of our age and eschew the positivist pursuit of permanent or invariant social relationships following the natural sciences model.
Conflicting Sentiments in Academia
The role of universities has been mixed when it comes to engaged scholarship. Initiatives such as ASA’s Community Action Research Initiative (CARI) grants program, Campus Compact, Scholars Strategy Network, URBAN, and the Public Purpose Institute (Carnegie Community Engagement Classification) are just some of the entities within or adjacent to higher ed that support such efforts. But institutions of higher education still constitute one of the most significant barriers to social justice advocacy research by their faculty. As the cliché goes: We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Universities often tout their many contributions to their communities and beyond. George Washington University (GW) has posted banners on campus that state, “We change the world.” But the reward system, particularly tenure and promotion practices, often discourage collaborative social justice research. Departments—even those whose members are progressive on most issues—and higher-level review committees prioritize articles and books from peer-reviewed outlets. Sole-authored publications are the most prized, with coauthored pieces where the scholar under review is the lead author coming next. When faculty come up for tenure or promotion, letters from external reviewers who are well-known full professors at highly respected universities are the most valuable element in their dossiers. Because the senior scholars who are most often sought out as external reviewers have rarely pursued it themselves, they are unlikely to recognize the value of engaged scholarship.
Promotion and tenure dossiers generally have three components, which are—in order of importance and weight—research, teaching, and service. Collaborative work with nonacademic entities, including social justice nonprofit groups and government agencies, is acknowledged but usually as part of the less-valued service portion of a dossier. The same holds for annual reports and most research awards provided by academic institutions. So traditional criteria are baked in throughout an academic career. For this reason, young scholars are often encouraged to focus exclusively on those research activities that will result in the “right” publications. After tenure is gained, then it might be the time to branch out into other types of research. But by then, most scholars have established their patterns of activity and research agendas, and moreover, have set their sights on getting promoted to full professor. So, the beat goes on. In the end, as one associate vice-provost and her colleagues observed, “If we want faculty to be involved in communities but reward them for other activities, we are our own worst enemies.”
But things may be changing. Some universities are incorporating community-engaged research explicitly into their tenure and promotion guidelines and are doing so in a way that highlights such activity as research and scholarship, not just service. The sociology department at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro offers the following guidelines on reappointment in its definition of Scholarship and Research: “Community engaged scholarship includes research/creative activities undertaken by faculty members in collaboration with community partners. It involves the collaborative production of knowledge. It involves both community engagement and scholarship. With respect to tenure and promotion, the Sociology Department utilizes the following standards of evaluation, which are derived from those established by the ASA Council. Community engaged scholarship is sociology that:
Draws on a body of sociological literature,
Is research-based,
Upholds rigorous methodological standards,
Is subject to peer review.”
And in Portland State University’s Policies and Procedures for the Evaluation of Faculty for Tenure, Promotion, and Merit Increases, scholarship includes “Application,” which “involves asking how state-of-the-art knowledge can be responsibly applied to significant problems” and “assessing its generalizability and using it to implement changes.” So, scholarship includes but goes beyond publications in respected outlets. It also includes the application of knowledge to change and not just understand the phenomena under investigation.
Supporting engaged social justice research may simply be in the self-interest of many academic institutions. As more institutions face increasingly tight budgets and other existential threats, brought home particularly during the pandemic, engaged scholarship may remind stakeholders, including donors, state legislators, voters, and the general public, of the benefits of higher education, including the ability to improve the lives of people in the local community as well as positively change the world. The more than 300 institutions that received the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification certainly see the value of supporting engaged scholarship.
The keynote address at the 2021 graduation celebration of the GW sociology department is illustrative. The speaker was Lamar Thorpe, a 2007 GW graduate with a double major in sociology and women’s studies who is currently the Mayor of Antioch, CA. An African American, he described the challenges of his early life, having been born in prison and raised by his adopted Mexican American family. He did not do well in school, spent time in the U.S. Navy, and then applied to GW. He mentioned that more than a few people asked him skeptically what he would do with a degree in sociology. He proceeded to describe what he said was an excellent education, noting that he learned about the structural causes of critical issues such as mass incarceration, structural racism, homelessness, hunger, and so many other problems that he now deals with on a daily basis as mayor—and emphasizing how much better prepared he is to deal with these issues because of his academic training.
Universities can do more. There appear to be lights at the end of this tunnel, and they are not all trains coming the other way.
Social Sciences and Social Justice
It is time to reignite one of our discipline’s long-standing traditions—that of engaged social justice scholarship. Two scholars who were among the severest critics of, as well as champions for, sociology and the social sciences in the twentieth century provide lessons that resonate today as much as they did when they were offered more than 60 and 80 years ago. Robert Lynd and C. Wright Mills both looked to sociology and the social sciences to play leading roles in improving the human condition.
As Robert Lynd argued in his 1939 book, Knowledge for What: The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton University Press 2016), it is essential that social scientists are involved in those decisions that critically affect people’s lives. “If the social scientist is too bent upon ‘waiting until all the data are in,’ or if university policies warn him off controversial issues, the decisions will be made anyway—without him. They will be made by the ‘practical’ man and by the ‘hard-headed’ politician chivvied by interested pressure-blocs.” Lynd further asserted that it was social science that should play the key role in finding answers to the challenges of the day. “But social science is confined neither to practical politics nor to things whose practicality is demonstrable this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Nor is its role merely to stand by, describe, and generalize, like a seismologist watching a volcano. There is no other agency in our culture whose role it is to ask long-range and, if need be, abruptly irreverent questions of our democratic institutions … The responsibility is to keep everlasting challenging the present with the question: But what is it that we human beings want, and what things would have to be done, in what ways and in what sequence in order to change the present so as to achieve it?” But he feared that social science may not be playing the role that it could and should play, observing that many social scientists were “lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down.”
Twenty years later in The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959), arguably the most influential book ever written by a U.S. sociologist, C. Wright Mills offered a critique of the bureaucratization of science, its emphasis on method, and the domination of the social science research enterprise by powerful institutions, particularly large corporations, government agencies, and the military. But he, too, envisioned a vital role for sociology. In the 1950s, Mills observed great insecurity and unease on the part of many, which he attributed primarily to the fact that people often viewed as personal troubles that which were in reality public issues. In examining the critical challenges of his day he argued that “it is this condition, of uneasiness and indifference, that is the signal feature of our period.” And he pointed to sociology, as both an intellectual and political force, to explain this reality: “It is now the social scientist’s foremost political and intellectual task—for here the two coincide—to make clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference.” He concluded, “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society … That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersection of biography and history within society.” Mills had high hopes and expectations for sociology.
But perhaps the most direct guidance for the practice of social science in the tradition of Lynd and Mills comes from the world of journalism, where it is often said that the job of a good newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Community-engaged research provides one pathway by which social scientists can do just that.
This essay is drawn from Squires’s chapter, “Wins, Losses, and Lessons of Engaged Social Justice Research: How Academic Institutions Nurture and Undermine Collaborative Community-Based Scholarship” in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Sociology for Social Justice, edited by Corey Dolgan, to be published by Oxford University Press.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
