At least since the movement emerged in the early 2000s, I’ve been a proponent and practitioner of all things public sociology. I edited Contexts magazine from 2008 to 2011 with Chris Uggen, fellow sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, and together we built The Society Pages.org, host of the largest collection of sociology websites on the internet. I helped create a senior [...]

My first experience with field research occurred in 1996 just after earning my doctorate. I worked for a small, progressive, woman-owned business in the San Francisco Bay Area that provided research and evaluation services to local, state, and federal agencies. My specialty was welfare policy evaluation, and there were plenty of opportunities to evaluate new programs set[...]

Why do I participate in community-engaged research? I believe in producing useful knowledge to further social change and social justice. As 2019 ASA President Mary Romero wrote, “Sociological data is wasted if our studies fail to affect public understandings of social issues or if research is n[...]

As demonstrated by this special issue of Footnotes, there is a growing and welcome recognition in sociology and allied disciplines of the value of community-engaged research (CER) and of its potentially transformative benefits for community partners, students, universities, and scholarship in the field. This has long been my experience with CER, most recently wi[...]

As a community and urban sociologist, publicly oriented sociology is a linchpin of my research methods through the practice of active participation observation with urban social movements and documentary work with public history organizations. Multiyear funding by a governmental partner got me involved in public policy, asset building, and community organizing in the nei[...]

I am a public sociologist and have been working as an engaged scholar for more than 25 years. I have found this to be some of the most satisfying and rewarding work I have done as a sociologist—helping communities solve problems they identify as needing input from the discipline. Of course, community-engaged research is nothing new. Sociologists have been doin[...]

Resurgent “culture wars” and American partisan politics have once again put higher education on the hot seat. Stoked by attacks from the Right, colleges and universities find themselves on the defensive, having to fend off charges of elitism, liberal bias, and irrelevance. And to some degree, the onslaught is working. According to the Pew Research Center, only half o[...]

Through my role as the administrator for the research and community-organizing grants of the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, which supports social change by linking research to social action, I have a birds-eye view of community-based research. I get to see participatory practices in all of their messiness and glory. Th[...]

A student recently asked me why I had switched my major from aerospace engineering to sociology and then years later left a career in finance to get a PhD in sociology. My response may sound trite, but it has become a standard phrase among many of us in the field, from undergraduates to professors: I wanted to be a social change agent. If you are like me, you may have[...]

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) is an R1 (doctoral granting and high research activity) institution with decades of experience with community-engaged research (CER). The UNL Sociology Department has long emphasized research methods, particularly survey methodology and social netw[...]

Since 2013, Lee Smithey’s students in a Swarthmore College sociology elective called Gun Violence Prevention have been working with activists and local groups to research gun homicides in Delaware County, PA. Along with CeaseFire PA, a nonprofit working to end the epidemic of gun violence across Pennsylvania and the U[...]

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[...]