The Vitality of Students for Public Sociology

Abstract

The vitality of students for public sociology.

“Post-truth” populism and rising inequality have led to a resurgence of public scholarship. Universities are struggling to reassert their public mission and fight off accusations of elitism and irrelevance. Scholars, appalled by the lurch towards nativism and anti-intellectualism, have re-committed to partnering with local communities to tackle increasingly entrenched social problems. Meanwhile, communities are in greater need of support from researchers and public institutions than ever before.

While this “public turn” couldn’t be more timely, it also excludes a vital group: our students. Michael Burawoy called undergraduate sociology students our “first public.” However, their role in public scholarship is negligible, reduced to that of an audience. In our academic careers—collectively spanning over 65 years—we’ve witnessed a diminishing divide between the realities of our students and those we study “in the community.” Our students are often first-generation, saddled with debt, and hail from besieged communities. We began asking ourselves: how can we better integrate our students into our public sociology?

Overwhelmingly, the more than 500 students who participated in CISER valued putting theory into practice and contributing meaningfully to research—especially research reflecting their own experience.

Over the last seven years, we, along with colleagues, developed an approach we call Community Initiated Student Engaged Research, or CISER, that bridges community organizations, university researchers, and students. Our research projects have explored low-wage work, mixed legal status families, the affordable housing crisis, middle school culture and climate, and youth civic engagement. CISER listens to our local partners, who are steeped in the daily work of these challenging social issues. We ask two questions: what do you know (based on experience) that you can’t “prove,” and what do you need to know to do your work better? Most often, they tell us there’s a dearth of data on vulnerable populations deemed “hard to reach,” which results in their being poorly served, overlooked, and under-funded.

We then train a large cohort of undergraduates through course-based action research. Students work alongside faculty researchers, e.g., surveying workers in the backs of kitchens, interviewing city planners, observing youth at school, parsing living wage debates, or documenting the lives of the unhoused. Participating in these ways, students are no longer a mere audience for public sociology but become its producers.

We found that incorporating undergraduates into community-based research can be transformational. First, student researchers with relevant lived experience and/or language skills can connect us to hard-to-reach populations our community partners serve. Many of our students are bilingual Spanish speakers, economically struggling, or have chosen to participate in CISER projects due to prior experiences with the research issues. When they enter college, these characteristics are often considered “deficits.” However, CISER flips the script, recognizing their language, culture, and life experiences as key assets.

We have also found that students’ involvement in CISER makes higher education far more meaningful. Overwhelmingly, the more than 500 students who participated in CISER valued putting theory into practice and contributing meaningfully to research—especially research reflecting their own experience. This was beautifully realized when they helped in presenting findings to large bilingual audiences and confidently leading local public discussions.

Finally, CISER can be transformational for faculty facing the familiar demands of the tenure-track troika—teaching, research, and service—by integrating all three into our public scholarship. In terms of teaching, it helps develop innovative pedagogical approaches that situate students as active partners in their education, while enabling us to learn from their distinct experiences and produce richer and more nuanced research. This, in turn, infuses the service we offer to our community partners as well as our own university, allowing the latter to better achieve its research, teaching, and public mission.

At this critical moment, public sociology is more vital than ever. By partnering with students as knowledge producers, we enhance this vitality, pushing sociology to grapple with the issues and knowledge of all of its “publics”—those in the community, as well as in our own classrooms.