The Civic Sociologist

Why should sociologists learn ethics?   Of course, many of us do concern ourselves with research ethics and, personally and reflexive, we make efforts to position ourselves vis-a-vis our objects of study; these may include marginalised communities in need of our support, but perhaps not our paternalism; or, perhaps we wish to understand the motivations of right-wing bigots - how can we relate to these figures in a way that preserves our integrity and the validity of our research? But, what if this is only the tip of the normative iceberg?   As Rubén Flores and Ryan Burg argue in their recent article in Civic Sociology, we in the sociological profession would benefit from a far more robust training and understanding of ethics. The authors advocate for an intellectual virtue they call 'conscious normativity'.   For this month's podcast I spoke with Ruben and Ryan about their ideas for how we can progress these lines of thinking in the sociological discipline and beyond.    

The Second Convivialist Manifesto, signed by 276 intellectuals from around the world, charts a new political position – a synthesis – that overcomes the limits of the major political paradigms of the 20th century - liberalism, communism, socialism and anarchism – in order to pave the way for something new. 

In their recent article for Civic Sociology, sociologist John Holmwood at the University of Nottingham, Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead of the verbatim LUNG theatre company in Leeds discuss the implications of their collaborations to bring those forgotten elements of the truth – however we define it – to light. The significance for our relationship to the public in an age of experts and post-truth cannot be underrated.

We tend to think of the market and government as separate spheres, related to one another, perhaps regulating one another, but rarely do we track the long-term ways in which both have created and shaped one another. Sarah Quinn, in her new book, 'American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation' tells a different story - one that positions the government's construction of credit markets in order to achieve policy ends - especially in housing - produced entire fields of finance in the market, while making government unaccountable and invisible within these processes and policies we tend to associate with the private, rather than public sector. This week, on The Civic Sociologist podcast, we talk with Dr Quinn about her fascinating and revealing retelling of the American story.

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the ‘End of History' in which we could expect liberal capitalist democracies to triumphantly expand across the globe.  While many today might laugh at the assertion that anything about the present could be defined as a successful or stable political order, what happens if we take the longer view of things back to the turn of the 20th, rather than 21st century. As I discuss with James Block, Professor of Political Thought at DePaul University in Chicago, progressives back then thought the American project had culminated, with all the central institutions of liberalism firmly in place. The question became, how do we get our population to buy into this American project – which required participation - if it was already finished? The answer was found in consumption – individual gratification and the promise of fulfilled desire – a promise that appeared to be attained by the mid-1960s, only to produce alienation on a massive scale when the younger generation realised the moral emptiness of this new regime. Tracking the consequences of these trends to the present, we can see the end of the line for this particular order of things – requiring a radically new imagination if we propose to get out of the current mess we find ourselves in after the end of history.

This week I'm sitting down with Carl Fraser, Lecturer in Architecture at Coventry University and director of Situation Architecture. Specialising in 'counter-mapping' Carl was involved in a project we conducted in Exeter last year to develop cooperative housing for early career professionals, which you can read more about on the civic sociology blog. He has also conducted fascinating research into the decline of the British high street and the adaptation of public space in the Occupy and other protest movements. We discuss these and related topics in our conversation conducted last month in London.

This week, we'll be speaking with Pamela Herd, Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Her recent book, co-authored with Don Moynihan, titled 'Administrative Burden: Policymaking By Other Means', explores the politics of greater or lesser degrees of burden citizens experience when interacting with government bureaucracies and policies. It's a fascinating discussion of an underexplored set of dimensions in public policy. We then turn to discuss the role and position of sociology in these debates and the academy, in general, pointing to possibilities for our further involvement and public significance moving forward.

This week on the Civic Sociologist podcast, I'll be presenting a recording of a talk I gave at a recent conference in Manchester called 'A Processual Account of the Rise of the Modern University System', which tracks my on-going research into the long-term 'Academization Process' beginning in the early 19th century. We can see two phases in this process, first a shift from the medieval to a modern elite university, then a second phase moving from elite to mass. Because contradictions embedded in the logic of the first phase have not been resolved, we can see a range of social issues and inequalities that are *caused* by further expansion of credentials today. This links us up with many of the themes we are interested in at Civic Sociology, including the rise of anti-expert populism and what we might do differently to better connect academics and professionals with the public and vice-versa.

In this week's podcast, we are speaking with Tariq Modood, Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy at the University of Bristol. I ask about his work as a leading public intellectual around issues of 'multiculturalism' since the 1990s, including his experiences with the Labour Party at that time and since. We explore his views on multiculturalism which are distinctly rooted in ideas of the civics, community and values. Listen to see if there might yet be a future for multiculturalism in Britain and beyond.

In this episode of The Civic Sociologist podcast, I sit down with Rebecca Elliott from the London School of Economics Department of Sociology to discuss her work connecting issues of climate change with social research, policy and activism. Elliott's research into issues of flood insurance take us from the relatively mundane world of insurance to pressing issues around the sociology of loss in general. We also discuss her contribution to debates surrounding the Green New Deal.

In our first podcast for our new journal, Civic Sociology, Eric Lybeck speaks with associate professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, Michael McQuarrie about his research into Rust Belt America & his emerging comparative study of similarly ‘left behind' regions in the East Midlands of the UK.