Public Sociology

Bringing together interdisciplinary leaders in methodology and arts-based research (ABR), this comprehensive handbook explores the synergies between artistic and research practices and addresses issues in designing, implementing, evaluating, and publishing ABR studies. Coverage includes the full range of ABR genres, including those based in literature (such as narrative and poetic inquiry); performance (music, dance, playbuilding); visual arts (drawing and painting, collage, installation art, comics); and audiovisual and multimethod approaches. Each genre is described in detail and brought to life with robust research examples. Team approaches, ethics, and public scholarship are discussed, as are innovative ways that ABR is used within creative arts therapies, psychology, education, sociology, health sciences, business, and other disciplines.

This article proposes a new understanding of the constraints and opportunities that lead intellectuals engaged in different political and social fields to create alternative modes of resistance to domination. The study of the Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad offers insights into the social conditions of this mode of committed scholarship. On the one hand, this article applies Sayad's theory of immigration to his transnational intellectual engagements. It establishes how immigrants' intellectual work are conditioned by their trajectories, both before and after leaving their country, and by the stages of emigration (from playing a role in the society of origin to becoming caught up in the reality of the host society). On the other hand, the article illuminates the constraints and the spaces of possible action intellectuals face while moving across national universes and disparate political and academic fields. Sayad's marginal position within the academy constrained him to work for the French and Algerian governments and international organizations while he was simultaneously engaged with political dissidents, unionists, writers, and social movements. In tracking Sayad's roles as an academic, expert and public sociologist, the article uncovers the conditions that grounded improbable alliances between those fields and produced new forms of critique and political action. The article concludes by drawing out some reflections that 'collective intellectual' engagements elicit to the sociology of intellectuals.

This review is as much about a new book by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg as it is about the overall phenomenon of scientific production for wider public. It is a timely topic because this “public sociology” text exists within an increasingly professionalized academic environment, where the notion of “publish or perish” is felt by everyone. In this environment, the questions around who are we publishing for and for what ends become even more significant. Even though there might be some exceptions to the rule, the problem of science, in our case sociology, entering the public domain is relevant, as it should be. So how can sociology be more reflexive of its public role? Perhaps by changing the conventional forms of scientific publications.

A l'occasion d'une journée nationale rassemblant les réprésentants de divers samu sociaux de France en vue d'une dynamique de réflexion sur les pratiques des maraudes, j'ai présenté quelques pistes à partir des enquêtes de terrain que j'ai réalisées à Paris.

هر چقدر طی سال های دانشجویی تحقیق سفارشی انجام ندادم (البته تصور نشه که تحقیقات زیادی سفارش شده و من رد کردم) در مورد ترجمه به دلیل معیشت نتونستم و بیشتر کارهایی که ترجمه کردم سفارشی بودند (هر چند در حوزه خودشون آثار برجسته ای هستند). خوب چون سفارشی بودند لزوما مورد علاقه نبودند و از جمله در مورد کتاب سوروکین اختلاف نظر جدی با نویسنده دارم و البته اختلاف نظرم با موسسه ای که سفارش کتاب رو داد و مقدمه ای طولانی بر کتاب نوشته البته خیلی بیشتره. از جمله انتقادات عمده ای که میشه به سوروکین کرد یکی اینکه در تحلیل اجتماعی خانواده رو واحد بنیادی و تعیین کننده در نظر می گیره خوب من ضدخانواده ام و معتقدم خانواده جدای از جامعه نقشی تعیین کننده نداره و یا اصلا نمیتونه رهایی بخش باشه. دوم اینکه با وجود اینکه مفصل و با جزئیات انقلاب جنسی آمریکا رو شرح میده ولی در نهایت نقش سرمایه داری رو در انقلاب جنسی و به ویژه کالایی سازی زن و سرمایه محور کردن روابط دو جنس کم اهمیت و عرضی و قابل اصلاح میدونه. و سوم و جالب اینه که هم سوروکین و هم کتابهای دیگر انقلاب جنسی و از جمله دوستان فعال در این موسسه بیش از سرمایه داری به کمونیسم و مارکسیسم می تازند. با اینکه احساس میکنم چپ و نیروهای مترقی در این باره به اندازه کافی اعلام موضع و تمایزبخشی نکرده اند (البته این بیشتر یک حسه و مطالعه مشخصی در این باره نداشتم)، اما مارکس هم در مانیفست کمونیست هم در دست نوشته ها، تا حدود زیادی صف خودشو از طرفداران سرمایه داری جدا میکنه و به ویژه میگه که چیزی مثل چند همسری کارویژه بورژوازیه و نه کمونیسم. خوب به نوعی من اینجا مترجم منتقد کتاب هستم که شاید خیلی رایج نیست و لازم بود نظر خودمو بگم. امیدوارم یکی دو سال آینده بتونم از دست ترجمه های سفارشی راحت شم.

The Abs-Tract Organization ("TATO") is a nascent non-profit think tank for absolute social philosophy and global civil society, committed to definitively solving the world's systemic social problems through a high-level framework of "abstraction." TATO is looking for capital funding to cover start-up, as well as basic operational and administrative expenses. This includes setting up its legal structure, establishing its research program and academic partners, initiating an outreach campaign, and developing a long-term sustainability strategy while securing public and philanthropic support. This business plan outlines these details and the think tank development strategy.

Abstract: The developmentalist gaze of the Fair Trade movement is on Global South producers. In this article we turn our analytic gaze toward North American fair traders to explore the racialized, neocolonial power relations in which these movement actors are implicated. Section One is a brief historical sketch of Fair Trade certification. We argue that the certification system is a multi-sited, global institution that is shaped by and shapes neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent splintering of the international certification system. Section Two provides a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for the remaining sections. In Section Three we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. In Section Four we explore the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. Section Five is a critical analysis of the neocolonialist and racist discourse of Fair Trade, with a focus on the “helping” discourse. We contend that as Global North fair traders strive to “help” Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop.

Trong hơn một thập kỷ qua, nền nghiên cứu xã hội học tại Mỹ đã xuất hiện một hướng nghiên cứu mới rất đáng chú ý, dù đang trong quá trình "định chế hóa" , đó là nghiên cứu "Xã hội học đại chúng". Nhà xã hội học đang bỏ ra nhiều công sức để "quãng bá" cho loại hình nghiên cứu này là Micheal Burawoy, giáo sư xã hội học Trường ĐH California-Berkeley. Bài viết này sẽ trình bày quá trình hình thành của xã hội học đại chúng, vai trò của từng phân nhóm trong nghiên cứu xã hội học nói chung và xã hội học đại chúng nói riêng.

Researchers committed to food justice often enter communities and nonprofits with a desire to help. They often think there is a scarcity, such as food, that they want to understand and help to increase. At the same time, research obligations may lead to extracting "findings" without advancing food justice. Such actions may unintentionally work against food justice, especially the goal of dismantling structural inequalities and advancing social equity. This commentary chronicles the ongoing and incomplete process by which I have carried out food justice research and worked toward food justice. In short, reciprocal research requires working with, not for, organizations and communities. This entails ongoing acts of solidarity. One way to express this is through flexibility with research goals in order to tailor all or parts of one's project to answer questions that increase understanding of how to challenge structural inequalities and advance social equity. Relatedly, openness to how food justice activists and organizations confront the food movement and society more broadly to address whiteness, privilege, racial inequality, and notions of diversity can enrich critical social science. Of equal importance is sweat equity. Most food justice activists and organizations have few resources and cannot serve the whims of researchers. Therefore, providing labor is an important allied act. This increases the researchers' empathy with activists, organizations, and communities, and creates opportunities to build trust and dissolve social boundaries. To enter into a situation that deepens our knowledge of the food justice movement and advances food justice requires solidarity and sweat equity.

Este artículo fue parte del libro "Hacer Sociología en Venezuela juntos con Alberto Gruson" (UCAB, 2013) que fue una compilación de textos en homenaje al Prof. Alberto Gruson. El documento es una reflexión sobre cómo los sociólogos abordamos nuestra profesión, haciendo uso del tema de la Sociología Pública, para luego tratar el quehacer sociológico en CISOR.

Эта книга продолжает разговор о вкладе общественных наук в социальные изменения, роли публичной социологии в диалоге между общественными группами, обществом и государством, о росте и упадке гражданских инициатив, идентичности социальных движений и иных вопросах, тесно связанных с природой гражданского общества в России, его неоднозначным прошлым, противоречивым настоящим и неопределенным будущим. Отечественные и зарубежные специалисты открывают новые перспективы публичной социологии, представляя пространство для нового интеллектуального поиска и осуществления позитивных сдвигов в жизни людей, групп и организаций. Издание адресовано исследователям и политикам, активистам и всем тем, кто интересуется проблемами развития демократии в России.

Anarchy and Society explores the many ways in which the discipline of Sociology and the philosophy of anarchism are compatible. The book constructs possible parameters for a future ‘anarchist sociology’, by a sociological exposition of major anarchist thinkers (including Kropotkin, Proudhon, Landauer, Goldman, and Ward), as well as an anarchist interrogation of key sociological concepts (including social norms, inequality, and social movements). Sociology and anarchism share many common interests—although often interpreting each in divergent ways—including community, solidarity, feminism, crime and restorative justice, and social domination. The synthesis proposed by Anarchy and Society is reflexive, critical, and strongly anchored in both traditions.

Mit dieser Schriftenreihe entsteht ein Instrument für den kontinuierlichen Transfer von Beobachtungen, Erfahrungen, Analysen und Befunden zwischen Zivilgesellschaft, Wissenschaft und Politik. Menschenfeindliche und demokratiegefährdende Phänomene werden von unterschiedlichen Standpunkten beleuchtet (z. B. Rechtspopulismus, Rechtsextremismus, Diskriminierung, Hassaktivitäten). Perspektiven aus Praxis und Wissenschaft, welche sich mit aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen, Problemstellungen und Gefahren, aber auch mit Potenzialen, Möglichkeiten und vorhandenen Beispielen beschäftigen, werden zusammengetragen. Die Gewinnung und öffentliche Vermittlung von Wissen ist ein Beitrag zur Stärkung der demokratischen Kultur und der Zivilgesellschaft: Wissen schafft Demokratie!

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

This dissertation is a study of violence against women (VAW) prevention, feminist public sociology, and social media. In the past decade, many sociologists have been working to debate and operationalize Michael Burawoy’s call “For Public Sociology”, which challenges academics to engage beyond the university to effect social change. At the same time that Burawoy’s program has garnered much sociological attention, social media have become a central site of mass communication and core component of the public sphere more broadly. This research explores two questions through surveys and in-depth interviews as well as my own experiences with public sociology: (1) how do people working on VAW prevention use and experience social media? And (2) what is the role of feminist public sociology in preventing VAW?

My findings explore the benefits and challenges of social media for VAW prevention work and argue that these processes should be understood through the ecological model of VAW prevention that is widely used in offline prevention work. I find that participants primarily use Facebook and Twitter, and that their activities cluster around four broad goals: (1) information transmission to existing and new audiences; (2) conversational activism: shaping narratives around VAW; (3) feminism: shaping their own feminist identity as well as online feminism more broadly; and (4) preventing online VAW (e.g. online sexual harassment), a new form of VAW prevention that has garnered recent advocacy and emerging academic work.

My research contributes four theoretical conclusions to discussions of public sociology, of feminism, and of VAW prevention: first, converging disciplines and roles in social media means that there is a more pronounced need for knowledge translation to achieve social and institutional transformation. Second, VAW prevention in social media reveals a rapidly reflexive, increasingly intersectional feminism that prioritizes experiential knowledge and conversational activism online. Third, this feminism is incompatible with Burawoy’s original four-part framework for sociology but can be reconciled using community-based scholarship principles and emerging feminist work. Finally, the emerging category of online sexual violence encapsulates emerging re-understandings of feminism, gender, and violence by presenting us with a present-day cyborg problem where offline/online dichotomies are increasingly obsolete.

Responding to a recent debate within the journal Social Movement Studies, this paper critically considers the function of the ‘social movement academic’, one who researches social movement activism. It attempts to transcend the current dead-lock that exists between academic and activist forms of theorising by resolving an ethical stance based around realist social ontology. The paper argues that one function of this academic is to provide claims to knowledge at ontological depth.

As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War this year, it is clear that various forms of slavery did not end with that legal document. Even now after all this time, we still need to acknowledge our cultural indebtedness in so many ways. In particular, white rock & roll musicians owe an enormous debt to Southern African Americans because without them, America would truly be without a form of music that we could truly call our own. Indeed one of the great ironies of American history is that white singers and musicians found their own personal agency through the music of African-America while the creators of this music were still in the chains of slavery or the apartheid culture of Jim Crow South. I am writing to publicly acknowledge my personal indebtedness and appreciation for my musical forebears through whom I found voice and agency during the formative years of the late 1960’s. I write this as a collection of personal “snapshots” that I have been collecting for almost fifty years now. Some of them come from my own life, others from recorded interviews, narratives and performances of the real trailblazers of rock music who remain mostly unknown or forgotten. Of course there have been many that have already written about some of events presented in the following passages, but like fading photographs, historical images and narratives need continual renewal for each generation in order to minimize distortion and myth and to acknowledge debt and give credit where it is long overdue.

Autoethnography and symbolic interactionism: a way of being and seeing the world

The subject of this paper is the link between the conceptual tools of symbolic interactionism and ethnography, with particular reference to autoethnography. Ethnography and symbolic interactionism are closely intertwined, both from a historical point of view and in terms of their theoretical points of reference. This deep bond formed in the context of the Chicago School at the beginning of the last century, in the early days of urban sociology and applied sociology. After briefly introducing some historical references to the link between symbolic interactionism and ethnography, and offering a basic definition of autoethnography, we analyze the link between interactionism and ethnography using the metaautoethnographic method. The main general propositions that emerge from our work are: a) Social life, identities, social relationships are fluid, not static, and autoethnographic research is a consciously situated form of ethnography; b) Autoethnographic research is open but grounded in the transformations of «obdurate reality» (Blumer), with which the researcher negotiates the process of ethnographic interpretation and understanding; c) «Epiphanies» (Denzin) and «sensitizing concepts» (Blumer) are crucial tools for autoethnographic interpretation; d) Autoethnography is a way of seeing the world. The autoethnographic process is a time-consuming, open, flexible, and often very demanding way of understanding reality. The autoethnographer is himself both observed and observer. His way of viewing the world around him also becomes the prism through which he filters all the information that allows him to understand the situation he is studying, in a continuous, ongoing process of interpretation.

Après l'abandon du projet de centre commercial et de loisirs EuropaCity fin 2019, le maintien d'un projet de gare du Grand Paris Express dans les champs du Triangle de Gonesse cristallise les oppositions autour d'une nouvelle « zone à défendre » en bordure de la capitale.

The study of intellectuals constitutes a vibrant intersection of political sociology, sociology of knowledge, sociology of intellectual life, and sociological theory. Influential scholars such as Karl Mannheim, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault have enriched the social-historical understanding of intellectuals in modern societies; and more recently, the New Sociology of Ideas (NSI) has extended this endeavour with studies of social scientists and humanities scholars in Western countries. This thesis, however, documenting the intellectual trajectory of Shen Yuan (沈原, b. 1954) since the 1960s, is the first empirical study of a Chinese social scientist as a public intellectual produce within the sub-field of the NSI. It explains how Shen negotiated an authoritarian regime to become a public intellectual. In order to
explore such a process, this study demonstrates the importance of attending to the way Shen sees and defines himself as an intellectual. Following Gross’s theory of Intellectual Self-Concept, the research shows that the key to understanding the making of Shen as a public intellectual is to study the Chinese sociologist’s changing intellectual identity, from problematic Marxist during
the 1980s and 1990s to public sociology after 2000. To trace Shen’s intellectual trajectory, this research utilized original interviews with Shen Yuan and several of his students in Beijing, and primary sources including Shen’s publications. While employing various interpretative tools, including Gross’s intellectual self-concept, Bourdieu’s field and habitus, and Watson’s dual concepts of orthopraxy and orthodoxy, the research makes two conceptual contributions to the
sociology of intellectual life: both archived identity and conceptual literacy hone an analytical understanding of the development and work of public intellectuals.

Das Seminar fragt nach der Aktualität der Arbeiten des US-amerikanischen Soziologen Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962). Wir nähern uns seinem Denken über die Auseinandersetzung mit einem seiner Hauptwerke Soziologische Phantasie (im Orig.: The Sociological Imagination [1959]). Im Zentrum seines Denkens steht nicht nur eine Auslotung des Verhältnisses von Individuen und sozialen Umwelten, die er mit Blick auf alternative Theorievorschläge entwirft, sondern auch die Frage danach, was Soziologie leisten kann und soll. Mills Forderung einer soziologischen Phantasie stellt sich hierbei der „merkwürdige[n] Lust an der Attitüde des Unbeteiligten“ (Mills) entgegen, die er in Soziologien seiner Gegenwart ausmacht. Insofern berührt sein Werk auch die Frage danach, wie sich das Verhältnis von (Sozial-)Wissenschaft und Politik bestimmen lässt.
Das Seminar kann als Einführungskurs in soziologisches Denken und soziologische Theorie verstanden werden. Gleichzeitig wollen wir über den Stellenwert von Wissenschaft in der Öffentlichkeit nachdenken. Neben Mills‘ Soziologische Phantasie werden wir weiterführende Texte diskutieren, die das Selbstverständnis der Soziologie vor dem Hintergrund aktueller Entwicklungen ausloten.

Sociology’s marginality to public discussion of the crisis stems partly from naïveté about the sociology of its own knowledge, in particular about its interlocutors’ interests. Historically, sociology has repeatedly re-established its intellectual relevance through its dialogue with movements for social change; this article argues that another such dialogue is overdue.

Starting from existing discussions of social movements and their knowledge production, the article focuses on the organisational dimension of such knowledge and explores how this is elaborated in the current movement wave. Looking at movement spaces of theoretical analysis, new popular education processes and movements’ knowledge creation institutions, the article highlights potential contributions to renewing sociological processes of theorising, teaching and engaged research respectively, paying particular attention to movement practices of ‘talking between worlds’. It concludes with a call for a dialogue of critical solidarity between public sociology and new forms of social knowledge production.

Questo scritto introduce e presenta un saggio di Michael Burawoy, dove il sociologo di Berkeley traccia un profilo intellettuale del collega e amico Erik Wright. Redatto per la conferenza tenutasi l'1 e il 2 novembre 2019 all'Università del Wisconsin a Madison, dove Wright era stato docente nel Dipartimento di Sociologia e per circa quarant'anni direttore del Havens Center for Social Justice, il saggio di Burawoy Wright presenta le origini e gli sviluppi delle ricerche di Wright, mostrandone infine il potenziale per ricerche future che leghino studio e trasformazione della realtà sociale. Sviluppatosi nell'arco di alcuni decenni come programma di ricerca scientifica neo-marxista che rielabora un'analisi di classe al passo con i tempi, il progetto di Wright muta all'inizio degli anni Novanta, a seguito di aporie scientifiche e mutamenti politici più generali, lasciando il posto al Progetto di utopie reali. Grazie a Erik Wright, il Havens Center è stato non solo un dipartimento universitario di assoluta centralità nel dibattito sociologico americano, ma un'autentica fucina di sociologia critica, crocevia di generazioni di ricercatori e attivisti da tutto il mondo, dove si fondono rigore scientifico e impegno politico. Questo saggio è stato inviato da Michael Burawoy a Officina PrimoMaggio e riproduce il testo pubblicato sul numero 121 della New Left Review, uscito nel febbraio 2020.

“Scientificity” and appeals to political independence are invaluable tools in the efforts of institutions such as the American School of Classical Studies at Athens to maintain their professional autonomy. Yet again, the cooperation of scientists and scholars at large, among whom the archaeologists affiliated with the ASCSA, with the OSS suggests a constitutive affinity between political and cultural leadership. In this article, I historically map out this relationship while drawing from sociological categorizations of knowledge and its employ in order to situate the archaeologists in their broader social and political context and evaluate their work not merely as agents of disciplinary knowledge but also as agents of culture and cultural change.

Oddajemy do rąk czytelnika publikację, na którą składają się artykuły pogrupowane tematycznie: 1) Ogólne rozważania; 2) Wykluczenie społeczne; 3) Niepełnosprawność; 4) Uzależnienia; 5) Seniorzy; 6) Inkluzywność. To, co łączy poszczególne części, to postawa badawcza, polegająca na bliskości relacji:  badacz - ludzie z ich licznymi problemami. Bliskość zawiera w sobie uznanie podmiotowości badanych oraz gotowość ze strony badaczy do włączenia się  w prąd działań na rzecz ochrony uzasadnionych interesów jednostek i grup społecznych, jak i formułowania wizji społecznych, programów i żądań zmian społecznych, służących bardziej sprawiedliwym stosunkom społecznym.  Na takie podejście składają się różne perspektywy badawcze, z których ostatnio na czoło wysuwają się koncepcja „agency” i „socjologii publicznej”

This article revisits the debate over Barker and Cox’s (2011) use of Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals to contrast academic and activist modes of theorizing about social movements. Often misread as an attack on personal choices in career and writing, the distinction aimed to highlight the different purposes, audiences, and social relationships entailed by these different forms of theorizing. Discourses which take ‘scholarship’ as their starting point position ‘activist’ as a personal choice within an institutional field, and substitute this moral commitment for a political assessment of its effects. By contrast, few academics have undergone the political learning curve represented by social movements. This may explain the widespread persistence – beyond any intellectual or empirical credibility – of a faith in ‘critical scholarship’ isolated from agency, an orientation to policy makers and mainstream media as primary audiences or an unquestioned commitment to existing institutional frameworks as pathways to substantial social change.  Drawing on over three decades of movement participation and two of academic work, this article explores two processes of activist training within the academy. It also explores the politics of different experiences of theoretical publishing for social movements audiences. This discussion focuses on the control of the “means of mental production” (Marx, 1965), and the politics of distribution. The conclusion explores the broader implications of these experiences for the relationship between movements and research.

The paper reports on both methodological and substantive findings. It presents a method for generating simplified representations for regional urban populations, their geographical sub-populations and communities. the method generates greatly simplified high-resolution socio-economic profiles of populated geographical areas from complex large census data sets.

¿Qué buscan los chicos y chicas que entran en las «bandas latinas»? Seguramente esta pregunta es la que menos importa a aquellos que se encargan del «fenómeno»: prensa, políticos, académicos, policía, servicios sociales. Cómo se construye un enemigo público es una etnografía del Estado. Examina, a partir de Bourdieu y de una larga tradición de estudios críticos, cómo actúa y qué obtiene cada una de las partes implicadas en la creación de ese objeto llamado «bandas latinas». La prensa vende periódicos generando alarma social. Los políticos obtienen votos con promesas de seguridad. Y los educadores y policías pugnan por tener más legitimidad a la hora de regular los problemas sociales. Las «bandas latinas» son convertidas así en «enemigo público», pero también dejan de serlo cuando conviene a estos actores. Mientras, unos cuantos chicos y chicas entran y salen de estos grupos, viven su vida, muchas veces complicada, buscando respeto.

إن صورة المثقف في العالم العربي معروفة تماماً: فهو منظّر يتحدث عن التقليد، الحداثة، الاستبداد، الهوية، الوحدة العربية، العولمة، إلخ، لكنه يتجنب اللجوء إلى المجتمع بحثاً عن معطيات تجريبية. حتى باحثي العلوم الاجتماعية غالباً ما يقعون في فخ الوعظ كما الفلاسفة، يثيرون الأسئلة بدل تقديم أجوبة ملموسة . والأكثر ندرة حتى هو أن تجد بحّاثة اجتماعيين محترفين في الحقل العام.  ومردّ ذلك ليس فقط لغياب نتاجهم عن وسائل الإعلام أو الصحف،  وإنما أيضاً لصعوبة أن تنجز عملاً حقلياً في العالم العربي، في ظل وجود الأنظمة الاستبدادية ونقص القدرات البحثية. فأجندات البحث الاجتماعي في العالم العربي – اختيار الموضوعات وأحياناً المنهجيات – تحددها اهتمامات الجهة المانحة أو تحت ضغط المشكلات الاجتماعية الآنية والملحة. وتبقى هناك استثناءات مهمة وسأحاول الإضاءة على بعضها وتبيان أهميتها. سأقدم في هذا الدراسة مسحاً لمسار أبحاثي الشخصية وفي سياق إيضاح بعض المعضلات التي تواجه الباحثين في أثناء إنجازهم لبحوثهم، وبخاصة حين تسعى لأن تكون نقدية وتتوجه العموم في آن.
هذا فصل في ساري حنفي و نورية بن غبريط-رمعون  ومجاهدي مصطفى (تحرير) مستقبل العلوم الاجتماعية في الوطن العربي. بيروت: مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية.

Making space for queer-identifying religious youth is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, shedding light on youth cultures, queer community and religiosity. There is a lack of empirical research that examines queer Christian youth, their experiences, perspectives and perceptions, with some sources casting religion as automatically negative or harmful to the realisation of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) identity (or ‘coming out’). Rather than assume that sexuality and religion – and in our case Christianity – are separate and divergent paths, the project event explores how they might mutually and complexly construct one another. The policy report considers the ramifications for politics, policies and public imaginations.
https://weekscentreforsocialandpolicyresearch.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/final-policy-doc.pdf