"Case Study 7.2 Data to Bring Justice: Addressing Disparities in the Criminal Justice System"

Pamela Oliver "Case Study 7.2 Data to Bring Justice: Addressing Disparities in the Criminal Justice System" Preprint of chapter in Philip Nyden. Leslie Hossfelt, and Gwen Nyden (eds.) 2011 Public Sociology: Research Action and Change. Pine Forge Press. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/public-sociology/book234763 This is a case study of my racial disparities work that overlaps somewhat with other presentations I have made of the same material. My work has involved doing descriptive statistical analyses of racial patterns of imprisonment and making public presentations on these patterns, as participating in many meetings of boards and committees working on these issues. Part 1 of this article describes the background of my work and how I got involved, partly through connections with community groups and partly through luck. Part 2 describes my public engagement, including giving talks and participating in many meetings as well as doing analyses at the request of community groups. Part 3 is reflections on the differences and tensions between public and professional sociology.

Reframing the public sociology debate: Towards collaborative and decolonial praxis

This article presents a critical analysis of Michael Burawoy’s model of public sociology, discussing several of its epistemic and methodological limitations. First, the author focuses on the ambiguity of Burawoy’s proposal, problematizing the absence of a clear delimitation of the concept of ‘public sociology’. Second, the author links the academic success of the category of public sociology to the global division of sociological labour, emphasizing the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ involved in Burawoy’s work and calling for the decolonization of social science. Then, the author expounds his concerns regarding the hierarchy of the different types of sociology proposed by Burawoy, who privileges professional sociology over other types of sociological praxis. Reflecting upon these elements will provide a good opportunity to observe how our discipline works, advancing also suggestions for its transformation. Along these lines, in the last section of the article the author elaborates on the need to go beyond a dissemination model of public sociology – the unidirectional diffusion of ‘expert knowledge’ to extra-academic audiences – and towards a more collaborative understanding of knowledge production.

Blurring Public and Private Sociology: Challenging an Artificial Division

This article encourages sociologists to take a hybrid approach to the incorporation of public sociology into the discipline. The idea of public sociology rests upon a double conversation between sociologists as public actors, and the involvement of the ‘extra-academic’ world into the dialogue. However, the separation of public sociology from professional sociology is artificial. The division of labour between those working solely in academia, and those reaching out to the public at large is imaginary: sociologists do work in both the public and private. By blurring the line between public sociology and professional sociology (which constitutes a ‘privacy’ of sorts), sociology is able to reach a larger audience. To illustrate this argument, I examine how three theoretical approaches within sociology, governmentality literature, critical realism and second modernity, exemplify both public and private sociology, while remaining methodologically coherent and rigorous. These approaches show sociology to be a field in which disparate, multiple, fluid theories and metatheories exist side-by-side in work that is both public and professional.