Public Sociology at Berkeley
Sociologists at Berkeley have long been committed to studying topics of public concern and to communicating the findings of their studies to that public.
For example, in the early 1960s, Charles Glock and Gertrude Selznick pioneered survey studies of anti-Semitism. In the 1980s, Robert Bellah led a team including Ann Swidler that produced the best-seller, Habits of the Heart, a seminal study of Americans’ efforts to deal with the consequences of individualism, and Arlie Hochschild’s Second Shift crystalized the the experience of an unfinished gender revolution. In the 1990s, a collaborative book by six faculty, Inequality by Design, responded to arguments of The Bell Curve. In the 2000s, Claude Fischer and students at Berkeley launched Contexts, the magazine of the American Sociological Association devoted to bringing sociology to general readers, and Michael Burawoy, as President of the association, made public sociology one of the missions of professional sociologists.
- Forums on Public Sociology – videos of presentations and conversations about public sociology
- "Public Sociology at Berkeley, 2nd Edition," edited by Michael Burawoy and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, 2005 – an on-line volume of papers by Berkeley Sociology faculty.