Suchergebnisse

Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- 1 - Getting Together at the Local Winery -- 2 - The Long Road to the Midwestern Winery Boom -- 3 - More than Marketplaces: The Attraction of Local Wineries -- 4 - Becoming a Midwestern Vintner -- 5 - Wineries Are Work: Going "Backstage" -- 6 - Organizing the Midwest Wine Industry to Address Challenges -- 7 - The Challenges of Identity and Quality -- 8 - Local Vino and Mondovino: Midwestern Wineries in the Global Context -- References -- Index -- About the Author

This article, presented as the presidential address at the 2009 Association for Humanist Sociology Annual Meeting, in New Orleans, LA, describes different ways AHS serves as a resource for doing change work, drawing heavily on the author's experiences with the association since 1993. It concludes by calling for members to fully utilize these different resources the Association offers, and to reach out to colleagues and students and, in the process, expand the Association's potential as a resource for doing change work.

This article examines the debate on public sociology through the community-based work of the authors and their students. Critiquing the continued focus of public sociology on policy makers, funders, and other sociologists, we argue that sociologists must reorder their priorities by serving the public itself. Although large-scale studies play an important purpose in the discipline, sociology must once again value smaller-scale "organic" research grounded in local communities to remain relevant. Furthermore, a "critical constructionist" theoretical framework offers a conceptual approach that counters the distanced, ameliorative standpoint of mainstream sociology. We offer programmatic ways sociologists can combine their teaching, research, and community service to engage students in learning the discipline through change-oriented work.

While the tools of civically engaged higher education (service-learning, community-based research, etc.) existed in sociology classes well before the onset of what some call the "civic engagement movement," they have quickly shifted from margin to center as key building blocks for sociology's own trend toward public sociology. While we examine the precarious rise of both civic engagement and public sociology, we argue that lacking strong social movements as shaping forces, the social justice potential for both civic engagement and public sociology must come from practitioners' links to community-based politics and social movement organizing. Such connections still ground teaching and scholarship in the real politics of everyday life: people, institutions, and communities.