Daniels Jessie - Going public: a guide for social scientists

A few years ago, a New York Times columnist railed against professors for glorifying arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. There are fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago, Nicholas Kristof declared, implicating academics turgid prose, weak social media presence, quantitative emphasis, hidden journals, and focus upon technique and abstraction rather than relevance and clear thinking. Some of the smartest thinkers, he wrote, just dont matter in todays great debates. And they are themselves largely to blame for this.

Members of the professoriate were furious, and charged that the accusations were unfounded. We are in fact deeply engaged with the world around us, teaching thousands of undergraduates every year, and are actively involved in the communities where we liveKristof just cant see itthey asserted. But others admitted that the Times columnists complaints were at least partially accurate. Many scholars would like to be more publicly engaged, but they dont really know how to go about doing so. Or they feel their professional commitments compel them to communicate mainly with colleagues, in ways that prevent others from joining the conversation.

A junior scholar laments, Ive been publishing on my research for over ten years but its been a long and hard struggle to take pride in what I do. I guess part of the shame about my work is that its so incredibly academic. Though its my job to write in this way (and I dont always have a choice in the matter), I know that much of my writing can be very inaccessible to the people I care about most, my family, my friends and most of all, the people who are the topic of my research: migrant workers.

She worries that by writing more accessibly shell lose status in her chosen profession, especially since shes a woman of color who already faces challenges operating in majority-white institutions. Im trying to move past this and embrace my role as a scholar and writer with my second book, says the sociologist. But my fear now is that academic colleagues will think its unsophisticated and too elementary. (Sigh, yes I have issues!) Shes not alone.

As scholars, we steep ourselves in the theories and methodologies of social research in order to master the tools of our discipline. We believe that such tools offer us a way to systematically understand the world. In the process, we learn the conventions of our field and expectations of what makes for good scholarly work. Later, if were lucky enough to land a job at a college or university, we are tasked with the challenging work of teaching young minds. Many, if not most of us, also produce social research. In order to publish this work, we must receive the approval of peers who make up the editorial boards of our journals, who review our manuscripts. To do so, we adhere to very high levels of theoretical and methodological rigor, and address audiences comprised mainly of other experts.

During this process, we often begin to shed our distinctive voices. We also learn to distance ourselves from those who do not share our expertise. Being a card-carrying social scientist, we learn, means writing dispassionately and trying very hard to sound smart Ironically, complaints about turgid scholarly writing often come from the very disciplinary gatekeepers who supposedly uphold the standards that constrain us, including officers of professional organizations, journal editors, tenure committees, and dissertation advisors.