Citizen Scholar, in progress
Update: It’s done and coming out in 2024. Here’s the introduction in draft form.
I’m writing a book about public intellectual work whilst mostly locked up at home. Draw your own conclusions. I’m also somehow still waiting for the appeal on my (victorious) lawsuit against Trump to be decided by the Supreme Court. Although he’s no longer president (making the case literally moot), the Trump experience casts a shadow over all of our future civic endeavors in ways that hang over our political thought and practice – reflected, in my mind at least, by the Supreme Court’s stalling.
The book is called Citizen Scholar, and if I do my part to fulfill my contract with Columbia University Press, it will be published in less than two years. While I work on it, I’ll post occasional excerpts, essays, and reflections here. I hope you will read along, and share your critiques, suggestions, and ideas.
This is from the proposal, revised for the introduction.
The book uses examples and advice from my own experiences as a sociologist in public, and my and interactions with readers, writers, and social actors of many kinds, to both motivate and assist sociologists and other social scientists to adopt its precepts. My relevant experiences include public spectacles, such as the Trump lawsuit (and the resulting abuse by anti-Semites and other trolls), and challenging the work of scoundrels (and nonscoundrels) in academia. Less dramatically, I have devoted many years to producing descriptive analysis and essays, including a thousand blog posts on the Family Inequality blog (which led to a popular introductory textbook, The Family; and a book of essays, Enduring Bonds). That workaday descriptive work is a key bridge between academic and lay public audiences (including students) – synthesizing and translating specialist skills and knowledge, and then bringing the insights from "the public" back to the scholarly arena.
In the last five years, I have worked to advance the movement for openness and transparency in social science, founding the first preprint server in sociology (SocArXiv) and taking the case (unsuccessfully) to the American Sociological Association (ASA). I co-edited the public-facing journal of ASA, Contexts. Then, in 2020, I joined many other social scientists in the disorganized scramble to at once learn and inform the public about the rushing disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic – gathering and sharing data and analysis, reading and recommending scientific work, writing academic papers and delivering talks. Was it possible to legitimately promote scientific understanding of the greatest health crisis in a century while also being "political" in the middle of a pivotal political crisis that threatened our democratic system? By the time 2020 arrived, many of us felt we had no choice.
Imperatives
As scholars today we already faced imperatives – both personal and institutional – to make our work engaging and influential, to connect with communities beyond our disciplines and institutions. That was before the multiple escalating social crises over the last several years drove many social scientists to question their own political as well as professional priorities. In this book I provide a rationale and motivation to meet the career goal of "engagement," and the personal goal to contribute intellectually to civic life, and advice on how do them together. Faced with the crises in democracy, public health, social justice, and the environment, some people have dropped everything to change research topics. Others took up calls for activism, gave money, joined Twitter. We questioned both our relevance and our efficacy. I've been writing and talking to people about this subject for years, but it's no accident that the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflagration of the Trump presidency pushed me to escalate the issue to a book-level project.
I place the citizen scholar in the flow of these seismic social events, which dramatically intervened in both my public and scholarly life (and yours, too). I want to help us move beyond the model of public work as broadcasting our scholarship, beyond the laudable effort to get more readers. The citizen scholar model I develop here is one of reciprocity and openness, reflexivity and accountability. It changes our research workflow and our interventions as citizens, and enables them to better reinforce each other.
In many social quarters, intellectual is an epithet and academic is a pejorative synonym for "trivial." And that usage seems to produce no cognitive dissonance with living a life that depends on the work of intellectuals and academics, which is an unavoidable feature of modern society. This goes beyond the ignorance of the uninformed voter who says, "Get your government hands off my Medicare" or, "I don't know anyone who's died from measles." It's a deeply felt conviction among many of our fellow citizens that modern life is livable despite rather than because of the efforts of nerdy, probably-liberal scientists and writers and doctors and philosophers. That the good parts of progress, like avocados or Wikipedia or elections, are the result of natural or automatic processes that real, living professional intellectuals mostly just obstruct or corrupt.
To overcome these attitudes, we intellectuals need to make an argument with passionate reason, but also produce facts on the ground with demonstrably valuable deeds. We have to make our case, but we also have to earn our place. For medical researchers or engineers, their social usefulness is often proven tangibly. The position of the social scientist is more tenuous. We may do useful work, such as producing social surveys and analyzing pandemic trends, but many of us also garner approval (or opprobrium) from the implications of our conclusions rather than their scientific merit. In particular, we often get accolades for reinforcing what people (especially powerful people) already believe, rather than for producing original discoveries or solutions. If some people decide whether they like our work based on whether they agree with our assumptions and conclusions, that is a blessing and a curse, a source of encouragement (and book deals) as well as a temptation that threatens to corrupt our scholarship (even when we're right).
Some mainstream social scientists join with conservatives who blame activist scholars for the lack of social trust our disciplines engender. They use the visibility of academic activism to denigrate the work of those perceived as too engaged, too driven by social purpose to be trustworthy in their scholarly work (especially when those accused of untoward activism are members of marginalized groups). Their paragon of science is the disinterested pose. But social improvement was the original purpose of social science, and pursing that goal need not undermine our science, as demonstrated by sociologists back to W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams. My mission in this book is to promote social engagement and to help make our purpose-driven work more credible and effective. That means a scientific approach that doesn't shy away from reporting bad news or criticizing perceived allies, while working to understand and account for the repercussions of that work.
Journalism has wrestled with these issues forever. The NPR Ethics Handbook says, "We're not advocates. We may not run for office, endorse candidates or otherwise engage in politics in a participatory or activist manner." Academics do not have this code. Many of us participate in campus politics (such as the faculty senate), but also in off-campus politics through activism, political contributions, and advocacy – and often these two arenas are not separable. As anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh reflected about her long efforts to achieve an end to China's notorious one-child policy, "I have always been forthcoming about the politics of my own scholarly practice. For nearly 30 years I sought to use every ounce of scientific creativity I possessed to educate the public and research community." When this political participation is well within mainstream bounds it is rarely questioned (a graduate student in my department, Amanda Dewey, was elected mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, in 2020), but it raises the same questions as more radical activism -- questions we should answer. We don't give up our citizenship (or its public expression) when we become scholars -- professional intellectuals -- and nor do we give up our scholarly perspective when we fulfill our obligations as citizens.
This book argues that we should embrace the reciprocal relationship between these social roles and perspectives, which will enhance our public and scholarly contributions to society as well as to our careers. I want to give clear-eyed advice -- which acknowledges risks and downfalls as well as promising professional rewards -- but also inspiration for a model of professional and civic life that can be more fulfilling in all ways.
Citizen Scholar
The word citizen has largely been captured by a narrow definition of legal citizenship within a nation state. And then the word become a hub for toxic dehumanization, that place where "America First" is a self-evident value and the majority accepts policies that exclude non-citizens from the Census, or from basic benefits for survival, such as social welfare programs and even coronavirus vaccination. We should free citizen from this constraint, and restore its meaning as a sense of active belonging to a community, however delineated. When we speak of someone as a "good citizen" versus a "bad citizen," we evaluate them in terms of their "duties and responsibilities of a member of society," specifically as a nongovernmental, civilian actor. That opens up an aspirational sense, as in "global citizen" (someone who seeks to act in affirmation of universal human purpose). I hope to revive it here as citizen scholar, using the conception of scholars (scientific or otherwise) as people who are at once expert in a particular area of knowledge but who also continuously study and learn. A scholar is not a broadcaster of knowledge, but a someone who generates knowledge, which requires communicating – listening as well as speaking, reading as well as writing. A citizen scholar is a person who accepts and fulfills the duties and responsibilities of a scholar in society, to generate and deploy knowledge in the practice of citizenship.
Adopting the position of citizen scholar does not imply an activist political orientation, of either the left or the right. Many social scientists do work with little direct social or political implication. They are solving puzzles, or developing research methods, or conducting research on a more basic level of discovery. If this describes your work, however, I hope to convince you of two things. First, that all of our work is within politics in the sense that the allocation of resources (including education) and the identification of problems to be solved are outcomes of politically contested processes. And second, that your work is also part of a system that needs public support and trust, and it earns that by demonstrating its openness, transparency, and accountability. The engagement of any one research career with public actors may be indirect, but it is nonetheless systemic -- through our funding, the governance of our institutions, our teaching, our norms and standards. The responsible citizen scholar has duties and responsibilities beyond the workaday conduct of research, even if they don't involve Twitter of TikTok. In this book I appeal to activist scholars to be responsible with their conclusions and implications, when those statements draw from relevant research. That's a responsibility they owe to the scholarly community. But researchers outside the political fray similarly owe that community their support in building a scientific system the public can get behind.
Some say a scholar's politics and public work must be separate from their research. On the other hand, some (especially in academic sociology) say research is inherently political and refuse to accept the division between the two. In this book I show how these types of work may best be seen as distinguishable practices that transparently inform each other, making both more valuable. Social and political concerns make the research more relevant and better informed; grounding one's contributions as a citizen in scholarship makes that engagement as a citizen more legitimate. Successfully integrating these elements of our work and lives requires mastering the skills and norms of communicating in multiple overlapping social arenas. In short, the book is part advocacy, part self-portrait, and part how-to for the engaged and engaging social scientist.
Outline
In Chapter 2, I will place the project in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which changed everything -- including how we research, write, teach, and learn about society. The pandemic upended the practice of scholarly communication and the interaction of scientists with the news media, the public, and each other; it exacerbated but also revealed the depth of our disinformation problems and their structural underpinnings; it disrupted our professional lives and led many scholars to reconceptualize their roles and redirect their efforts; and through catastrophic loss and untold human suffering, it exposed an opening for institutional changes that will have long-term consequences we can only just (but must) imagine.
The chapters that follow include both principles and persuasion as well as how-to advice and guidelines for best practices. Chapter 3 picks up the entreaty for social scientists to do descriptive work in their fields. This is important both for understanding our subject matter, and for communicating about it with people who are not specialists in our areas of work. If we want to grow the circle of trust around our scholarship, to teach and learn beyond our immediate professional settings, we will need to devote time and resources to the production and dissemination of descriptive work -- timely statistics, graphics, writing, speaking -- that can help shape the wider discussion of our core subjects and insights.
The principles and practices of open science are central to our public communication and our accountability as well as to the quality of our work, and I make this case in Chapter 4, remotivated by the lessons learned during the pandemic. Many of our readers will not be expert enough to check our work process and products for reliability and scientific soundness. However, the relative few who have that competence may play an outsize role in evaluating and communicating our credibility. And making ourselves open to such evaluation is a key signal to everyone else, including journalists, funders, and politicians. By increasing open access to our research outputs and materials, we also promote equity and diversity in the research community by providing more points of entry into the research process.
Chapter 5 argues that the participation of citizen scholars in the daily public discourse about science and research represents the contemporary embodiment of the principles of scientific peer review. Rather than undermining the staid standards of peer review, that incisive Twitter thread (or blog post) on a newly published paper takes peer review to a new and necessary level. We use the weight of our skills and knowledge, and our scholarly reputations, to help everyone assess and employ the flow of research. We saw this operating at high speed during the pandemic, when epidemiologists' Twitter threads became must-read, real-time commentary on breaking-news research, statistical models, and public health advice. It was rapid and chaotic, and mistakes were made, but it showed the essential value of scholars deploying their expertise to address urgent public needs. In the process, we saw something like the demystification of the peer review process, which is not -- and should not be -- wholly owned by academic journal editors.
Having put the cart of public peer review before the horse of communication platforms, in Chapter 6 I double back to discuss the social media elephant in the faculty lounge. These platforms are vital to the work of active citizen scholars, because of their reach and efficiency, and their capacity to bring disparate populations together in omnidirectional communication. The tools of social media allow us to meet and interact with scholars we know and those we don't, including those who work in adjacent areas of research, as well as journalists, activists, and all manner of other unexpected interlocutors (from vicious trolls to kindly awards committee members) from around the world. (With their embedded one-click language translation affordances, we can now carry on reasonable conversations in real-time with people speaking different languages from us as well.) Social media are widely misused, or at least underused, by academics who treat them as broadcast devices. This is part of why the appearance of trolls and mob attacks can be surprising as well as awful -- because they reflect the uncomfortable reality that communicating in public makes us vulnerable.
In this chapter I address the real risks and costs experienced by citizen scholars when they fall victim to online attacks. The consequences are not just personal, in terms of psychological tolls and time wasted, but also systemic, as trauma and fear drive good people out of the online public square. This problem is vastly inequitably distributed, falling in grotesque disproportion on the vocal members of marginalized groups who contribute their efforts to enhancing the public good in both scholarship and citizenship. So our solutions must not be limited to the personal and individual; we must apply our efforts to the betterment of these environments, which will require structural interventions as well as personal good behavior.
In Chapter 7 I turn to the issue of activism, which sharply divides social scientists and challenges the legitimacy of citizen scholars working in public. The simple prospect of stating moral value propositions fires fear in the hearts of some academics. For people who hope to get tenure, annoying or undermining people higher up in the professional hierarchy can jeopardize a lifetime ambition and career path. For those who have tenure, if they keep their heads down not much can threaten their jobs for life -- but a social media scandal just might. And beyond personal concerns, many people fear that being "political" in public will undermine trust in our work and institutions. All these are reasonable concerns, but we need to get past them. In the chapter I draw on my experience as a member of the anti-Trump “resistance” (suing the president for blocking me on Twitter) to reflect on the pros and cons of public activism for citizen scholars and offer some advice.
Then I bring it all home with sensible and yet surprisingly insightful conclusions and implications. To be announced.
