Preventing rural child abuse: progress in spite of cutbacks

Professionals in a rural community started a service delivery program not in spite of, but because of, economic distress, to counteract the increase in child abuse caused by economic depression. Public education is shown to be a necessary tool in the establishment of new services.     

On the public commitment of intellectuals in late socialist China

This article investigates the intense debate on the figure of ??Chinese public intellectuals,?? which has gained increasing importance, both inside and outside Mainland China, during the last decade. The climax was reached in the year 2004, when the debate on the search for and against a role for the ??public intellectuals?? became the litmus test of the intellectual intersections between the State actors and the public. Through a close reading of the crucial documents, this article critically engages with the terminology and the interpretive paradigms employed. Thus the article highlights the contribution of the scholars examined to a dialogue on the role of critical thinking within China as well as globally. In fact, the exploration of the diversity of contemporary Chinese thought on the topic of ??public intellectuals?? can be inscribed within the framework of the following questions: How is the social category of ??public intellectuals?? used and why? And, ultimately, what does it really means to be an intellectual for the public in China today? In this sense, the article sheds light on the indigenous and foreign understandings of ??public?? and ??intellectual.??     

Examining the undisclosed margins: postcolonial intellectuals and subaltern voices

South African history and culture is etched with traces of subalterns that continue to struggle against silencing. The resistance struggle owed much to the efforts of ordinary South Africans, who bore the brunt of repression. The tactics of the apartheid government included structural repression, state violence and cultural suppression. To the extent that resistance was outlawed and severely punished, the struggle was a subaltern expression. Less well known is the fact that there were other sources of cultural repression: some disaffected beneficiaries of apartheid, who styled themselves as liberal intellectuals were quite reactionary in their responses to the resistance literature. Some relatively progressive intellectuals have also contributed (however unwittingly) to the marginalization of black writers, men and women. The women’s resistance poetry addresses political and gender activism, responses to the deaths in the struggle, the recognition of the need for imaginative strategies to prevail against apartheid, capitalism, patriarchy and neo-colonialism, as well as the need for self-reflection and self-criticism. The post-apartheid period has brought new and tougher challenges. The testimony given by women at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests how women have been silenced by tradition, the brutality of the state and some of their comrades, fear of the consequences of being heard, and by the inherent shortcomings in the structure and process of the investigation. The condition of migrant subalterns in the post-apartheid state is investigated by examining the lives of women who have casual employment as domestic workers and live in makeshift housing in urban shack settlements. Most are sole supporters and caretakers of their households and struggle to make up the curbs in social services that have resulted from structural adjustment. Poorly paid and exploited by their employers, abandoned by the trade union movement and ignored by the local government, the fact that they and their dependents survive is a function of their capacity for labour, networking and creativity. From the methods and achievements of subaltern organizations, it appears that they have a pivotal role to play in improving the lives of subalterns.     

The sociology of intellectuals in the 20th and 21st century

Sociologists have treated intellectuals and their ideas for a long time as mere products of external social structures. Recently, however, researchers shifted their focus to cultural explanations, appreciating more fully the role cultural structures play in shaping their biographical trajectories and success. At the same time, I argue that these theories do not fully integrate the insight of performance theories and focus usually on textual self‐presentation of intellectuals. Although such an approach is valuable, I propose that sociologists should pay attention also to the processes of meaning‐making that make up intellectual appeal on stage. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the sociology of intellectuals has been for too long obsessed with questions of success and prestige, and I propose that sociologists should shift their attention to the underappreciated and marginalised among intellectuals.     

British sociology and public intellectuals: consumer society and imperial decline

The following is the lecture given for the BJS 2005 Public Sociology Debate given at the London School of Economics and Political Science on ll October 2005. This lecture on the character of British sociology provides a pretext for a more general inquiry into public intellectual life in postwar Britain. The argument put forward falls into several distinctive sections. First, British social science has depended heavily on the migration of intellectuals, especially Jewish intellectuals who were refugees from fascism. Second, intellectual innovation requires massive, disruptive, violent change. Third, British sociology did nevertheless give rise to a distinctive tradition of social criticism in which one can argue there were (typically home-grown) public intellectuals. The main theme of their social criticism was to consider the constraining and divisive impact of social class, race and gender on the enjoyment of expanding social citizenship. Fourth, postwar British sociology came to be dominated by the analysis of an affluent consumer society. Finally, the main failure of British sociology in this postwar period was the absence of any sustained, macro-sociological analysis of the historical decline of Britain as a world power in the twentieth century.