The Challenges and Joys of Publicly Engaged Sociology

Abstract

In this essay, I lay out my motivations for doing publicly engaged sociology, emphasizing both the joys and the challenges of this work, and some of the key lessons that I have learned. I explore my attempts to impact policy at the federal level and the local level of my university, as well as efforts to shape changes across academia during the COVID‐19 crisis. I have found it meaningful to be working toward all of these changes. Moreover, making sense of the spaces that I inhabit, collecting data, exploring patterns, and connecting it to social theory, has deepened my thinking as a sociologist, and bettered my research more broadly.