Mostly, I remember it was a beautiful day, and I won a gift card for a local coffee shop—which more than offset the $10 “donation” I made to Students for a Free Tibet. But it was kind of sad because so few people showed up that everybody won something in the raffle. Even if those raffle prizes had been donated, and even if the organization made money, I still felt like I cheated the system. I don’t think many Tibetans would be inspired by my self-sacrifice.

The charity bike ride to fight AIDS was different. At least it felt different. Four days into the 400-mile bicycle ride, I noticed that one of the riders had affixed two large bandages to the backs of her calves. Written on them in black marker was the phrase, “THESE LEGS FIGHT AIDS.” Suddenly, everything made sense. Those words summed it up: the desire that those 400 miles of sore butts, burning legs, and sweat (if not blood and tears) would mean something. They meant determination. They meant struggle. They meant caring.

Photo © Kelly Doering, Stick People Productions (stickpeopleproductions.com).

To sociologists, this phenomenon presents a variety of puzzles. Do people participate because of an altruistic concern for others or merely a selfish desire to have fun? Is this kind of civic engagement old or new? What does it say about our society if civic recreation is replacing Lions Clubs and PTAs as an ideal way of getting involved in public life? There are no simple answers to these questions, but new evidence shows that the “fitness boom” breathed new life into an old civic form—not because it is an efficient way to raise money, but because it resonates with the cultural value of hard, bodily labor and with narratives of suffering for a noble cause.

the changing civic repertoire

Research on civic engagement is never just about civic engagement; it is also about the promise of democracy and the everyday meanings of citizenship. So the stakes were high when Robert Putnam, in his influential book Bowling Alone, showed that a variety of forms of civic engagement—from voting to membership in voluntary associations—were on the decline in the U.S. To read his book is to feel a mountain of data weighing upon you, creating an unpleasant fear that individualism is usurping our capacity to make democracy work. Many scholars confirmed Putnam’s thesis with evidence of their own, but his critics pointed out that some forms of civic engagement, such as volunteering and political advocacy, were actually on the rise.

As scholars weighed evidence on both sides, it became clear that American civic life was changing, if not necessarily declining. Putnam’s image of the lone bowler symbolizing an anemic democracy wasn’t quite right, but the political significance of bowling is less absurd than his critics realized. There may be fewer people in bowling leagues today, but bowlers might be raising more money for charity than ever before. Recreational opportunities feature prominently in the contemporary civic repertoire.

Civic recreation illustrates both what is old and what is new about contemporary civic engagement. On one hand, there is nothing new about using a leisure activity to raise money for charity. Benefit dinners, charity auctions, and dance marathons have existed for decades, and they all promise a good time in exchange for supporting a good cause. On the other hand, fitness fundraisers—running, walking, or performing some other athletic feat to raise money for some cause—are relatively new. Fitness fundraisers represent a recent innovation on an old civic form, and the story of civic recreation’s transformation is also the story of some significant economic, cultural, and political changes in American society.

the transformation of civic recreation

Fitness fundraisers emerged in the late 1960s as walkathons to combat hunger. The first walkathon in the U.S., the Walk for Development, was held in 1968 by the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation. Hundreds of similar walks followed suit: Project Bread organized its first Walk for Hunger in 1969, the same year that the Church World Service began the CROP Hunger Walks. The March of Dimes organized the first Walk America in 1970. It is striking that this tactical innovation occurred during a period of social upheaval: sociologist Michael Schudson argues that it was around this time that a new ideal of “rights-bearing” citizenship emerged. The citizen who came out of the 1960s was keenly aware of how “the personal is political,” and as a result, developed a number of new techniques of political activism—at about the same time that other techniques began the decline documented by Putnam.

In the 1970s and ’80s, fitness fundraisers spread across the nonprofit sector. People weren’t just walking, and it wasn’t just to fight hunger. Nonprofit professionals coupled myriad causes with myriad fitness activities. For example, in 1978 the American Heart Association launched a fundraiser based in schools and called it Jump Rope for Heart; in it, elementary students ask for donations for heart and stroke research. The event promises to promote physical fitness and combat obesity among students, who receive “thank-you incentives” (that is, toys) in return for meeting pledge goals. Biking and running events became common in the 1980s, as the number of health charities organizing them expanded. In 1980, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society organized its first bike ride to raise money for MS research. The two most popular fitness fundraisers today also started during this time: the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for the Cure (1983) and the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life (1985).

The timing of this tactic’s diffusion is significant for economic, cultural, and political reasons. Civic recreation provides nonprofit organizations with a financial buffer against fluctuations in government funding, which is often their single largest source of revenue. The Reagan administration brought about a sharp contraction in government funding for nonprofit social services, even as the sheer number of nonprofit organizations in the U.S. grew to record highs. Thus, civic recreation helps nonprofit organizations maintain steady revenue streams in uncertain financial times, and successful fundraisers provide them with a competitive advantage in securing donors in an increasingly crowded nonprofit sector.

Culturally, the emergence of fitness fundraisers coincided with the “fitness boom” in the U.S., a period marked by the growth of the health and fitness industry and the increasing popularity of hobbies like jogging and cycling. Not simply a healthy lifestyle choice, individual fitness became an important cultural value and a marker of middle-class status, thanks to its promotion by apparel companies, the fitness publishing industry, and mass media. Having a physically fit body, and the accessories to match, became a symbol of one’s social and moral fitness as well. Owning the newest pair of Nike Air Jordans might not improve your game, but it could work wonders for your style and social status.

Scholar and critic Samantha King argues in her book Pink Ribbons, Inc. that these economic and cultural changes are also political. The rise of fitness fundraisers and cause-related marketing is part of a broader conservative shift in American politics and the dismantling of the welfare state. In the 1980s, President Reagan and other conservatives abdicated social responsibility while advocating personal responsibility for addressing social problems. Individuals who lacked social fitness had only themselves to blame, and nonprofit organizations turned to for-profit activities to make up for the decline in public funding.

As for what has happened to civic recreation since the ‘80s, quite frankly, we don’t know for sure. Detailed, representative data on nonprofit fundraising is hard to come by. Most information comes from the Internal Revenue Service, since every 501(c)(3) organization must report its revenues and expenses each year on IRS Form 990 in order to maintain tax-exempt status. The IRS requires organizations to report “special events” revenue, but the groups don’t have to provide many details about the nature of those events. Moreover, revenue from fitness fundraisers are sometimes lumped in with “direct public support,” making it indistinguishable from direct financial donations.

Imperfect though the data may be, the number of organizations reporting any special events revenue whatsoever is an indicator of the prevalence of civic recreation. As the graphic on p. 30 shows, the number of organizations reporting special events revenue has risen, in both relative and absolute terms. Between 1991 and 2007, the percentage of organizations reporting net revenue from special events increased from 24.1 to 32.4 percent. In absolute terms, the number reporting special events revenue tripled during this time. So, we know the sheer number of civic recreation opportunities to which Americans have been exposed has increased significantly.

Ironically, this growth may have occurred in spite of, rather than because of, any financial benefits. While these events hold the promise of stabilizing revenues, they frequently lose money for the sponsoring organization. Charity Navigator, an “independent charity evaluator,” found in a 2007 study that organizations spent $1.33 for every $1.00 raised by a special event, compared with $0.13 spent for each $1.00 raised in total. Here again, though, we do not know the true financial impact of civic recreation, because many special events are not reported as such.

Further, whether or not an event is financially successful may be unrelated to the overall presence of civic recreation in the American civic repertoire. Even if individual events fail, the sheer amount of civic recreation taking place will still rise. Take, for example, Pallotta Teamworks, a for-profit event planner with a checkered past. Best known as the sponsor of the California AIDS Ride, this organization was a pioneer of the multi-day, multi-thousand-dollar-pledge fundraiser (the template for the AIDS bike ride described here). The organization closed its doors in 2002 amid declining participation and controversy about the inefficiency of its events. As the graphic (above left) shows, Pallotta’s events seem anything but successful.

However, even as individual events were failing, the sheer number of participants was booming, tracking a similar increase in the overall number of events. If, as the graphic on the right suggests, the prominence of civic recreation in the American civic repertoire does not depend on its economic success, the source of its apparent popularity must be located elsewhere.

suffering bodies and fit citizens

All actions are laden with meaning. For instance, we buy Girl Scout cookies because they’re delicious, but each purchase carries an additional value: it teaches a young girl that success comes from hard work. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Similarly, our hearts—and our money—go out to the Salvation Army bell-ringers at Christmas time as they devote their time and labor to the singular task of ringing bells for pocket change. They suffer bodily in the freezing cold, like the poor and homeless they want to help.

Civic recreation, too, is popular in part because it resonates with a deeply held cultural value of hard work through bodily labor. Rather than simply writing a check, it feels good to actually do something for the cause you believe in. Civic recreation tries to unite the value of individual fitness with judgments of social and moral fitness in a healing way. In the face of physical and social ills—for we cannot deny their existence—conscientious citizens try to heal the individual and the social body in whatever ways they can. As an ordinary citizen, if I cannot enact complex, structural solutions, then what can I do?

I can ride a bicycle. When I signed up for ACT II (AIDS Network Cycles Together, II), I learned that the $1500 in donations that I would have to raise to participate in this bike ride would go toward HIV prevention services and a variety of legal, medical, and social services for people with AIDS (PWAs). Some people might prefer to simply write a check and skip the 400 miles of bike riding, but not I. As a practical matter, I couldn’t write such a large check myself, but together with friends and family we could. Plus, let’s be honest: I love cycling and this ride would be a great way to see the rolling hills of southwestern Wisconsin.

But that is not why I was standing hand-in-hand with strangers, people I had just met, listening to the sounds of a lone bagpiper, watching a solemn procession of people and objects that symbolized AIDS as they moved down an aisle of weeping humanity. By the time of those Closing Ceremonies—after six days of riding, eating, and sleeping together—I knew there was a deeper reason I had chosen to ride my bike. It was expressed in the narrative of suffering, fitness, and determination that we constructed collectively.

The event organizers worked meticulously to immerse us participants in HIV/AIDS symbolism, from the mundane to the prophetic. Little red ribbons were everywhere. There was a rider-less bicycle, “Rider Zero,” that accompanied our caravan to represent all of the PWAs who had died or were too sick to ride. Organizers used these symbols and other practices to tell a story of bodily suffering and determination to overcome it—the suffering that you feel trying to ride a bicycle up a hill is indicative of the suffering that PWAs experience every day. It is only through persistence and determination that you get to the top, just as only persistence and determination will win the fight against HIV/AIDS, whether in the individual or the social body.

Participants and other volunteers reinforced the organizers’ narrative. One rider, Brett, a veteran of six AIDS rides, told me a story of physically and emotionally living this metaphor: On a previous ride, after riding 300 miles in three days, he came upon a cemetery with red ribbons tied to the fence, and he broke down crying. The combination of physical exhaustion and the symbolic reminders of his friends who had died simply overwhelmed him. Even HIV-positive participants reinforced the metaphor connecting physical exertion with the fight against AIDS. On the fifth day after dinner, Josh stood up and announced to everyone present: “As an 11-year survivor of being HIV positive, I am alive today because of you. So thank you, thank you all for riding.” In response, everyone cheered and applauded like crazy. Who wouldn’t feel their efforts validated by such testimony?

In addition to these symbols and metaphors, we strove to enact the kind of caring, compassionate community needed to combat HIV/AIDS. Ordinary bike rides are frequently quiet and solitary, but organizers and volunteers worked assiduously to create a norm of boisterous cheering and mutual encouragement. Some volunteers acted as cheerleaders each day, parking their cars at the top of steep hills and yelling words of encouragement: “Looking good rider!” “You can do it!” Cyclists were socialized to do the same for one another, offering words of encouragement and sometimes getting off their own bikes to run alongside slower riders, cheering them on as they struggled to climb steep hills.

Notably, it wasn’t just the fast riders cheering on the slow riders; the slow riders reciprocated. Through this near-constant cheering and mutual support, organizers and participants enacted a culture of caring that reflected, in the words of one organizer, “the way the world should be.” At the Closing Ceremonies, one speaker urged: “Don’t just remember what you’ve experienced these six days and leave the spirit of caring and love behind you. Bring that caring spirit to the rest of the world. Help make the rest of the world more like ACT II.”

What did all of this accomplish? ACT II ultimately achieved the three main goals of all fundraisers: it raised money, generated positive publicity, and recruited volunteers for the organization and its cause. Because ACT II provided participants with an experience more meaningful and rewarding than putting a stamp on an envelope, more than a few ACT II participants remained dedicated volunteers, participating in ACT rides year after year. Of course, our ride didn’t win the fight against HIV/AIDS, but it did teach us a lesson: each of us can make a difference through hard work and determination. Horatio Alger would be proud.

the politics of fun

The emergence of fitness fundraisers and the broad appeal of civic recreation are inextricably bound with the economic, cultural, and political forces that have shaped our society over the past 50 years. This channeling of physical energy into civic purposes—this uniting of individual and social fitness—feels positive, proactive, and liberatory. It empowers people to take action, and it is more rewarding than writing a check. Civic recreation shows the tremendous creativity of nonprofit organizers and entrepreneurs working to create a better society any way they can. And it is liberating to know that civic action doesn’t have to be separated from ordinary life; it doesn’t have to be boring or overly serious. It doesn’t have to be anything. As our society changes, and as we seek new ways to improve it, we will adapt, innovate, and meet new challenges. That, at least, is the promise.

But then I think about playing kickball for Tibet, and it all seems ludicrous. Civic recreation can make politics seem a little too easy, a little too fun—just another commodity to be consumed and enjoyed without any deeper investment or risk. Even worse, cloaking politics in a mantle of sports and recreation could simply be “producing apathy,” as political ethnographer Nina Eliasoph might put it. It may be comforting to think that one form of civic engagement is just as good as another, but succumbing to the politics of fun risks making us unable or unwilling to do the important work when it’s not fun. Critics are right to worry whether we will work as good citizens for the common good, if it does not benefit—or entertain—us directly. Politics can be a matter of life and death—maybe not for you today, but for someone somewhere.

In the end, I think of civic recreation as the knife-edge of democracy. On one hand, civic recreation amplifies the self-interested individualism generated by the fitness boom and the conservative shift in U.S. politics. On the other hand, it is a product of the “rights revolution” of the 1960s, and it shows—directly and experientially—some of the important ways that the personal is political. Just as civic recreation can lead us into mindless consumption or political apathy, it can empower us to take action of the most communal and political sort. The promise of democracy stretches deep, deep down into the minutiae of everyday life; the means and ends to which we devote our civic energies are up to us. So, too, for civic recreation: its social benefits are there to be claimed, but are not guaranteed.

recommended readings

Eliasoph, Nina. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1998). An innovative ethnography of the ways people use informal talk and recreation to empty the public sphere of political discourse.

King, Samantha. Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). A strong critique of corporate philanthropy, cause marketing, and other ways the line between charity and profit is being blurred.

National Center for Charitable Statistics. One of the best online sources of data on the nonprofit sector, with integrated tools for conducting analyses.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000). A powerful description and explanation of trends in civic participation and social capital in the U.S. in the late 20th century.

Schudson, Michael. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Martin Kessler Books, 1998). An insightful historical analysis of how the meanings of citizenship have changed in the U.S. since the colonial era.

In this, our final issue at the editor’s desk, we turn our attention to the work of a Minnesota-based photographer, Wing Young Huie. We think you’ll see it’s no accident that Huie found himself at the release party for our very first issue, back in Winter 2008.

Born and raised in a predominantly white neighborhood of the port city of Duluth, MN, Huie is perhaps best known for a series of projects based in the diverse neighborhoods and communities of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These photographic explorations (from which a number of the images shown here are drawn) are created and then displayed in neighborhoods like St. Paul’s Frogtown and along Minneapolis’s Lake Street. They are installed in public places and often run for miles, including intimate portraits in the windows of local businesses as well as larger-than-life prints mounted on the sides of buildings. Some are so big that they’re mistaken for athletic apparel advertising or community promotions from the Chamber of Commerce. And these images read, at least to the sociological eye, as striking insights into social life, capturing the community as an aggregrate of its individual members.

Huie rarely uses technical terms or flowery language as he discusses his art and how he’s using it to engage with people near and far. Instead, he carries himself as a thoughtful observer, a humble Midwesterner who generally asks more questions than he answers and listens more than he talks. Despite this quiet approach, Huie’s thinking, motivations, and work are peppered with ideas eminently recognizable to the sociologist: diversity and difference, complexity and ambiguity, connection and (perhaps most of all) context. One recent critic, Patricia Briggs, highlighted context’s importance in Huie’s portfolio, writing, “[Huie] embraces the idea that art exists at the intersection of image, context, and viewer. Its power lies in conversation and connection… beyond the usual goals or logic of documentary photography… to stress the power of photographic images to build connections, to create and reflect relationships.”

Huie says it more simply, stating only that he photographs people in everyday life in “very subjective ways,” looking for images that appeal to him aesthetically. For him, this isn’t about objective, documentary photography that will accurately represent “just the facts.” Instead, it’s his engagement with his subjects that sets him apart. His portraits are meant to create intrigue and conversation, a sense of place that doesn’t require a sociology degree to recognize.

Huie’s latest and perhaps most ambitious effort is the monumental University Avenue Project. The portfolio includes hundreds of photographs taken along what locals just call “The Avenue,” the street connecting the Twin Cities from the State Capitol in St. Paul all the way to the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. And while the road runs East-West, the project took Huie in several new directions. For instance, in addition to creating prints to hang along the thoroughfare, Huie chose to digitally project the images at night, using large screens in an abandoned lot in the middle of the metro. All summer long, the community looked back at itself. Another new theme was his use of hand-held chalkboards that allowed his subjects to “speak” to the viewers.

This technique grew out of Huie’s frustrations with the conventions and limitations of documentary photography. Though it’s his medium of choice, Huie says “A lot of black and white photography portrays its subjects as victims.” Huie counts himself and his work as part of the problem. So, in an effort to “expand meanings rather than contain them” and “to connect the viewer to what is being viewed… reflect what I didn’t see,” Huie began to experiment in seminars and workshops. Eventually, he settled on a reflection and discussion exercise that involved participants writing down their answers to one of these six questions: What are you? How do others see you? What don’t others see about you? What is your favorite word? What is an incident that changed your life? How have you been affected by race? Then, he photographed his subjects, allowing the transitory connections he always makes with these people to continue with his viewers.

Huie understands these questions as the beginning of conversations—often tough conversations—between himself and his subjects, his subjects and their viewers, and viewers and their communities. “These questions are difficult to answer. They require someone to reveal a lot about themselves and their own vulnerabilities.” Huie recalls one particular exchange with a young girl who asked him not to share her comments with classmates, but then begged him to include her picture in his show. “But you understand,” he told her, “that then this will get seen by thousands of people, everyone.” The public nature of the show didn’t dissuade her, Huie recalls—in fact, it was exactly what the girl wanted. Huie puzzles on this moment, perhaps a signal of our unique age, in which privacy is guarded, but publicity is paramount. Everyone, Huie muses, wants to be recognized and connect in some meaningful way.

Huie has recently opened a new gallery and community space in a long-dormant commercial building (it had been vacant for decades) in a slowly-but-steadily rejuvenating part of South Minneapolis. He lives in an apartment above ”The Third Place,” which includes not only large walls to house his photographs, but also ping pong tables and a karaoke lounge (“Ping and Sing with Wing,” as one recent event was described). Huie believes The Third Place will be both a venue to sustain and support his work, and an artistic venture in and of itself, a way to embed himself more deeply within the social worlds in which he works. Indeed, when we sat down to talk about this feature, a gang-related slaying that had taken place at his doorstep the night before dominated our conversation, but seemed in no danger of driving Huie away: “This gallery is an extension of all my projects. It is not just where I work, it is where I live. They are all connected and part of being connected.” And so it is that Huie opens himself up to the experience of the community he captures, “Now is the time to reflect back, take a look at how to sustain and build a base for what I do. Now I’m a communal artist.”

Popular as a speaker for fifth graders, corporate titans, and community activists alike, Huie, like his work, is multifaceted. His body of work includes the cultural lives of adoptive families, black memorabilia in Minnesota, an exploration of race and place titled Looking for Asian America: An Ethnocentric Tour, and, in a foray into our “reality TV” culture, a personal profile not of a starlet, but of a young Native American girl named Schalemar Flying Horse. The images featured here are not a retrospective, but a collection of key moments in Huie’s life and work. They’re Huie’s landmark images.

For more information about Wing Young Huie’s work and The Third Place Gallery, visit wingyounghuie.com.

One thing organizational sociologists know—at least, those of us who study workplace inequality—is that the answer is “Yes, and in circumstances that have been found in many large organizations.” Policies on the books don’t guarantee anything.

Here’s the back-story and why I think this basic sociological point is worth thinking over. Eleven years ago, Betty Dukes and five other women went to Federal Court. They sought class action status for their lawsuit alleging that Wal-Mart, where they’d all worked, discriminated against women in pay and promotion. At Wal-Mart, the plaintiffs argued, women made up about two-thirds of the hourly workforce, but less than a third of salaried managers. In this highly sex-segregated work setting, a “tap on the shoulder” system of promotion permitted local managers to make staffing decisions with hardly any company oversight. The subjective system created pay bias and severely constrained women’s opportunities at Wal-Mart.

It took four years, but a federal judge in San Francisco agreed to let these six named plaintiffs represent the claims of up to 1.6 million other women, and his decision was upheld in two rounds of appeals. But when the case got to the U.S. Supreme Court, conservative judges like Roberts were skeptical about the group’s claims.

I have served as an expert witness in this case testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, and the experience has reminded me once again of how difficult it can be for lawyers, judges, and the media to understand and accept sociological knowledge.

In the media, this issue has typically been framed as one of “unconscious” or “hidden” bias. In fact, a few years ago, Fortune described Dukes v. Wal-Mart as “the war over unconscious bias,” and Business Week summed up expert testimony with the glib line “white men can’t help it.” Days before oral arguments were to begin, in fact, my hometown newspaper referenced my participation as an expert witness in the trial, writing “a University of Illinois professor’s theory that white men have unconscious bias against women and minorities is likely to be center stage.” But I have no such theory, and the answer to Justice Roberts’s question has little to do with what’s in people’s heads. Instead, it’s about whether a company adopts practices that have been shown to create and sustain bias or whether they implement those that have been shown to minimize bias.

Almost all large companies have written policies mandating equal treatment of men and women. Some even hold their managers accountable for following guidelines that minimize how gender (and race) stereotypes can influence decisions about hiring, assignments, and promotion, and they systematically monitor those guidelines’ effectiveness. Others, though, have written policies that end up disconnected from actual practices, let alone the organizational units charged with addressing diversity and equal opportunity. When sociologists like myself are asked to testify in class action Title VII discrimination cases like Dukes v. Wal-Mart, this is often what we’re being asked to do: determine whether policy and practice amount to nothing more than symbolic management.

While I faced some harsh (or worse: dismissive) responses to my testimony, I’m confident that sociologists must continue to present our data and analysis in cases like these. Without our evidence, gathered with the conceptual and methodological tools of organizational sociology, courts can conclude that the existence of well-intentioned anti-discrimination policies is equivalent to the practice of workplace parity. Workers and managers understand that management handbooks are just paper; the policies that employers enforce are the ones that they take seriously.

One thing I know is that organizational policies are not the same as organizational practices. Another thing I know is that ending discrimination requires conscious effort, not empty promises.

Writing a 3,000 word feature for a public audience, our contributors must dispense with the everyday apparel of scholarly publication. The layers of conceptual abstraction, the high-end designer methods and statistics, and the foundational undergarments of literature reviews—all gone. With all that stripped away, there’s no way to conceal vulnerabilities and authors can feel pretty exposed. As in naked dreams, though, when we first begin writing for a public audience, we tend to exaggerate the risks while underplaying the liberation and exhilaration that comes from breaking new ground. But that doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real.

We saw a bit of this in the kerfuffle over the American Sociological Association’s award for “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues,” which went this year to New York Times columnist David Brooks. When sociologists protested, in part due to Brooks’s conservative politics, the knee-jerk opposition seemed to undermine calls for broad-based public relevance and engaged scholarship—or, at least, to recast those calls as more narrowly partisan projects. While we might disagree with how Mr. Brooks uses our work, we defend his right to read, interpret, and mobilize sociological research and appreciate his high-profile efforts to do so. (Indeed, you may remember that we learned a lot about the challenges of disseminating sociology from Brooks in an interview published in one of our first issues.) We’ve actually heard similar professional resistance to popularizers like Malcolm Gladwell who distill and market social science for audiences a thousand times larger than that of our flagship journals. Even when members of our own tribe cross over and achieve a modicum of popular success, critics seem to burst from the woodwork to call into question their seriousness.

We’ve always tried to come from the other side at Contexts, putting our editorial energies into celebrating and effectively conveying good social science with real public relevance. Our graduate and national boards, web and section editors, and managing editors Letta Page and Amy Johnson have made heroic efforts in support of this mission. Our final issue features some terrific examples, with pieces on innovation, adoption, recreation, and closure. Sociologists have something important to say about such irreducibly social phenomena, and it has been our joy and pleasure to help tell their stories.

We couldn’t do any of this, of course, without your indefatigable energy as readers and supporters. Rest assured that new editors Jodi O’Brien and Arlene Stein will bring a fresh perspective that takes Contexts in exciting new directions. We’re cooking up some new ideas as well, developing and expanding our web-based project at thesocietypages.org, which will continue to host contexts.org. While such transitions might leave us feeling a bit exposed, we’re even more exhilarated about finding new ways to bring social science to broader publics.

You can listen to this interview in its entirety here.

Jon Smajda: What’s going on with Monte Bute?

Monte Bute: Well, I have stumbled into the world of death and dying. It was never an academic specialty, but now it’s becoming an experiential reality. Turned out that I have one of the rarest forms of cancer that exists… the type of thing that just sort of controls a lot of your world pretty rapidly. I then went into really severe decline very quickly, but continued to teach through all of that. And more than anything else, what it turned into was sort of a subtext of all of the classes I was teaching—often, purely by serendipity, not by intent.

JS: Your experiences as a sociologist have caused you to look at sociology and see what sociology can do to understand what you’re going through, but you’ve said you’re not finding much.

MB: No. The parallel to Durkheim and Suicide really stood out to me. Durkheim, of course, made a great breakthrough by dealing with suicide sociologically, but he threw the baby out with the bath water! I’ve recently run across an article, “Understanding the Experiential World of the Dying: Limits to Sociological Research,” and it just struck a bell with me. That that is just a central issue.

JS: What exactly did Durkheim exclude? Writing on suicide, how did that create blind spots for sociology?

MB: Well, he wanted to create, to point out to people, the paradox of what was truly the field of sociology. And he did so by excluding anything to do with the personal aspects of suicide. He didn’t want to know any details about individual cases; he didn’t care about motive, intention, any of those things. He wanted only to look at statistical rates and to be able to set up a classical invariant model of research. His whole premise to justify sociology was to turn the tables… and deal only with the archives of statistics on suicides. And to some degree, a lot of the approach to death and dying has been the same way. Let’s look for regularity, let’s look for pattern, let’s look at massive numbers of cases. And there’s value in all of that, but what’s often lost is the truths that come from the individual case, the single case, the negative case. And much of that, especially with dying, no matter how much you turn it into a sociological research project to study, you don’t realize that this is primarily an emotional experience, to face death. There’s no experience more lonely than dying. It changes in different cultures, but that’s the central point of it.

JS: So it’s not something that individuals go through in a vacuum.

MB: No, no, no, the social context is very powerful, probably the most important aspect to this, to me, was I received this diagnosis of terminal cancer out of the blue, on a cell phone, the day of my 65th birthday. Within a month, anonymously, former students and some colleagues created a “Fan Club” page on Facebook. That sort of “outed” me. And this no longer became a lonely, singular journey. It became a community. Suddenly it was a wide array of people involved, at different levels, in creating dialog about this experience… this suddenly turned it into a sociological experience. What began to immediately happen, being a sociologist, is I became a participant and an observer at the same time. That sort of double consciousness about the experience I had, there is nothing you could be more involved in than facing your own death, but at the same time there was detachment. So I was observing myself and others. [Dying was] an experience among a community of people.

JS: One of the things I’ve heard you say is that dying is a stage of the life course, it’s a process that people go through. It’s not just something that happens to you.

MB: People who work in the death and dying field, they have spent so much time trying to explain what a “good death” is. And when they talk about a good death, [they mean] that you should know it’s coming, you retain control, you have dignity and privacy, control over pain, you’re in a secure place, and there’s emotional support, etc. All of that stuff. I’ve come to a very different conclusion. Those things are all well and good, but my experience and understanding of this is, in fact, if you know that the end is coming, and have some time, this can be a liminal experience. You have an opportunity to reexamine the meaning of your life, and even more importantly, the meaning of what does it mean to be human. And, to me, a good death can be a death in which you go through affective and cognitive dissonance. You’re… unsettled. Now I don’t want you to die in that state, but this should be a time to go back to first questions and to final things. You reexamine and maybe you retell the narrative of your life. But you also look at the social and historical context that you’re living in. You begin to look at the human relationship with the cosmos, you begin to look and see that you are an animal that’s in a lived body. So many things come to the fore, and I think we’re so busy turning this into a therapeutic experience and a medical experience that we sort of lose the tragic nature of life, a chance to become a lay philosopher, a public philosopher in an odd way, and a public sociologist.

JS: What do you mean by “public sociologist”?

MB: Being a public sociologist is taking all social phenomena and using it, any form of social interaction, to help people make sense of their lives. And there is no greater taboo than the process of dying. People flee from the idea of dying, and so they add to the loneliness of the process. So for me, once I was “outed,” it caused me to step back and say, “My god, this is a teachable moment.” I will turn this into… a learning experience for my students, for my colleagues, for the general public. This is probably the most important public sociology project of my life.

*JS: I think one of the striking things is the way you’re using literature.

MB: In this dying experience, I have found that literature and film have spoken more deeply to me and to the people around me than the social sciences. And that’s unfortunate. For instance, Kurasawa, the great Japanese director, had an early film called Ikiru. It is the story of a Japanese bureaucrat who just plods to work every day. One day, he discovers that he has stomach cancer and has a year to live. The movie suddenly shifts to a memorial service, and we only discover through the memorial service how he spent his last year. And it was the most powerful image of someone who confronted death, confronted the meaning of their life, what they’d been doing, and it was a moment of awakening. Now those are things that should be captured more often by sociological ethnographies, life stories, biography—and they are occasionally—but they’re not what we spend most of our time working with students on.

JS: One last thing I wanted to ask you about is the book Tuesdays with Morrie. And I bring this up because every sociologist knows about this book, and every sociologist gets asked about this book, because it’s about a sociologist, and most people cringe. And then you said you re-evaluated your opinion of this book.

MB: I had read it and written it off as sort of a trite self-help manual, but I went back and I’ve reread that twice during the past 15 months. [Tuesdays] is what sociology should be doing about the process of dying. It is a profound rumination on the biological, the social and cultural, the psychological, and the spiritual elements of your coming demise. I’ll bet 95 percent of people who read that book could not tell you that he was a sociologist. He wasn’t using “soc speak,” he wasn’t babbling with journal diagnosis and definition, he was a human being who used the sociological lens to bring his own lived experience of this tremendously solitary experience to readers, to viewers, to people who were terrified by death. And he managed to turn this into a Socratic experience with his former student. [Morrie] talks about love and marriage and death and happiness, all of these topics, and he constantly has the sociological framework there without ever telling anyone he’s using this sociological paradigm to explain lived experience.

Discoveries from our Fall 2011 issue are available online at contexts.org/discoveries.

In his piece, Venkatesh characterizes sociology as a field “confused about its direction.” The discipline, he writes, once took us into otherwise “foreign, impenetrable worlds,” and “examine[d] cherished beliefs and institutions… stereotypes and misguided policies.” In previous generations, “data-carrying” sociologists like St. Clair Drake, Herbert Gans, and James Coleman were some of America’s “most influential truth-tellers,” “important cogs in the civic wheel” who helped ”end school segregation, ensure fair housing policies, [and] promote public sector accountability.” No more. Now Venkatesh worries that sociology and its “great American intellectual tradition” is “weathering a troubled transition.”

At the heart of Venkatesh’s concerns is the claim that sociologists are not taking on the big public problems and divisive social issues that were once our bread and butter. ”Where sociology once gravitated to the most pressing problems, especially the contentious issues that drove Americans apart, it no longer seems so sure of its mission.”

We don’t necessarily agree with everything Venkatesh says in this wide-ranging piece, though his claims are certainly making waves inside the field (perhaps precisely because his review was published outside of it). But we are certain that the sociologists who write for Contexts are doing their part to engage what we talk of as “real people problems.”

In this issue, for example, we have pieces from Reynolds Farley and Maria Krysan analyzing the current status of U.S. residential segregation, the phenomenon Doug Massey and Nancy Denton called “American Apartheid” almost twenty years ago. We’ve also got an article from Liesel Ritchie and colleagues about the BP oil spill and its lessons about disasters and disaster relief more generally, and John Hagan describes how social scientists have been called upon—and are able—to provide much-needed information for the International Criminal Court’s consideration of the genocide in Darfur. We even provide a look inside the social change afoot in Wisconsin as UW sociology graduate students take us backstage for the state Capitol protests and political events that gained so much national media attention earlier this year.

These aren’t always the most uplifting or calming of topics; it’s not for nothin’ that sociologists have been accused of being the “Debbie Downers” of the social science world. Surely, though, this is the kind of work the world needs.

“Academic disciplines,” Venkatesh concluded, “should not have to apologize for serious scholarship that does the unheralded work of systematically breaking down stereotypes, advancing policy, and ameliorating social inequity. We need sociologists to keep applying their fine-tuned antennae to social frictions because these will never be topics that can count on appealing to public curiosity about social reality—a consumer base that is always moving on to the next big idea.”

And at Contexts we further believe sociology has a responsibility not just to conduct this research, but also to ensure that it finds its way to those who need it, when they need it, and sometimes even when they don’t even realize that they need it. So here you go. Read. Learn. And pass it on.