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In defense of public sociology: A view from the internal EU periphery

Recent years have witnessed an increasingly critical reception of the Burawoy's 2004 model of public sociology, which set the basis for more than a decade of meaningful discussions about the possibilities and limits of public engagement in the field. In addition to the criticisms of the term's evasiveness and doubtful usefulness for fulfilling its self-defined tasks, one of the prominent expressions of disapproval has been centered on the alleged turning of a local (US-American) category into a global concept. From a postcolonial perspective, a general criticism of the idea of unidirectional diffusion to lay audiences of the "expert knowledge" acquired by professional sociologists was compounded with the negative externalities of the "geopolitics of knowledge" replicating the US division of sociological labor. Such criticisms include the calls for the decolonization of social science (Arribas Lozano, 2018). However, the paper argues that - when viewed from the perspective of professional sociologies in the post-socialist countries at the European periphery, which find themselves in objectively neo-colonial positions (Böröcz and Sarkar, 2005) of a different kind - Burawoy's model is becoming ever-more relevant. Namely, in the current mode of knowledge production, increasingly based on "academic capitalism" (Münch, 2011) and "competitive state", the tradition of intellectuals engaging in public debates beyond academic boundaries seem to be quickly disappearing. The paper argues that the application of the postulates of Burawoy's model can be productive in that context, both in its "organic", community engagement dimension and the dimension contributing to at least partial reconstruction of a Habermasian-inspired public sphere.

public sociology, Burawoy, knowledge production, EU periphery

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