This year’s Annual Meeting will feature two Presidential Panels. Selected by the ASA President, these sessions engage experts in the field on topics that align in important and timely ways with the meeting theme of “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Society.” Both sessions will include time for audience discussion.
Bridging Scholarship and Struggle: The Long Arc of Community-Engaged Sociology
Community-engaged scholarship (CES), that is, research conducted in deep collaboration with communities striving for social justice, offers a powerful alternative to extractive or top-down approaches to social inquiry. Grounded in collaboration, accountability, and shared purpose, CES positions sociologists as co-creators of knowledge and agents of change. Though historically undervalued in the discipline, this approach has deep roots in American Sociology and is gaining renewed recognition, as reflected in the ASA Council’s recent adoption of guidelines for including community-engaged scholarship in tenure and promotion cases. Building on this momentum, this session examines how CES is reshaping the field by advancing equity-oriented research, democratizing knowledge production, and strengthening communities’ capacities to challenge systemic oppression. Panelists will highlight action-based research that links sociological inquiry to transformative equity-oriented policy and institutional change. The session aligns with the annual meeting’s theme of solutions-oriented sociology that responds to the pressing challenges facing both the academy and democracy at large.
Session Participants:
Session Organizers: Teresa Irene Gonzales, Loyola University-Chicago; Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston
Presider: Teresa Irene Gonzales, Loyola University-Chicago
Panelists: Leisy Janet Abrego, University of California, Los Angeles; Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland – College Park; Cecilia Menjivar, University of California-Los Angeles; Aldon D. Morris, Northwestern University; Mark R. Warren, University of Massachusetts Boston
Putting Sociology to Work in Research Funding
This panel brings together sociologists who work, or have worked, in governmental and nonprofit funding agencies to think about how sociology informs organizational missions and research funding decisions. Accomplishments and challenges of sociology research funding will be discussed. Given the rapidly changing environment related to science funding, the panelists will also address just-in-time developments.
Session Participants:
Session Organizer: Nina Bandelj, University of California-Irvine
Presider: Nina Bandelj, University of California-Irvine
Panelists: Adam Gamoran, William T. Grant Foundation; Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study; Sarah Thébaud, University of California-Santa Barbara; Bruce Western, Columbia University