The Role of Public Sociology

Teaching Sociology over the last few years, I have found myself disillusioned by being part of the academy. Disillusioned not because I found the academy to be a useless and vacuous space, but because of its narrow focus in terms of its audience. This narrow focus renders the academic project ‘suspended’ from those it should serve. For knowledge to be of any use, it must first and foremost be a public good accessible to the widest audience. It follows that there is an urgent need to expand the horizons of the academy.

As a discipline, Sociology developed out of a need to make sense of the pressing social upheavals of the day and where possible offer new directions. There is no gainsaying that the academy must play a pronounced role in deconstructing puzzling problems besetting society and offer insightful explanations. It is useless and criminal to confine ‘knowledge’ to ivory towers. The very idea of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ has befittingly come under scrutiny in the last few years. That it is important to challenge and demystify the contours of knowledge production is not a moot point. To be sure, making ‘knowledge’ accessible and relevant demand that we challenge the western epistemological canon, i.e. inherited western ways of knowing or of what counts as knowledge.

By training, I hail from the discipline of Sociology and herewith submit that there is an urgent need for Public Sociology in Africa generally and particularly in Namibia. Championed by the foremost British Sociologist, Michael Burowoy, Public Sociology endeavours to bring sociology into conversation with audiences beyond the academy. It is an open dialogue in which both sides deepen their understanding of public issues (Burowoy 2004).

Now that I have introduced to you what Public Sociology is all about, I shall in the next coming days offer a number of reflexive pieces of analysis on a variety of issues pertinent to the Namibian society. Indeed, the familiar routines of everyday life demand that we look at issues from different and new perspectives. This is what Wright-Mills refers to at the ‘Sociological Imagination’, the relationship between personal experience and the wider society. There are a lot of experiences associated with particular social groupings that should be understood in relation with how the Namibian society functions as a collective. These experiences invite a number of questions such as: what can we learn from the demands of the so-called ‘struggle kids’ when we subject their experiences to a ‘Sociological Imagination’ that invokes biography and history? How do we make sense of ex-Koevoet / SWATF members who are making demands to the government of the day? What can we make of the prevalence and dominance of ethnic politics in Namibia? Should we understand the latter question within the context of an absence of a glue that holds the Namibian society together because there is no ideology to subscribe to? Or we should draw on the trope of acute differences in material conditions of various Namibian ethnic groups? What does it mean to be a Namibian? What does the relative disinvestment of young people in public life suggest for the future of Namibia? How should we approach the issue of inter-generational conflicts within the context of political elitism and one-party dominance? What kind of future leaders are we producing at our institutions of higher learning? What are the dangers of continued lack of academic autonomy at our tertiary institutions?

The above questions are but some of the issues I would like to interrogate with and for the audience beyond the academy. With these few words, I invite you to Sociología Pública.