The Routledge International Handbook of Public Sociology

Leslie Hossfeld, E. Brooke Kelly, Cassius Hossfeld, Leslie Hossfeld, E. Brooke Kelly, Cassius M. Hossfeld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000408287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book brings together the work of public sociologists from across the globe to illuminate possibilities for the practice of public sociology and the potential for international exchange in the field. In addition to sections devoted to the history, theory, methodology and possible future of public sociology, it offers a series of concrete case studies of public sociology practice from experienced scholars and practitioners, addressing core themes including the role of students in public sociology, the production of knowledge by communities and the sharing of knowledge with a view to having an influence on policy. Presenting research that is truly global in scope, The Routledge International Handbook of Public Sociology provides readers with the opportunity to consider the possibilities that exist for international collaboration in their work and reflect on future directions. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in research with public impact.

Section IV

Case studies in public sociology

A key concern of this Handbook is to examine public sociology from an international lens. By providing examples of case studies throughout the world, this Handbook on public sociology becomes valuable for a broad range of audiences. This section on case studies views perspectives of social life in the United States, Taiwan, the Philippines and India, in order to broaden perspectives on what public sociological study can achieve. These chapters differ in content, as Price et al. examine how the relationships between local organizations can better a community, while Debal K. SinghaRoy examines collective movements in rural India through a historical context. The differences in the publics these researchers choose to study are valuable because each author applies their sociological rigor to understanding a defined public, through case study. Included in this section is a study on US critical public sociology through the lens of the Canadian scholar Kimberley Ducey.

10
The Healthy Dearborn coalition

An interdisciplinary, continuing collaboration between university, health, government and community in Southeast Michigan

Carmel E. Price, Paul Draus, Rose Wellman, Sara Gleicher, Hala Alazzawi, Kathleen Pepin, David Norwood and Natalie R. Sampson

Launched in 2015 with the aim of preventing chronic disease through the promotion of healthy lifestyles, Healthy Dearborn (HD) (www.healthydearborn.org) is a diverse, cross-sector partnership between Beaumont Health, the City of Dearborn, Dearborn public schools and more than 550 community members. Its formation reflected an effort by the Beaumont Health System to promote community health and wellness as a component of its obligations under the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Beaumont had merged with Dearborn-based Oakwood Health System in 2014 and recognized the need to understand the health landscape of the Dearborn community, while also contributing to improved population health outcomes.

Sara Gleicher, Licenced Master Social Worker (LMSW), an experienced community organizer with a long history in health advocacy and municipal politics, was enlisted to coordinate the effort and immediately began reaching out to local residents and organizations. According to Gleicher (2018), ‘Healthy Dearborn is a multi-year initiative to prevent chronic disease by creating a “culture of health” where everyone enjoys healthy eating and active living.’ With Gleicher’s guidance, HD members are working together to achieve its stated vision for the city: ‘Dearborn, a thriving diverse community, will fully embrace a unified culture of health where everyone enjoys whole health, with equal access to healthy foods, health care, green space and opportunities for safe, active living.’ The coalition is organized into several key working groups, developed by its community members: Health Disparities and Health Equity, Healthy Environments, Healthy Foods, Inclusive Health Committee, Healthy Schools and Healthy at Work, as well as the research team.

HD is also a collaboration between community members and faculty. In fall 2015, Gleicher was introduced to Dr. Paul Draus, professor of sociology at the University of Michigan–Dearborn (UMD), by a mutual acquaintance in the Detroit public health community. Dr. Carmel E. Price, another sociologist at UMD, became involved with HD shortly thereafter, and these relationships led to an evolving, multi-year collaboration that cut across the domains of teaching, research and advocacy. Faculty members from UMD in other areas, such as public health (Dr. Natalie R. Sampson) and anthropology (Dr. Rose Wellman), also joined the research team as did faculty from neighboring universities, including Wayne State University and the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor.

This paper has two main purposes: 1) to describe the outcomes from this evolving partnership between HD and UMD from the perspectives of both university and community-based participants and stakeholders and 2) to examine public sociology as a concept and practice that can create cross-cutting links between public engagement and sociological theories and methods.

Public sociology at the University of Michigan–Dearborn

According to Breese (2011:79), public sociology gives a name to ‘a sphere of sociological engagement that extends further into the community by partnering with others to produce knowledge that not only benefits society but is crafted by and critiqued by the individuals this knowledge is meant to assist.’ From this perspective, public sociology is not a new development but provides a coherent way of linking together a number of endeavors that sociologists have long engaged in, as researchers, teachers, theorists, advocates and activists (Hartmann 2016). However, Burawoy’s presidential address at the 2004 American Sociological Association meeting placed the term in high profile and inspired a series of discussions concerning the extent and impact of sociology’s engagement with the world outside the academy. According to Burawoy (2005), public sociology may be defined in contradistinction to standard academic (what he calls) ‘professional’ sociology:

Public Sociology endeavors to bring sociology into dialogue with audiences beyond the academy, an open dialogue in which both sides deepen their understanding of public issues. But what is its relation to the rest of sociology? It is the opposite of Professional Sociology – a scientific sociology created by and for sociologists – inspired by public sociology but, equally, without which public sociology would not exist. The relation between professional and public sociology is, thus, one of antagonistic interdependence.

(emphasis added)

Burawoy’s conceptualization generated a lot of excitement and debate in the field of sociology. In his critique of Burawoy, titled ‘A Guide for the Perplexed,’ Brint (2005) begins by questioning the distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘public’ sociologies. According to Brint, the two roles are not antagonistic. In fact, the one flows from the other:

The only reasonable basis that any public has for listening to sociologists is that their research or their discipline’s insights bear on issues of public moment. Everyone has passions and values; but only professors and doctorate-level researchers have the accumulated knowledge and research of an academic discipline to offer. They alone have the rigorous methods to prove or disprove ideas that have gained currency.

(2005:48)

Writing from the perspective of their experience at a diverse urban university in the United Kingdom, Gabriel et al. (2009) contend that the pursuit of social justice goals may take particular forms, reflective of that context. They list the following as examples:

the University’s commitment to widen access to groups hitherto excluded from higher education; its support for research that consciously seeks to shape policy and enhance service delivery and, finally, the opportunities it provides to work collaboratively with marginalised communities in an ethos supportive of participatory methods and capacity building initiatives.

(2009:310, emphasis added)

The UMD, a branch campus of the state’s flagship research and teaching institution, the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor (UMAA), likewise maintains a distinct identity due to several factors: its location in Dearborn, an increasingly diverse small city located adjacent to the urban center of Detroit, Michigan; its student body, which is composed of a high percentage of non-traditional, first generation students; and its faculty, who have historically combined their various research interests with a focus on undergraduate teaching and a strong commitment to community engagement.

Due to this particular context, the forms of public sociology at UMD are distinct from what they might be at the UMAA or the University of California, Berkeley, where Burawoy teaches. As a primarily undergraduate teaching institution, with a locally based student population, our public sociology also tends to be local in character, arising out of partnerships with community-based organizations or local government agencies and engaging students through collaborations that may begin inside of classrooms but grow into more ambitious endeavors over time (Brooks 2004). In these respects, the HD-UMD partnership illustrates the interdisciplinary (Gabriel et al. 2009) and hybrid (Fairbairn 2019) nature of public sociology.

In the sections to follow, we begin by discussing the specific context of Dearborn in more detail. We then describe some of the phases of collaboration between faculty and students at UMD and HD, from teaching to research. We employ these separate but overlapping phases (first, service-learning, and second, the HD research team) to demonstrate the value of seeing public sociology not as a compartmentalized domain separate from a larger ‘professional’ body, but as an interstitial, hybrid, unfolding endeavor, which constantly interacts with other aspects of sociology such as theory and methods. We conclude with a discussion of the outcomes of the HD-UMD collaboration and the additional questions it raises.

Introduction to the City of Dearborn: Arab context and 500 Cities data

The 500 Cities Project (https://www.cdc.gov/places/about/500-cities-2016-2019/index.html) is currently our central dataset for understanding the health disparities in Dearborn. A partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the 500 Cities Project provides a free, interactive tool where the largest 500 cities in the United States can see census-tract level estimates geographically mapped for measures of health outcomes, prevention and unhealthy behaviors. This allows users to understand the geographic distribution of health data and to better understand health disparities as they exist by census tract. The City of Dearborn is one of the largest 500 cities in the United States; upon learning about the release of the 500 Cities Project, the HD Coalition examined the data. See Figure 10.1 for an example of one of the maps generated by the 500 Cities interactive tool.

Drawing from the 500 Cities Project as well as from the long-standing concerns of community members, HD began to focus on and make explicit the health disparities that exist between East and West Dearborn residents. For example, the 500 Cities data revealed that residents in South and East Dearborn experience rates of obesity at nearly 40% higher than rates among all city residents (25%). Rates of heart disease in South and East Dearborn are 1.5 times the national average, and families experience rates of food insecurity greater than those living in the highest poverty areas of Detroit (Wolf 2014). U.S. Census data shows that residents living in Dearborn’s health disparity neighborhoods are predominantly from Middle Eastern populations. Yet because most Middle Easterners and Arabs are classified as ‘white’ by the U.S. Census Bureau, there is little data available on their health.

Figure 10.1 Sample map from 500 Cities project

Nevertheless, the Arab presence in the region is significant. Arabs comprise 5% of Michigan’s population and are estimated to make up over 42% of Dearborn’s population (Abraham, Howell, and Shryock 2011). Indeed, Dearborn, Michigan, is the heart of the so-called Arab Detroit (Baker et al. 2009). The majority of this population is from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and Yemen. Dearborn and Greater Detroit also have a growing Muslim public sphere that includes mosques, Islamic charities, newspapers, food and clothing stores, civil rights organizations and an Islamic seminary. There are also approximately 97 mosques¹ in Greater Detroit, and many of these are located in Dearborn (Abraham et al. 2011).

In 2018, HD formed a new team called Health Disparities and Health Equity. This team was designed to make sure that health disparities, made visible by the 500 Cities data, are central to HD going forward. This new team is helping HD examine the 500 Cities data and has difficult conversations about structural inequalities. How, for instance, is zip code more predictive of health outcomes than biogenetic code? The Health Disparities and Health Equity team has further added HD evening quarterly meetings, that rotate to neighborhood locations throughout the city, to ensure that all people in Dearborn can participate in HD, and not just those who have the luxury to attend a meeting on Tuesday morning from 8:30 A.M. to 10:00 A.M. In addition, the team is developing an equity tool where all teams and HD programs can self-assess how well they are utilizing principles of inclusion and equity. As it relates to the goals of HD, the research team is also focused on addressing health disparities by assessing the settings of daily life in Dearborn (Newman et al. 2015).

Phase 1: service-learning project

The first phase of collaboration between HD and UMD was a faculty-led service-learning project. Dr. Draus had been participating in HD as both a UMD faculty member (i.e., an ‘expert’) and as a community resident early in the group’s life. He saw an opportunity for service learning when his fall 2016 Health Policy course was meeting at the same day/time as monthly HD meetings. Gleicher also thought a service-learning opportunity would be mutually beneficial for HD and the students, so a project was launched. The students were working through the course curriculum while also attending HD meetings and integrating with the five community work groups initiated by HD coalition members: Healthy Schools, Healthy Worksites, Healthy Foods, Healthy at Play and Healthy Transportation.²

As active participants, the students set about trying to further HD’s goals within the course of the term. The progress of each group depended on the goals that had been defined by HD. For example, in the Healthy Foods group, Goal 1 was to ‘Link People to Healthy Food Options.’ In order to do this, the group decided that they first needed to understand what food options already existed in Dearborn and whether these could be defined as ‘healthy,’ according to standard criteria. They collaborated with Dr. Price, who was at that time in the Healthy Foods group and developed a survey that would enable the group to map the food geography of Dearborn and establish a baseline for measuring progress toward that first goal.

By the end of the term, the students had developed a survey, gathered some initial data on food options at several Dearborn food outlets, including a major chain grocery store, a large locally based ethnic grocery store oriented toward Dearborn’s significant Arab-speaking population and a more boutique-style small-sized grocery store that catered to more affluent customers. They delivered a final presentation to an audience consisting of HD members as well as their classmates, concluding that Dearborn benefited from a relative bounty of food options, especially when compared to neighboring Detroit. However, there were gaps in terms of residents’ knowledge of these options, as well as their access in terms of either cost or geography.

In their required final policy memo (addressed to the City of Dearborn), they ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Section I Introduction – brief history of ‘public sociology’
• Section II Theoretical frames
• Section III Methodological choices in public sociology
• Section IV Case studies in public sociology
• Section V Students as knowledge producers
• Section VI Community as knowledge producer
• Section VII Sharing knowledge toward public impact
• Section VIII Conclusion
• Index