This emancipatory website is a branch of Mark A. Foster Services™ and a publication of The MarkFoster.NETwork™. Please sign the guestbook, and bookmark the site. If free speech is speech which frees the dominated, doing sociology becomes a radical act.

Public sociology may, like clinical sociology (a helping profession) and applied sociology (applied social research), be classified under sociological practice. Public sociologists apply their knowledge in the public sphere. Not all of them are formal clinicians or applied researchers.

As coined by 1988 American Sociological Association (ASA) president Herbert Gans, a public sociologist is a public intellectual. The popular redefinition of “private troubles” as “public issues,” commonly referred to as the sociological imagination, is a major value of public sociology.

Public sociology, as sociological activism, was proposed by 2004 ASA president Michael Burawoy. Specifically, the owner of this website, as a Bhaskarian critical realist, promotes unity. He regards the disunity of partisanship as a contradiction to revolutionary decision making and problem solving (MP3 audio file).