Digging in the penumbra of master categories

Burawoy’s ‘For Public Sociology ’ traces the many diverse ways in which our discipline can encompass public sociologies. This is a thoughtful piece, and an exciting one. It explodes the category of public, showing us its many facets. There is little I disagree with in Burawoy’s eleven theses. I found particularly important the notion of provincializing American sociology – which also resonates with the effort today among several historians to provincialize Europe. And I found Burawoy’s insistence that there are many diverse publics critical to the task he calls for. It is a brilliant, intelligent, generous, map of the project that he names For Public Sociology. It is in the spirit of the collective work Burawoy calls for that I make the following comments. I want to go digging. I want to detect the lumpiness of what seems an almost seamless map – though perhaps it appears to me as seamless precisely because I agree fully with Burawoy. Are there fractures in this project, is there a fallacy or a flaw we are missing? This digging is part of the work that needs to be done