Public sociology,social justice and struggles in the era of austerity-and-crises

Social justice and denialism: Public sociology or sociology for social justice?

The relationship between academic discipline of sociology and political/social struggles for equality and social justice has been an issue since the establishment of sociology. Sociology for social justice and equality was born in opposition to official academic studies which were subservient to the established conservative order: it sought to engage with, connect to and articulate struggles of marginalised, oppressed or exploited communities. However, social justice is certainly a contested concept.

Almost all claims are described as ‘just’ to give them legitimacy. In that sense, there is plurality and an inherent ambiguity within the concept that makes it contested ab initio. While struggles for social justice contain global significance and possible implications, they cannot but be understood in the context of specific struggles. However, it would be a sophism to suggest that social justice is devoid of meaning and legitimacy by pushing the arguments of subjectivism and relativism to their limits. The purpose of this article is not to engage with the various perspectives at a conceptual level, but to focus on sociology for social justice and public sociology. Whether one reads justice as fairness (Rawls, 1972), or as a relational and procedural approach (Young, 1990), or as a matter of capabilities (Sen, 2009) or reads social justice in the context of transformative politics of framing and counter-public (Fraser, 2012), it does not undermine the basic argument about the centrality of social justice to social struggles. Fraser’s approach is particularly attractive, as it proposes shifts in the structures relating to discourses and practices that would transform ‘the deep grammar of frame-setting in a globalising world’. The aim is ‘to overcome the injustices of misframing by changing the boundaries of the “who” of justice [and] the mode of their constitution, hence the way in which they are drawn’ (Fraser, 2012: 23–24).

There is a long tradition of sociology born out of claims for social justice and equality. Joe Feagin (2001), during his Presidential address at the American Sociological Association entitled ‘agendas for the 21st century’, stressed how social justice and sociology are intimately connected. He urged sociologists to examine ‘the big social questions of this century, including the issues of economic exploitation, social oppression, and the looming environmental crises’. He noted,

Given the new century’s serious challenges, sociologists need to rediscover their roots in a sociology committed to social justice, to cultivate and extend the longstanding ‘counter-system’ approach to research, to encourage greater self-reflection in sociological analysis, and to re-emphasize the importance of the teaching of sociology. […] And, clearly, more sociologists should engage in the study of alternative social futures, including those of more just and egalitarian societies. Sociologists need to think deeply and imaginatively about sustainable social futures and to aid in building better human societies.

Such calls continue the traditions led by numerous eminent sociologists concerned about how sociology addresses the problems of an increasingly complex world where injustice and inequality persist. Immanuel Wallerstein (2000) called for a radical opening ‘from sociology to historical social science’ to be ‘developed into a re-unified, historical social science on a truly global scale’. Michael Burawoy (2005) called for a ‘public sociology’ contra ‘policy sociology’. This sparked an important debate in many countries regarding the potential and meaning of public sociology in the era of global crisis. Burawoy (2007) acknowledged that his inspiration for ‘public sociology’ came after visiting South Africa in 1990 when he witnessed the praxis of progressive South African sociologists opposing apartheid. ‘Public sociology’ calls for thinking beyond the self-referencing of a closed professional system to open up and be accountable to society:

Professional sociology generates its own counter-movement, its own counter-utopia, a sociology that involves dialogue with publics rather than peers, whose truth is measured by consensus rather than correspondence to the world, whose legitimacy is measured by relevance rather than scientific norms, whose politics involves public debate rather than the pursuit of professional self-interest, whose pathologies are populism and vanguardism rather than professional self-referentiality. A powerful professional sociology, therefore, compels us to think through and map out the meaning and possibilities of its other – public sociology.

Gewirtz and Cribb (2002) critique how ‘policy sociology’, or what they refer to as ‘sociology from above’, overlooks proper engagement with the tensions between ‘different facets or claims to social justice’ in the context of education policy (p. 499). They propose ‘a plural conception of social justice’, rather than succumb to the disempowering logic of those radical perspectives which see change as impossible due to structural imbalances of forces in favour of the ruling elites, classes and dominant groups. This draws on Rawls’ (1972) ‘reflexive equilibrium’, the notion that the principles of justice must be constantly tested against various intuitive judgements and vice versa. The danger of relativism in this approach is apparent.

One of the many definitions of sociology is ‘applied science’ that is useful, if not essential, for social change (Schwartz, 2017). Despite the social reality of being ‘looked down upon’ by scholars of other academic disciplines in the neoliberal times of relentless profit maximisation, a considerable number of academics and students are still attracted to sociology because they believe that the discipline ‘will provide them with the expertise to remake the world as a more socially just place’ (Alexander, 2005: 171). The tradition of connecting to struggles is an attraction that draws scholars to the discipline. Floya Anthias explains that what drew her to sociology was that scholars are called upon to critically engage in theoretical questions, which ‘stem from trying to think about what are the tools we can deploy in order to understand things better’, as she was always interested in issues of racism and issues of sexism and, of course, class inequality (Cheney et al., 2016).

This article focuses on the type of sociology that promises transformation in the direction of social justice and equality. This is often organically connected to radical and critical perspectives connected to social struggles. There are a number of powerful critiques about how mainstream sociology had exercised censorship, silencing or ignoring radical strands of scholars, such as Marxist scholars, critical race, feminist and gender scholars, anti-colonial and other radical strands. Only recently have mainstream sociology texts introduced radical scholars as founders of sociology. Marx was ‘restored’ as a founder, as the figurehead of the Marxist school; however, the position of other scholars from feminist, critical race and postcolonial theory was only recently ‘restored’ in textbooks. The notion of ‘neglected founders’ was introduced in revised sociology textbooks in order to introduce scholars such as Harriet Martineau, Ibn Khaldun and W.E.B Du Bois ¹ together with other ‘modern scholars’. However, chronic neglect or censorship cannot suddenly be ‘undone’ or ‘restored’ by adding a name, a theorem or a reference. The recent publication of the biography of Du Bois has sparked an interesting debate about the implication of excluding this scholar for over two decades from American mainstream academia, which served the purpose of imposing ‘immutable hierarchy as functionalism’ and social Darwinism on generations of scholars, only when ‘the Civil Rights Movement in America broke down the walls of the sociological ghetto, allowing it to access the rich Du Boisean perspective’ (Schwartz, 2017: 1227).

While academic and professional sociology in the United States (and around the globe) laid its foundations on excluding Black scholars like Du Bois, feminists and other radicals, they were denying the potential for alternative strands within academic sociology to develop and exert influence (Morris, 2017). However, intellectual work channelled into movements and activism was hardly lost: Marx’s influence was born and flourished outside academia; Antonio Gramsci never held an academic post, neither did Rosa Luxemburg. Yet they are recognised as a major influence on social sciences and sociology. As Patricia Hill Collins (2016) suggested, Du Bois surpassed ‘public sociology’ by becoming a ‘public intellectual’ who spoke for and to a mass movement and thus contributed immensely to transforming the world. Collins points to ‘the intellectual virtuosity’ demonstrated by Du Bois, ‘having that rare ability to engage in multiple forms of sociological practice and place them in dialogue with one another’. At a global lever, Ari Sitas (2014), critiquing the sociology of the Global North and the old South African sociology, suggests that there is broader similar denialism. He underscores three instances:

The first is about how intellectual and scholarly discontinuity is entrenched in the South; the second is about the near to total absence of Africa in the sociological canon; and third, is that most creative sociological thinking on the continent occurred outside the university system – a system that was and continues to be incapable of absorbing and refining such ideas.

Denialism, exclusion and being relegated to a marginal or subordinated position in the world in the struggle of ideas are ideological struggles that extend well beyond the confines of academia. Often, scholars excluded from academia engage in and produce theory and praxis far more creative, useful and effective in social transformation than those within as they are not confined to many restraining institutional pressures. As a result of struggles and other conjuncture reasons, historical moments and paradigm changes occur, which transform academic disciplines. In other instances, we can observe the development of counter-movements within academia. Keim (2016) demonstrates the importance of providing alternatives to ‘counterhegemonic currents’ precisely due to ‘their refusal to participate in the dominant arena – less through theoretical discussion and explicit critique, but rather through specific forms of collective social scientific practice’ (p. 26). Thus we find the emergence of autonomous sociology in the era of the supposedly globalised ‘oneness’, as a ‘counterhegemonic current’ which facilitated ‘the emergence of original, autonomous sociologies at the periphery’. This was constituted as ‘public and policy sociology, counterhegemonic currents shift their arena of debate and interest from the international, Northern-dominated scholarly community to the local community of sociologists as well as to extra-academic actors in their own society’.

The story is, therefore, rather complex. There is no uniformity or homogeneity in ‘national sociologies’, as nationalist or globalist historiography or other knowledge systems often depicted. In countries with a British colonial experience that are today ‘ethnically divided societies’, such as India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, South Africa, Ireland and Cyprus, one finds multiple contestations within their national and nationalist sociologies. South Africa provides a fascinating story of a social justice and emancipatory sociology which emerged in confrontation with the liberal and aloof tradition in the 1970s–1980s. However, leading South African sociologists have noted with concern that this sociology has since subsided with the end of apartheid. Sitas (1997) described this as the ‘waning of sociology’ in a society riddled with contradictions of a contested transition, even before the African National Congress (ANC) took over in 1994, but with the ascendance of the liberation movement ‘sociology’s prowess has waned’ (p. 16). Hendricks (2006) speaks of an ‘intellectual schizophrenia of South African sociology’, and agreeing with Sitas he notes that ‘since the discipline has so effectively severed its links with civil society, there are no longer any cutting edge debates emerging from its ranks’ (p. 92).

Burawoy’s ‘public sociology’ is welcomed by eminent South African sociologists – Webster (2004) considers that it gives legitimacy to what South African sociologists had done for decades against apartheid. However, others complain that it confuses ‘sociologists with activists’ and calls for ‘indigenization’ (Nyoka, 2013). Recently, radical sociologists from within movements have critiqued the uncritical celebration of ‘indigeneity’, ‘difference’ and ‘identity’ as a postmodern mask for inequality. However, others point to the failure to properly engage in scholarly debates. Adesina (2006) critiques radical and conservative ‘scholarship as regurgitation’:

In South Africa, public sociology was policy sociology, and the claims for Professional Sociology against Policy, Critical or Public Sociologies not only misrepresent the US experience where much of the classical Industrial Sociology texts were policy studies done for US firms – have the potential of undermining efforts at democratising the intellectual space within our universities.

Mapadimeng (2012) disagrees that there is a general decline of post-apartheid sociology, arguing that there is not only a ‘renewal of sociology in South Africa [with] active interest and involvement in the struggle against inequalities as part of the voices of the poor’ (p. 51). He concludes that ‘the extent to which sociology is involved in struggles against inequalities is under question since public sociology, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, is underdeveloped’. Mapadimeng (2012) is optimistic about the future of sociology in Africa that extends its ‘rich tradition of being primarily concerned with generating knowledge around contemporary social problems and social movements’ which stimulated ‘sociological imagination’ (p. 44).

Despite their global significance, the specific social conditions that generate sociological debates are instructive. In this context, the debates in sociology of Israel/Palestine, however, are very different, given the deep and continuing violent division of the country and the subordinate position of Palestinians. Yet Marxist and other radical sociologists in Israel/Palestine have taken up social justice issues with regard to the oppression of Palestinian Arabs (Ram, 2018: 73, 86) as the ‘sociology of colonisation’ has led to the development of perspectives common among Palestinian Arab scholars. The sociologist Avishai Ehrlich, critiquing the status quo, described Israel as a ‘war society’ as war permeates all aspects of political, social, economic and cultural life (Erlich et al., 2013).

Sociology and social work: Reflexivity on ‘horrible histories’ and new agendas

Reflexivity is essential for any sociology of social justice as the starting point is critique of the discipline, meanings and practices (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Social work draws from sociology (as its prime theoretical or disciplinary source – although it also draws on social and developmental psychology and other disciplines). Recently, radical and critical social work scholars have produced studies on the ‘horrible histories’ of social work, whereby social work was used as ‘the tool of the state to undertake brutal, oppressive and abusive acts’ (Ferguson et al., 2018) to overcome professional ‘historical amnesia’ so as to decide which sides to take in a profession inherently contested. As Ferguson et al. (2018) insist,

We view social work as an inherently political activity and that means looking at, and learning from, those episodes when social work acted in ways that, most of us would think, breached our various professional ‘codes of ethics’. (p. 3)

Of course, sociology is not inherently progressive or necessarily inspired by social justice. Scholars and practitioners perceive or read and practise sociology with very different outlooks, purposes and meanings; it is a profession in institutional and power processes with various agendas. Sociology is a useful analytical and empirical framework and tool for multiple, often opposite purposes. Academia, with all its proposed scientific detachments from politics, cannot escape politics. In the very constitution of sociology as an academic discipline, politics was part of it. Despite good intentions, Durkheim’s first professorial Chair in Sociology was marred by the social sciences’ quest of establishing and legitimising order in a world in disarray. The global dominance of the US functionalist model was part and parcel of the Western/Northern dominance of the kind of Western/Northern ‘modernisation theory’, in the kinds of economic development that imposed ‘structural adjustment programs’. Colonial anthropology and sociology university departments were central to the process of classifying, legislating and exercising social control over colonial peoples, unleashing processes of otherings and alterity.

Any sociologist of the British Empire can tell what colonial sociology was about. Ruling over such a vast and complex empire, including diverse India, meant administrating over and tampering with ethnic, religious and cultural affairs (Low, 1973). Social engineering was practised. Throughout the 1920s and up to the 1940s, British authorities prioritised the establishment of a probation system infused by Victorian moralism and colonial oppression, which serve as the basis for colonial social work (Rappas, 2014; Triseliotis, 1977).

A horrible story is the Nazis’ purge of radical, Marxist and Jewish sociologists from academia to impose their own ‘Nazi sociology’ and ‘psychology’, which were the theoretical and empirical frames to impose their horrific racial-social engineering of the Nazi crime against humanity. Let us not forget that

Hitler himself, by the way, would not have hesitated to become a sociology professor. In order to be able to stand for the presidential elections, he needed to obtain German citizenship, and one of the solutions proposed in 1932 was to appoint him to the chair of ‘Organic social theory and politics’ at Braunschweig Technical University. Certain sociology programmes had readily integrated the Nazis’ ideology well before they came to power in 1933. (Keim, 2013)

The practice of eugenics was part of the apartheid regime’s sociological practice. This is where social work became an instructive instrument, either as tool for domination or as a tool for resistance. Ferguson et al. (2018: 30) make a powerful case:

Social work in South Africa has its roots in apartheid ideology, born out of what was called the ‘poor white problem’ of the depression of the 1930s (Sewpaul, 2012). Thus, from its earliest beginnings until the first democratic elections in 1994, public sector social work functioned within apartheid structures and policies. (The ‘architect of apartheid’, Hendrick Verwoerd, was himself a social work academic.)

‘Declassifying’ in a society racially organised and ‘classified’ is a vastly difficult task, as South Africa is proving (Mare, 2014). But horrible histories need undoing, hence the necessity for alternatives.

Public sociology, applied sociology and social work: Social justice for all?

Colonial and imperial projects are intimately connected with both colonial sociology and social work. Until the beginning of the 20th century, in US academia, there was little distinction between sociology and social work: ‘there was a combination of the scientific and the practical in solving social problems’ (Munson, 1979: 611). The ‘split’ that occurred never properly severed the links, as the boundaries between the two remain blurry. Sociology developed into a scientific approach, while social work embarked on a ‘practical approach’: ‘Modern efforts to reunite sociology and social work have much in common with what existed between the two disciplines over 100 years ago’ (p. 611).

In the American and Western European contexts, the story becomes more complex as efforts to develop ‘a clinical sociology’ or ‘applied sociology’ by the 1930s would be ‘value-free’ and ‘devoid of value judgments’ (or politics) to resemble the split in psychology between ‘clinical psychology’ and other radical trends within psychology. The idea of generating knowledge to be applied for individual therapy and solving ‘social problems’ and ‘fixing’ societies’ evils becomes popular. By the 1950s, ‘social problems’ are connected to ‘dysfunctional’ families, groups and anomy in the AGIL model developed by Parsons. The Functional System Problems – AGIL consisted of four essential functions: Adaptation (A), Goal Attainment (G), Integration (I) and Latency (L). Much of the ‘applied sociology’ when the profession of social work was established reflects the Parsonian and Mertonian models of the closed ‘social system’ and their emphasis on ‘social order’. By the late 1960s, with the beginning of the demise of the functionalist model and the rise of radical and critical models, we found three models of ‘applied sociology’: Social Engineering, Radical Sociology, and Enlightenment (Street and Weinstein, 1975). Today, ‘applied sociology’ is more complex and reflects the need to recognise conflict in society (Ingleby, 2017; Thompson, 2018). Many scholars today call for critical sociology (Garrett, 2016) and radical sociological perspectives (Ferguson et al., 2018) to address the current issues in social work.

The relations between sociology and social work are still an issue. Wallerstein (2000) referred to ‘the collateral damage of the march toward progress’ for sociologists and social workers who performed the ‘fixing’ of social problems such as ‘activities and held attitudes that were “anti-social”’, assuming that these would be transitional problems of groups that had been insufficiently modernised:

The self-image of sociologists as social workers, or as the theorists of social workers, provides a key to the real definition of the activity of sociologists. Indeed, the world of the financial sponsors (states, foundations and so on) was particularly attracted to this concern of sociologists, without which sociologists would have received even less financial support than they in fact did.

Wallerstein (2000) critiques those sociologists desperate to publish and produce ‘solutions’ who ‘moved on to various “post”-concerns: post-industrialism, postmodernity, post-colonialism’, proclaiming that ‘modernity suddenly seems to be the past, not the present’ (p. 28). The world has never normalised – despite the therapies, urban disorder has intensified:

As for urban disorder, far from disappearing as it had long been argued would happen, it seems to be escalating. And while sociologists have not ceased to be social workers, they have certainly become more circumspect and less sure that any of their remedies will have the beneficial effects they are intended to have.

The umbilical cord between sociology and social work was never cut. For years sociologists taught in social work departments and many social workers became great academic and public sociologists. In the current world disorder, novel dimensions of injustice and inequality require renewal of both sociology and social work. It is no coincidence that recent debates and scholarship within social work have brought attention to the fact that contrary to lip service, there is failure to practise social justice. As Bhuyan et al. (2017) note, ‘despite an explicit endorsement of social justice values by the program and the profession, graduates reported limited opportunities to learn anti-oppressive practice or apply social justice theories in their field education’. The authors instead argue that what we have in practice in the ‘hidden curriculum’ is much more powerful, as ‘social work education reflects market pressures that privilege task-oriented goals while “mainstreaming” social justice rhetoric’. They find that students and practitioners via the professional ideas, influences and state realities of operating in the specific national contexts, as well as the regional and global world system of capitalism, shape the profession in ways that often negate or make social justice meaningless, given that ‘mainstreaming social justice masks structural inequalities’. Hence, they argue that ‘skills to confront oppression with transformative change are viewed as abstract goals and thus less useful than clinical practice’. As argued by Ferguson et al. (2018),

while the roots of the current crisis lie in the inability of the neoliberal project of the last three decades to overcome deep-rooted structural problems within the global capitalist economy, the dominant political and ideological response to that crisis has been more of the same in the form of increased privatisation and public sector cuts. (p. 9)

Critical (and public) sociology is a necessary component of critical social work education (Morley et al., 2016). If social work is to fulfil its promise of social justice, then working proactively towards the universal achievement of equal dignity and worth demands that social workers engage in critical analysis and question social arrangements. This means breaking ranks with individualistic or establishment theories and developing alternative theories, challenging the structures of society (Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial critique, environmentalism, etc.). Radical social work means developing anti-oppressive theory and practice. Critical scholars have criticised ‘clinical’, ‘medicalized’ and ‘therapeutic’ terminology to make social work practice depoliticised, distant and individualistic. Rather, the idea is to focus on the missing voices of oppressed groups to find the necessary strategies to ensure inclusion and social transformation. In this context, recent scholarship in social work has critiqued how mainstreaming social justice masks structural inequalities (Bhuyan et al., 2017), while others have developed intervention programmes and theorised anti-oppressive social work, aiming at the promotion of equality and combating the structural causes of hardship (Raineri and Calcaterra, 2015).

Sociological self-reflexivity and theorising: Struggles for social justice and mobile commons in the times of austerity-and-crises

A fascinating debate over recent years relates to the notion of the commons. The notion of mobile commons was developed (Trimikliniotis et al., 2015; 2016) ² to reflect what struggles ‘produced’ on the ground. The content of the mobile commons is actually ‘defined’, changed and re-made by the praxis of the struggles and claims of rights, the modes of sharing, passing on, extended to others. Therefore it is ‘owned’ by all those who struggle, need it and rely on it. It is a ‘social template’ to be taken up in context: the real ‘authors’ of the mobile commons are those subjects involved in the praxis of the struggles – at best, public sociologists or sociologists for social justice are co-authors. Academic, policy and political output is often produced by academic or professional sociologists, in Burawoy’s classification. However, this does not stop sociologists from being committed to causes, connected to social movements and engaged in pursuing social justice. Gramsci’s original distinction between ‘traditional intellectuals’ (e.g. teachers, professors) and ‘organic intellectuals’ (in social and political movements) is becoming increasingly blurred: many university teachers and researchers are committed to movements; others lend their services to governments or corporate capital. Edward Said (1994) has extended the Gramscian ideas about the function of intellectuals in society: the notion of the public intellectual borrows also from Benda’s heroic intellectuals to act as ‘a rationalist vanguard’, but Gramsci’s social dialectic is the basic frame for understanding societies divided and contested in struggles.

The notion of the commons is intimately connected to public sociology/sociology for social justice as well as ‘applied sociology’, often seen as the key source of social work. In the current conjuncture, the future of a public sociology cannot but be informed and provide frames for drawing on and theorising from social and political struggles, learning from successes and failures. Also learning from ‘horrible histories’ is crucial so as never to be repeated. In the context of mobile commons, an essential element is the knowledge experience from struggles beyond Europe and the European Union (EU). This is of great potential, as it is a force-in-praxis already yielding results. It is impacting societies, which are already different as they are changing as a result of these processes/forces. The crisis-ridden periphery of Europe is a laboratory for learning.

The question is how to learn more from struggles. If we accept the ‘conflictual’ logic of reading the society as conflict, disagreement, dissensus and disequilibria with moments of order, consensus and equilibria, then we must turn the order model of the world on its head. This enables us to see a different world. The processes of ‘learning’ become conflictual and fragmented. But who are ‘we’? One segment in society or one set of institutions may be ‘learning’ something while another is also ‘learning’, but the ‘lessons’ are very different, sometimes with different aims and ends. Rancière’s (2004, 2010) disagreement and dissensus offer a perspective in re-reading the false world of ‘order’: the ‘Police logic’ of managing order versus ‘politics’ in the partaking of those denied the right to participate. One global sociological reading of the world proposes that we examine ‘the cycles of deviance and defiance’ as essential to appreciate the contestations and struggles over the normalisation imposed by the ‘forces of order’, contra the forces of deviance and defiance (Sitas et al., 2014).

Memories of struggles, legacies and ideas are often shared; they may survive or disappear; some become myths, while many are distorted. However, often something remains from struggles. These may be inscribed and embedded socially, politically, culturally, even legally. Others are simply forgotten or even suppressed. Yet social and historical memory are contested zones. Learning from the recent past can be useful. The notion of transfer of knowledge and experience is a practice happening throughout the centuries. In today’s world, this is occurring faster and much more intensely: the fear of ‘contagion’ is not confined to the financial dangers in globalised markets or to the fear of terrorism or copy-cat crimes. It has a flip side: it may be used to produce results in what can be thought of a positive or progressive direction. One must not lose sight of the fact that during the crisis-and-austerity era of the EU, crisis management concerns were largely about ‘containing’ the crisis for fear of spreading. From the perspective of those in power, an effort was made to create a ‘quarantine’ to contain the banking and financial crisis in the Eurozone. Greece was the prime example, but so was Cyprus, which experienced financial ‘states of emergency or exception’ with the imposition of the so-called ‘haircut’ (i.e. confiscation of bank deposits) serving as a model for the Bail-in Directive that followed (see Trimikliniotis, 2001; 2013a; Trimikliniotis and Bozkurt, 2013; Trimithiotis, 2016; 2018). Countries on the EU periphery such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are facing ‘the new social question’ (Rosanvallon, 2000), which is re-surfacing violently and with new terms, as the old structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the poorer countries of the South are now imposed on the debt-suffering periphery of the Eurozone, resulting in the drastic collapse of the late European welfarism and causing poverty, homelessness, mass unemployment, closure of small businesses and destruction of social security.

‘Contagion’, however, is another word for the old fear of the ‘domino effect’. The failures of containing the problems of a ‘world out of joint’ (Wallerstein, 2016) are apparent. Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, a series of anti-terrorism laws and practices imposed have been curtailing rights and freedom, but terrorism and counter-terrorism have actually intensified. This is combined with the imposition of tougher immigration regimes and a process of hardening of borders bringing about anti-immigration and racist politics to the core and mainstream. These present major challenges for sociologists and social workers committed to social justice. Learning from past successes is just as essential. Just before the 11 September 2001 attacks, a unique convergence of various forces in a sort of constellation of movements, policy-makers and campaigners allowed for the passage of two critical EU Directives ³ that changed legislation throughout the EU to become key instruments in equality struggles. The new equality laws drew on the logic and lessons from gender equality, which has a longer history, the long-term struggles against racism (civil rights in the USA, anti-apartheid and indigenous movements in the world), as well as struggles for religious and ethnic equality, sexual orientation and gay rights, disability equality and against age discrimination. Some scholars consider that the two EU directives mark a leap forward in reshaping the institutional frames and rights aiding those struggling for equability (Chalmers, 2001; Fredman, 2001). This is not to claim that this is ‘the end’. Far from it, any critical assessment will recognise the legislation that was limited, partial and very much unfinished business in scope, depth, recognised grounds and actual implementation. If anything, we are today experiencing major setbacks and backtracking, a full-blown regression in the struggles for equality and justice. Moreover, the explicit exclusion of immigration policy from the equality provisions of the directives is a major legal blow to the concept of equality. It must be stated anyhow that even if immigration policy were included, in the recent crisis, it is almost certain that it would have been suspended on the grounds of emergency and exception.

Nonetheless, a great deal can be learned from the alliances for the advancement in struggles for equality. Within the generally bleak global environment of recent decades, if we were to generate a balance sheet on struggles for justice and equality, we would observe at least some positive developments in some human rights norms. The importance of alliances in struggles for justice has led scholars to speak of a ‘justice cascade’, bringing about justice via prosecutions (Sikkink, 2011). This may be over-optimistic and exaggerated; however, we can read these limited/partial successes as part of the emergence of what Ari Sitas (2008) called the ‘ethic of reconciliation’: the advancement of powerful claims to universal human rights is cited as a key component in these struggles (Trimikliniotis, 2013b). An instance of this is the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. This is by and large the result of tireless grassroots activism by relatives and families of victims of forced disappearances who literally ‘invented new legal tools’ and have forced the judges to recognise rights (Kovras, 2014), thus forcing the evolution of ‘transitional justice’ (Teitel, 2014).

Struggles, however, never stop. Sociologists and social workers cannot but choose where they devote their time and energy.

Conclusion

Sociologists and social workers are products of their times. They cannot but make choices about what they ought to do about a world riddled with contradictions. There is no ‘law of the motion of history’ propelling the world to march forward, nor is modernity necessarily a world of rationality, social justice, equality and progress. As Wallerstein (2000) aptly illustrated, the old problems of ‘deviance, poverty, crime, and all the other “maladies” attributed to the transition from pre-modernity to modernity’, which were bread and butter for sociologists, criminologists and social workers, are not being fixed with the old recipes. Moreover, specialisation and division of labour in academia, which was meant to allow for scientific advancement, is producing fragmented knowledge and inadequate solutions. We are called upon to halt the damage inflicted by ‘crippling the ability of the students to think as social scientists’ (Wallerstein, 2000: 34). Social sciences must be reunited by providing students the analytical and empirical tools to make disciplinary connections to read the bigger picture and global processes.

In what direction and basis should this ‘reunification’ take place? Who are the agents of change? What can sociologists and social workers do? To whom are sociologists and social workers accountable? Burawoy’s ‘public sociology’ has opened spaces for debate. Others are calling for rethinking the ‘public value of social sciences’, not only sociology (Brewer, 2013). The task is hard:

Today, when economics is increasingly obsessed with the expansion of the market and when political science sees the state as the handmaiden of the market, so sociology has the specifically Gramscian and Herculean task of defending and transforming civil society – in its local, national and global scales. The defense of human society from market tyranny and state despotism coincides, therefore, with the project of sociology itself. (Burawoy, 2007: 7)

Beyond earning a salary, which is getting harder for many, sociologists, social workers and social scientists must reflect on their science and practice. Moreover, a ‘social compass’ is required – conscience and civic virtue to forge commitment and sense of direction. As Sitas (2000) proposes,

I am asking for a qualitative leap, an aufhebung, that does not invalidate the two qualitative moments, that sublates them beyond the ‘of’ and the ‘for’ to create a sociology ‘with’. A sociology that is in dialogue with communities and their cultural formations, a dialogue that involves a joint project of discovery – a sociology in and of the public domain, indeed a science of civic virtue.

Moreover, Sitas (2006) calls for a ‘reclamation journey’ to remedy the situation, ‘to engage with the hard-nosed question that asks what kind of know-hows supplement, innovate and enhance the project of elucidating a general understanding of an unequal, interconnected, organized and evolving sociality’.

This thus requires a ‘creative dialogue’ to serve as a means to enrich both ‘what is common in the discipline’ and ‘provide the language and theories for alternative conceptualizations’.

Different historical contexts describe the various paths that sciences for social justice and equality have taken. However, they must be seen as part of long traditions connecting ‘science’ to ‘the social’. This is essential to explain and understand society and social transformation processes. New sociological approaches are necessary to offer alternatives to conservative order-based apologetics, including the radical pessimism approaches currently in vogue, which often suppress an appreciation of the processes and potentialities for transformation. Knowledge from struggles constitutes commons that can and must inform sociology, social work and emancipatory praxis. Current equality and justice struggles in defending and claiming rights, including the struggles of ideas in social sciences with their own specificities, are part of the wider societal struggles. Making these connections, theoretically and empirically, is a vital source of generating knowledge that must be incorporated within sociology, social work and social sciences in order to renew their outlooks in a world desperately seeking to exit the current global crises and impasses.