Freeden Blume Oeur’s research while affiliated with Tufts University and other places

Across W. E. B. Du Bois’s long life, as in our current moment, conversations about race were contested in the general public as well as on university campuses. We are living in yet another “revolutionary situation,” to echo James Baldwin, who, in speaking to a group of educators in 1963 just weeks after Du Bois’s death, insisted that we be prepared to “go for broke.” In this essay, we offer a model for how sociology instructors can go for broke collectively. We take advantage of the fortuitous situation where we independently and concurrently have called attention to Du Bois as “the teacher denied” and “the educator derived,” and offer here an instructional compass that draws on, extends, and unites the various strengths of our published work. We want to use this new collaboration to challenge ourselves, and to build on recent calls by writers and organizers for an abolitionist imaginary that guides relations within a teaching community and informs pedagogical tactics both inside and beyond the university classroom. The instructional compass we offer is guided by the need for deeper theorizing of the historical present and past; reconfigures traditional horizontal relationships with an eye toward community building; considers the stratified nature of higher education and the need for new ways to support and invest in the work of historically Black institutions and non-elite institutions; and embraces an artistic and humanist ethic as a necessary counterweight to the typical (scientific) standardized curriculum.

On the occasion of the book’s quasquicentennial, our special issue brings together four articles that show the continuing relevance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). The contributors illustrate how a fresh perspective on the theoretical insights that Du Bois began to develop in The Philadelphia Negro deepen understanding of contemporary topics such as gentrification, policing, residential mobility, and the rhythyms of daily life in Black neighborhoods. Taken together, these articles adopt four tenets of a Du Boisian Sociology that are grounded in the contributions of The Philadelphia Negro: (a) using history to contextualize the contemporary, (b) studying social phenomena through the subaltern perspective, (c) using a “case of” design, and (d) analyzing the structural context that shapes individual outcomes, with attention to people’s agency. As our special issue demonstrates, while already a classic, The Philadelphia Negro deserves an even wider audience for its lessons on what city blocks can tell us about the character of a city: the residents and their institutions that have come and gone, the shape of changing neighborhoods, and what all that could mean for urban change in the future.

Over the past two decades, pressing questions around childhood, age, difference, and power have traversed the multidisciplinary study of childhood, and have come to overlap increasingly with writings on colonialism. While children remain relatively under-analyzed across this scholarship, children and notions of childhood are always implicated in colonialism and its vestiges. Moreover, legacies of colonialism shape the images of children who dominate headlines today, from cruel policies which separate migrant children from their families at the United States—Mexico border, to Israel’s continued assault on Gaza and the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children, to young climate activists who have mobilized around the globe. Our special issue explores questions around colonialism and childhood, and specifically their processes of racialization; and argues for a general practice of decolonizing the study of childhood. The authors—representing several disciplines and regions—have contributed essays which cover two broad themes. The first three articles speak to histories of colonialism and their entwinement with childhood, and the challenges actors face in attempting to reckon with those histories. The next three articles take up discussions concerning childhood as a colonialist racialized concept, and pose questions about who is deserving of care and whose care should be recognized as good for children. Our queries recognize the important work already being done by childhood studies scholars, invite newer researchers to the field to consider childist concerns, and welcome all to imagine futures beyond our present crises.

A silence in the resurgence of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois has been his work as an instructor. This article uses Du Bois’s early teaching experiences and reflections on the “ugly” progress of schooling to ask: What should guide the pedagogy of sociology instructors when racial progress is so ugly? I sketch here a pedagogy inspired by Du Bois—who was the teacher denied—which is motivated by a positive notion of propaganda. Du Bois was a radical pedagogue whose mixed-methods instructional agenda informed a critical Black Sociology and bridges recent calls by American Sociological Association leadership for a discipline that is more emancipatory and educative. Embracing the right to propaganda gives pedagogical teeth to honest appraisals on racial progress. Triangulating art, science, and agitation in our pedagogy offers a general compass, and my article concludes with one direction that compass might lead: a classroom assignment where my undergraduate students became “print propagandists.”

We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery’s Social Psychology Quarterly article, “When a Name Gives You Pause,” a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery’s article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive.

In 1992, Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne organized a symposium in Sociological Theory with the aim of tearing down a “wall of silence” between feminist theory and the mainstream of sociological theorizing. For help, the editors turned to the work of Dorothy E. Smith, the renowned theoretician and methodologist. Smith’s theorizing today carries even greater appeal, having expanded from a sociology for women to a sociology for people. This wider scope never sacrifices her project’s theoretical versatility and nimbleness and disdain for abstraction. In offering a critical tribute to Smith, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 95, the present symposium invited three scholars—Paige Sweet, Rebecca Lund, and Marjorie DeVault—to share new reflections on the legacy of Smith’s powerful mode of inquiry.