ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a very profound moment in academia, bringing front and center the promise of sociology in creating meaningful social change. This chapter provides a brief historiography of public sociology in American sociology – where the coinage of the term took hold. It discusses the nodal points of the development of public sociology, primarily in the United States. The Institute for Research in Social Science out of the Sociology Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a primary goal: the scientific study of the South so that people in the region could begin tackling their problems in significant ways. The call for public sociology that still resonates today is the call ASA president Michael Burawoy made in his 2004 presidential address, ‘For Public Sociology’.
