Just found another article about settlement sociology, a form of living-in participatory sociology from the late 19th-early 20th centuries. It was a form I cant imagine being in existence in the UK any more…nice middle-class people living in a big house with working-class and marginal people, using sociology to examine each other’s experiences.
We had a bunch of nice middle-class people turn up in St Anns a few years back, after David Miliband lost the Labour Party leadership election. He had some money left over from his campaign apparently, and used it to do some good works…keeping the third-way light burning I suppose. Anyhoo these nice people turned up planting flowers and bulbs all over; they jumped out of a lorry, weeded, planted and left.
It feels like that is about the limit of the accommodation between the worlds now.
But nonetheless, sociology was more once, it was more alive; and sociologists were not so otherworldly. And as a social construction entire, other constructions remain possible.
Oakley, A. (2017). The forgotten example of “settlement sociology”: Gender, research, communities, universities and policymaking in Britain and the USA, 1880–1920. Research for All, 1(1), 20–34. https://doi.org/10.18546/RFA.01.1.03
jeffgoatcher 