Presences, positions, publics

We all, I think, know the danger in offering suggestive titles, as hopedfor audiences, listeners and engagements are pulled in (or pushed out) as the ‘someone’ to whom we should be responsive – and through whom we recognise ourselves. Titles (and job descriptions) have to live up to the name and, since deciding on the chapter title, I’ve had some time to pause on these words and to re-visit my intentions in conveying different journeys into and experience of and through ‘sociology’. If sociology is to be ‘someone’s’, to emerge from somewhere and be carried, sustained and challenged by ‘sociologists’, questions emerge of what it means to embody, labour or ‘be’ the discipline. Who is entitled to lay claims to this professional identity and who then does or disrupts ‘sociology’? For feminist sociologists, including myself, these are enduring questions of professional mis-recognition, career arrival and academic–activist relevance; of legitimately being on the academic page as well as feeling that the page itself may already be restrictive (Santos, 2014).

In the Art of listening, following longstanding feminist questioning of personal–political implicatedness and forms of academic (dis) engagement, Les Back (2007) calls for a pause and a slow deliberate thoughtfulness – even in the midst of REF outputs, income tallies and other quick and urgent measures of success and ‘failure’. So I’m at least going to pause on the words that are in my title, Sociology for some, someone’s sociology. And to try not to reflect the ‘sum’ of sociology as already known in advance, as equated to income or output, as opposed to something much more contested and complex, personally and professionally provisional; as an invite to do and disrupt sociology. While I say this, I’m mindful of my own ‘arrival’ into sociology, seemingly professionally credentialised even as ‘my’ particular subject area (feminism, sexuality, gender, class) often means inhabiting a precarious presence, and a potential absence (Taylor, 2012a).

For example, in a recent academic forum, I was happily engaged in collegial conversations. In these settings, conversational exchanges can become conversions, allowing us to display, convey and circulate career capitals – or not. Such conversions, moving from conversations to careers, are perhaps more subtle than bringing out the CV. So, what’s new? Why does it still surprise, and still stick, when academic conversations complicitly reproduce social inequalities, expectations and entitlements?