Amphibious sociology: Dilemmas and possibilities of public sociology in a multimedia world

The sociological windmill in action

The best characterization that I know of the practice of public sociology is the beautiful article by Michael Burawoy (2010) about Edward Webster, the well-known South African labor sociologist who founded the SWOP (Society, Work and Occupations Institute) of the University of the Witwatersrand. Burawoy describes the daily work of Webster with the apt metaphor of the windmill. Like a windmill, Webster, the public sociologist, is in constant movement, propelled by the many arms that make up his professional activity: research and teaching; participation in the public sphere (media, social movements, etc.); public policy advocacy; and the construction of institutions that embody and promote public sociology (for example, research centers and NGOs). Thanks to the rotation and interaction of these four arms, sociological imagination becomes political imagination, in the same way that the incessant turning of a windmill turns air into energy.

Thousands of miles away, in the heart of the Amazon, the South African windmill resonated during my empirical work on minefields. I had arrived there propelled by the forces of various arms that had brought me from academic research and public debate regarding indigenous rights in Colombia to human rights advocacy work in Washington, and from there to new rounds of research and activism in Brazil and Ecuador, all as part of the process of consolidating two institutions I helped to found: the Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society (Dejusticia, a Bogota-based research center and NGO) and the University of Los Andes Program for Global Justice and Human Rights (a university-based legal clinic, also in Bogota). I started the project with a study on the Urrá dam, located in northern Colombia in the same place where the bloody paramilitary movement had its headquarters and where control over the territory and business of drug-trafficking has been disputed between paramilitaries in shadowy alliances with the armed forces and the traditional political class on one side, and the equally violent leftist guerrillas, particularly the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC), on the other. The Embera-Katío indigenous people are trapped in the crossfire and have lost at least 21 leaders, assassinated by one side or the other. Today, after 20 years of forced displacement and human and environmental loss for the catastrophic effects of the dam, they are at risk of cultural and physical extinction (Rodríguez-Garavito and Orduz Salinas, 2012).

Allowing myself to follow the unpredictable path of public sociology, I arrived at the second location of the project: the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. The study on the Urrá dam led me to get involved in the legal defense of indigenous groups that, like the Embera-Katío, had not been consulted prior to the construction of development projects in their lands, in spite of the fact that practically every Latin American country has ratified Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), which establishes the obligation to conduct prior consultations. By donning my second professional hat (I had been trained as a lawyer before becoming a sociologist) in a hearing on this topic before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in 2010, I learned that a complaint regarding a similar case had just arrived at the Commission, submitted by indigenous communities and environmental organizations that accused the Brazilian government of not consulting Amazonian indigenous groups before authorizing the construction of Belo Monte, which would be the third largest dam in the world. The case immediately attracted international attention, given that the Brazilian government had declared the dam to be of national interest – as it played a crucial role in their plans to convert Brazil into an economic power – and that celebrities (such as Sting and James Cameron) had traveled to the region to express their solidarity with the indigenous peoples. When the Brazilian government refused to obey the Inter-American Commission’s order to halt construction of the dam while it reviewed the complaint, various human rights organizations and academics traveled to the region to document the situation and express their condemnation of the government’s decision.

Having been involved in the Urrá case as an academic researcher and in Belo Monte as an attorney, my comparative sociologist’s intuition led me to look for a third case of legal and political mobilization which, in contrast to the previous cases, had ended with a favorable legal decision for the indigenous communities. The opportunity to complete the study sample presented itself in mid-2012, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held a hearing in the territory of the Sarayaku people in the Ecuadorian Amazon, which led to a ruling in favor of the indigenous communities. When I traveled to the Sarayaku territory for fieldwork, the attorneys and the community were expecting the Court’s decision, which was published a day after my visit ended. In a historic decision, the Court ordered the Ecuadorian state to indemnify the indigenous community for having authorized oil exploration without having previously consulted the community and to conduct such a consultation should Ecuador consider oil exploration within the Sarayaku’s territory in the future.

With this case study, my route had come full circle in the windmill: from the research of a professional sociologist to intervention in courts and media, including participation in debates regarding indigenous rights in each of the three countries, and ending again with the professional sociologist. As tends to happen, at the end of the project I did not know which was my identity or exact role in the story. I was all roles at once and none in particular.

Elsewhere, I offer a detailed account of the results of the study (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2011). For the purposes of this article, I will limit myself to outlining the four strengths of public sociology that I believe are illustrated by the type of process I have described. First, the rapid change of roles and identities allows one to see the same social reality from distinct angles (the scientist, the activist, the judge and the public official). The result, I believe, is a greater empirical thickness and accuracy than is possible in other types of sociology.

Second, the design, the questions and the results of the research project are directly informed by interactions with actors from the reality under study and planned with various audiences in mind. The result is a greater relevance of the research for multiple audiences, which could translate into influence in the fate of the issues under study.

Third, in allowing herself to be carried with the rhythm of events, the public sociologist tends to have immediate and continued access to the places and actors of her studies, who see her more as just another actor rather than an intruder interested in extracting information. Intervention through multiple formats (such as opinion columns and other media appearances) also grants an immediacy to the research products that conventional academic production does not have, as the latter takes several years to come to fruition. In contrast to the conventional researcher – for whom social practice is a laboratory she enters with rubber gloves, dissects with the cold analytic scalpel of the professional scientist and leaves, untouched, never to return – public scientists tend to continue the dialogue with the people and collectivities for whom these practices are not a laboratory but their lives.

Fourth, public sociology has an emotional strength that has been little analyzed in the growing literature devoted to it. Having been made in direct contact with events and a multitude of people (actors in the cases, diverse audiences, etc.) and having an explicit inspiration in normative commitments (the defense of a social justice cause in which one firmly believes, the construction of a supportive research/action institution and community, etc.), public sociology is a constant source of motivation. The adrenaline rush that courses through one’s veins while between the blades of the windmill is a powerful stimulant to continue working, one that tends to be lacking in the solitary work of the professional sociologist, from whom it is expected that he leave the moral convictions of his life outside the academia. As Burawoy eloquently wrote in connection with the sociological windmill, ‘When the winds are gale force it is impossible to get close [to it] without being drawn into its vortex’ (Burawoy, 2010: 5). It is an exhilarating experience indeed. It is made even more stimulating by the fact that it is always a collaborative enterprise, as the myriad activities and commitments cannot be tackled without teams of highly motivated researcher-activists. ¹

To my mind, these are the strengths of the process of practicing public sociology and of the results that it generates. However, each of these also has its dark side, which creates steep dilemmas. To them I now turn.

Don Quixote versus the windmill: The dilemmas of public sociology

In a famous passage of Don Quixote, the novel’s protagonist, accompanied by his faithful squire Sancho Panza, spars with windmills that he mistakes for dangerous giants. As in Miguel de Cervantes’ story of the celebrated knight, there is much that is quixotic in public sociology. It is a very ambitious undertaking, even dangerous in contexts such as minefields. As in the novel, there is a high risk that something will go wrong in the story of the sociological windmill.

The main risks can be viewed as the opposites of the four aforementioned qualities. In the first place, the same changes in roles and activities that allow a more rich and complete version of the facts have as their inevitable cost dispersion. The public sociologist leaps from one task to another, from one meeting to the next, from one place to another very different one. For example, I remember writing my opinion pieces for a Colombian newspaper in the middle of fieldwork in the Brazilian or Ecuadorian jungle, later searching anxiously for an internet cafe in a small town on the return route in order to submit it before the deadline. This risk of dispersion becomes permanent and makes concentration impossible, which is indispensable to convert empirical richness into quality academic products. In other words: the speed and immediacy of public interventions wind up replacing the slower and more patient work of a social scientist. The result can be academic dilettantism.

Second, with relevance and influence comes the risk of a loss of independence. By interacting with multiple audiences, public sociologists can be captured by one of them, for example, a state agency or company that hires them as a consultant, or a social movement that demands unconditional loyalty. I have personally lived this dilemma: a state agency that requested a concept paper legislation about prior consultation in Colombia was so uncomfortable with my position of guaranteeing indigenous rights that it decided to shelve the report; I rejected several offers from mining companies to work as an ‘indigenous community relations consultant’; and several times I had to explain to the indigenous movement why I was not signing their political statements, even though I agreed with them. The reason was the same in all of the cases: the need to maintain my professional role of public sociologist, or – to put it in the terms I learned from Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a master public sociologist – to remain objective while not being neutral. But this was not always well received by the above audiences.

In violent places and countries, relevance has an additional high cost: public sociologists not only risk their independence but also their physical safety and lives. Precisely because they are relevant, they are a problem for powerful, violent actors – from state armed forces to leftist guerrillas, paramilitary squads of the right, local mafias or private armies serving companies.

In fact, the connection between relevance and personal danger is so close that I believe it is characteristic of public sociology in countries with a legacy of recent political violence (such as Colombia, South Africa and many other countries of the Global South) or volatile places such as minefields. Put more clearly: those who practice public sociology in these contexts can do so only because other public sociologists who came before us gave their lives, tranquility or personal safety to the cause.

This was the moving revelation of a conversation that I had in Johannesburg with the new generation of SWOP researchers, the center founded by Eddie Webster, our ‘sociological windmill,’ who was also present. The youngest members were the ones who remembered that several of Webster’s colleagues were murdered by state forces for their anti-apartheid academic and political work. Without such extreme commitment and persistence on the part of Webster and his surviving colleagues, SWOP may have disappeared at the hands of the apartheid regime.

The same could be said of public sociology and, in fact, of sociology in general in Latin America. Indeed, some of the pioneering centers of Latin American sociology (such as CEBRAP in Brazil, co-founded by Fernando Henrique Cardoso) were refuges for academics persecuted for their studies and their militant critiques of the dictatorships of the 1960 and 1970s. Therefore, from the beginning, the human rights movement and public sociology were intimately tied, and some foundations (such as the Ford Foundation) that tended to only support academic programs in the region inaugurated programs to finance the then emerging human rights NGOs when it came to light that the academics that supported these NGOs were being killed, threatened or exiled (Keck and Sikkink, 1998).

In the most violent countries, such as Colombia, many sociologists have paid with their lives or exile for having raised their voices against the various armed groups. In fact, what was the most influential academic center for the study of violence in the 1990s (the National University’s Institute for Political and International Relations Studies, IEPRI) was persecuted in a manner so systematic and bloody that a large part of its researchers wound up in exile. Some were targets of the FARC (such as Eduardo Pizarro), while others were targets of paramilitary groups (such as Álvaro Camacho and Iván Orozco) and received fellowships to escape the violence for several years at the University of Notre Dame and other places. With the caustic humor which Colombians have developed to endure this savagery, some called these sponsorships ‘Carlos Castaño Fellowships,’ a reference to the name of the commander of the powerful paramilitary armies that forced many public intellectuals into exile at the end of the 1990s. Others did not manage to flee in time: in 2004, Alfredo Correa de Andreis, a well-known sociologist from the Caribbean coast, was assassinated in a plot involving paramilitaries and the intelligence agency of the Colombian state. Although those of us who practice public sociology in Colombia today face personal risks that we must anticipate and manage with extreme prudence – for example, by carefully coordinating fieldwork with local NGOs and communities – fortunately, we do not face the prohibitive level or risk of our predecessors. We owe them the spaces we now have in universities, civil society, the state, and the media.

Third, the cost of immediate access to the actors and facts is difficulty in taking the analytic distance that is essential for academic work. Precisely because they are not intruders in a social ‘laboratory’ from which they want to extract information, public sociologists wind up in a tangle of events, unable to leave in order to think and write. The problem with the windmill is that it never stops turning. And the vertigo of this perpetual movement can inhibit the tranquility and distance necessary to theorize and unravel the patterns that connect the facts.

Finally, the flipside of emotional adrenaline is burnout. Motivated by their moral and personal commitment to their audiences and institutions, public sociologists end up in the vortex about which Burawoy writes. Before reading his account of the sociological windmill, I had used the same word – vortex – in describing my sensation of doing public sociology, interacting with so many different people in so many diverse places at such a dizzying speed. The experience is as exultant as it is exhausting. Going from minefields to classrooms and then the hearings of the Human Rights Commission in Washington is fascinating. But it requires a work pace that can be inadvisable and even unsustainable.

Amphibious sociology: Public sociology in a multimedia world

How to negotiate such difficulties? I do not believe that there are simple solutions. In the end they are existential dilemmas, the kind that go hand in hand with the job itself. Those who enjoy the benefits of public sociology also accept its costs.

The focus of this issue is the dilemmas of public sociology. However, I do not want to end the article with this tragic tone, in part because a characteristic feature of public sociology is optimism. Or, to paraphrase Gramsci, its combination of scientific and moral commitments means that pessimism of the intellect is mixed with optimism of the will. Thus, an appropriate way to conclude this text is to mention, at least briefly, professional strategies that could mitigate the dilemmas and take advantage of the strengths of public sociology.

My argument is the following: to navigate the winds of the windmill, it is necessary to become amphibious. In the same way that amphibious animals or vehicles move from the air to the water or ground, the public sociologist should be able to move through various media without surrendering. In violent contexts, in addition to navigating air, water and earth, the public sociologist must be able to face the fire.

This type of practice is what I refer to as amphibious sociology. Etymologically, ‘amphibian’ means ‘one that lives a double life.’ And, as we saw, this is precisely the defining characteristic of the public sociologist.

Two strategies seem especially promising to spread amphibious sociology, one related to the texts that it produces and the other to additional formats of diffusion. I believe that one of the principal reasons for which public sociologists suffer from dispersion and burnout is that the valid formats for the academic world (indexed journal articles and books in university presses) have a language and communication codes that differ markedly from those that their other audiences expect (such as readers of newspapers, social movement leaders, marginalized communities, television viewers or the anonymous public of social media). The distance between these formats is so great that to be relevant in different worlds one must live two (or more) parallel lives.

In the face of this dilemma, one solution is to cultivate intermediate genres of writing and diversify the formats in which the results of public sociology are disseminated. The first implies producing texts that are legible for a wider audience, without losing academic rigor. The second means that public sociology must be a multimedia sociology. As an amphibious animal moves from one natural medium to another, so the amphibious sociologist translates his or her work products to different publication media, from books and articles to videos, podcasts, blogs and online classes. In both cases, the goal is to synthesize his or her efforts in products that can be circulated in both academic audiences and the public sphere.

If public sociologists decide to experiment with these strategies, they will find a spectrum of fascinating opportunities. For example, if they want to attempt a hybrid writing style between academic and journalistic, they would find support in the growing literature of journalists who write with the fluidity of their trade but do so by incorporating theories and empirical findings from the social sciences. Following this approach, they have addressed topics as diverse as African dictatorships (Kapuściński, 2002a), urban life in contemporary India (Mehta, 2005), drug-trafficking and slum culture in Latin America (Alarcón, 2012), job insecurity in the United States (Ehrenreich, 2008) or the future of the Arab Spring and other social movements that use social media (Gladwell, 2010).

Academics who borrow narrative tools from journalism and literature are also aiming at this middle point. The results are ethnographies, chronicles and essays written for broad audiences on topics such as the politics of clientelism in Argentina (Auyero, 2001) or forced displacement in Colombia (Molano, 2005). Nonetheless, hybrid literature produced from the academic shore continues to be relatively scarce and timid in comparison with what is produced outside universities.

I believe that this encounter is fundamental for public sociology, both because it can mitigate the sociologist’s dispersion and burnout and because there is a profound elective affinity between the latter and the investigative journalist who produces in-depth social analysis. Both use a combination of deep empirical work, creative reflection and empathy and solidarity with the subjects with whom they dialogue. This is evident, for instance, in the description of ‘immersion journalism’ offered by the legendary chronicler Ryszard Kapuściński in a book whose title, A Cynic Wouldn’t Suit This Profession already reveals the affinity with public sociology. Kapuściński describes his chronicles on Africa as an effort to portray and think about society ‘from inside and below’ (Kapuściński, 2002b: 31), based on a lifetime of dialoguing and living with the subjects of his writings. When asked about the relationship between theory and experience in intellectual work, the Polish journalist maintained that ‘in the community of writers, there can be a very simple division between those that find their inspiration in themselves and those that must be inspired by external motivations. There are reflexive characters and characters that reflect the world’ (2002b: 120). Speaking of his own work, he said something that could describe many public sociologists: ‘In my case … I reflect the world: I have to go to the place of the facts to be able to write. Staying in one place, I die’ (2002b: 120). Like amphibians, I would add.

I have tried to advance my own work on minefields in this direction. After publishing an academic article that formulated the framework of the project and illustrated it with the case study of the Urrá dam in Colombia (Rodríguez-Garavito, 2011), I concluded that the empirical richness of this story could not be told within the trappings of conventional academic writing. The 20 years of the case spanned the core processes underlying civil war and the disputes over land and natural resources in contemporary Colombia: the rise of right-wing paramilitary squads and their penetration into politics; the involvement of the FARC in drug-trafficking and the struggle to control areas of cultivation and transport; forced displacement and land encroachment; the complicity of wide sectors of rural business people in the displacement and violence; the race for natural resources in a country turning toward a mining- and oil-based economy; and the tragic impact of all of this on indigenous peoples, whose lands, culture and life are endangered by being caught in the crossfire. This is why I decided to co-author a book that weaves together the threads of this story, which had not been told in a systematic form (Rodríguez-Garavito and Orduz Salinas, 2012). Thus, although we did the research with sociological tools, we wrote it in the language of literary journalism, with the hope of reaching a wider public, including indigenous peoples who today suffer similar cases in Colombia and other countries. The experience was as challenging as it was gratifying and led me to write journalistic chronicles for the Colombian press regarding the other two cases of the study, before completing the more academic book that compares and theorizes the three.

But all of this refers to the written format, which is only one of the possible channels of expression for the amphibious sociologist. I suggest that an equally useful strategy to address some of the dilemmas of public sociology is to take advantage of its strengths in order to generate products in diverse formats. The dominance of texts in academic life means that public sociologists exclude a large part of their work from their publications. What is left out are many of the most interesting experiences and information from participation in meetings, events, fieldwork or court proceedings, but that remain confined to academic books or newspaper articles to which many potential audiences do not have access – from grassroots organizations and social movements to university professors and students in marginalized areas.

The opportunities to fill this gap are multiple. For example, the fact that internet users spend more than 80% of their time online watching videos creates a valuable opportunity for amphibious sociology. Given that public sociologists have access to situations and people that are interesting for broad audiences, all they need to do is incorporate a video camera into their toolbox, along with the tape recorder and notebook. In this way they can generate valuable images that can be used in classes, training courses for marginalized communities, evidence in legal proceedings, or as accompaniments to texts that result from the research. The same can be done with pictures, podcasts and documents that they collect during their work and which can be easily disseminated through blogs, websites and social media.

I have experimented with these formats in the project on minefields, with the help of other researchers and of a professional film crew that accompanied us on our fieldwork. The interviews and shots have been made into documentaries that we disseminate for free over the internet, together with academic and journalistic texts on the project. ² We have also written policy papers and educational booklets regarding the right to prior consultation. In this way, we hope that different audiences will find these diverse formats useful. While indigenous peoples’ organizations tend to use the videos and booklets in the training courses that they run, university students prefer videos, public officials opt for policy papers, academics prefer analytic texts and the wider public reads newspaper chronicles.

Of course, all this sounds easier than it is in reality. There is a long way to go before hybrid genres of writing and multimedia formats are formally recognized as a valid form of knowledge within academic communities. Moving from one medium to another creates new risks of dispersion, burnout, dependency and dilettantism. In my case, I am in the midst of experimenting with multimedia and have reached only incomplete and temporary solutions. But that is exactly the challenge of amphibious sociology.