web du bois the souls of black folk sparknotes

An example of a community-based research project from my own institution, UC Santa Cruz, is a project called No Place Like Home, led by sociologists Miriam Greenberg and Steven McKay, that documents the housing crisis in Santa Cruz, CA. Though not often used by cultural sociologists, it offers a research model of public sociology, and a method well suited for community ethnographies and studies of organizational or neighborhood culture. Today, community-based research is commonly used in social psychology, social work, and education, as well as sociology departments. 2 According to Strand and colleagues, three tenets guide community-based research: (1) a collaborative process between professors, students, and community members (2) the utilization of multiple methodological approaches within research practices and the dissemination of knowledge and (3) an emphasis on social justice, including the implementation of practices which serve to promote positive and sustainable social change. By involving members of the community at multiple levels, and incorporating and validating multiple sources of knowledge, sociologists and other researchers have argued that a central goal of this method is to understand and support the specific community’s needs and foster social change accordingly. W.E.B Du Bois and Community-based ResearchĪt its most basic, community-based research is a collaborative process between a community and researcher(s).

Du Bois’ innovative methods in American sociology’s first large-scale empirical study-a fifteen-month project that included demographic, statistical, historical, and qualitative approaches-offers methodological insight into the study of the “color line” that suggests that instructors should consider including Du Bois in methods as well as theory courses. In the context of a revived interest in Du Bois’s significance for sociological theory and cultural sociology, here, I present Du Bois, and specifically The Philadelphia Negro, as offering a pioneering methodological model for community-based research. DuBois is a founding father of American sociology, but, unfortunately, neither this masterpiece nor much of DuBois’s other work has been given proper recognition in fact, it is possible to advance through a graduate program in sociology in this country without ever hearing about DuBois. T is an important study that deserves to be read by students of sociology and others interested in the development of the discipline in particular or in American intellectual history in general. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award -writes:

Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, sociologist Elijah Anderson-the 2018 recipient of the ASA W.E.B. Originally published in Section Culture: Newsletter of the ASA Culture Section.

Web du bois the souls of black folk sparknotes