Two Roads to Public Sociology

Nira Yuval-Davis , an Israeli dissident, has been a long-standing defender of human rights: a founder member of Women Against Fundamentalism, and the international research network of Women in Militarized Conflict Zones, a consultant to different divisions of the United Nations as well as to various NGOs, including Amnesty International. Known internationally for her research on gender, racism, and religious fundamentalism, her books include Racialized Boundaries , Gender and Nation , The Politics of Belonging , Women against Fundamentalism . She is Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging at the University of East London. In this essay she conducts an internal conversation with the renowned Israeli sociologist, now deceased, Baruch Kimmerling, on the different roads to public sociology.

Situating preparedness education within public pedagogy

Both ‘disaster preparedness’ and ‘public pedagogy’ have been broadly defined and diversely utilised. Preparedness has been dealt within the disciplines such as civil engineering, sociology of disasters, public health and psychology, rather than education. Recently, inquiries into the learning and teaching of preparedness is increasing in the field of education, and some of them position preparedness education within the field of public pedagogy. However, conceptual discussion as to how and why the two fields are associated has been limited. The primary aim of this paper is to fill this gap by drawing on public pedagogy literature that conceptualises ‘publics’ and ‘pedagogies’. By doing so, the paper attempts to respond to Burdick et al’s call for Problematizing Public Pedagogy.