Is There a Need for a Non-Academic Sociology? Cohabitation of Non-Academic and Institutionalised Sociological Thought in Turkey

Sociology has, like other academic disciplines, become increasingly institutionalised over time and has accepted the limits of the academic “field”. With this natural history of academic disciplines in mind, an important question is whether the transdisciplinary synthetic, theorizing and thought provoking character of sociology requires the discipline to operate outside the academic field in ways that can push its boundaries. On the one hand, it can be said that the debates around the term "public sociology" point to a need in this direction, but public sociology seems to express an orientation from the academy to the public outside of it. On the other hand, it is a useful area of research to ask what the potential of non-academic debates, social movements or public spaces is to encourage and support the production of such theories and methodologies within the academy, and whether this potential is still valid under changing social conditions.

This study aims to discuss the contribution of non-academic circles to the production of sociological thought in the history of the development of sociology in Turkey, and the effects of academic institutionalization in retrospect. Although a chair of sociology was established within the university in Turkey as early as the 1910s, its institutional continuity was soon interrupted and had to be re-established in the late 1930s. For a long time before and after this date, sociological studies within the academy as well as sociological analyses outside of it determined the shaping of sociology in Turkey. On the other hand, the impact of institutionalized academic studies has become more decisive than non-academic ones after the 1990s. Through the mutual contributions and discrepancies between academic and non-academic studies, the study aims to catch a clue about the path that sociological studies can follow today.