Critical Engagement with Public Sociology:A Perspective From the Global South, edited by Andries Bezuidenhout, Sonwabile Mnwana, and Karl von Holdt. Public Sociology series. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022.

The book looks at the long tradition of critical engagement in research done over the last forty years at the Society,Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), a research institute with a long history of working with movements and communities across South Africa, doing what it calls critical engagement. According to the book’s editors, critical engagement is a “sociological practice involving distinct processes of knowledge production in partnership with popular movements as well as the development of theory through the interaction between scholarly and political practices” (9).The first five chapters give a historical account of critical engagement at SWOP, its benefits and “pitfalls” in different projects as they tried to “develop a social science of liberation” (54). It outlines debates SWOP engaged in, the various publics they worked with, the conceptual ground they broke, and their influence, especially within the labour movement and later in policy circles (Bezuidenhout, Mnwana and von Holdt’s;Webster’s; Buhlungu’s; von Holdt’s chapters).

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