This article reviews an attempt to rejuvenate the concept of the civic university in the United Kingdom through the establishment of the Civic University Commission in 2018 by the UPP Foundation. This review is based on a critical appraisal of the concept of ‘civic’ on which the idea of the civic university relies. The review suggests another formulation for higher education: not the civic university but the university of the earth, built on a convergence of the social and natural sciences and Indigenous knowledges connected to world-wide progressive social movements and political struggles. The university of the earth supports an intellectual insurgency to deal with emergencies confronting humanity and the natural world.

While sociology and urban planning might seem respectively to represent the theory and the practice of knowledge about cities, their relation has usually been distant. British sociology and urban planning were closely related before 1914, but largely because sociology was not a bounded specialty: community investigation methods were common throughout the British reform world, finding particular and successful application via city planning’s focus on housing and industrial location. In the United States, by contrast, sociology early became a clearly-defined academic discipline, and sociological empirical methods, although widely shared, supported only generalized reform demands, because local planning of housing and industry was politically impossible outside industrial communities. Most prewar city planning aimed at middle-class and aesthetic values rather than socially ameliorative community design. Between the wars, British academic sociology continued to develop slowly, and community sociological investigation fell largely to the rapidly developing profession of city planning, whose success and power culminated in the masterful plans for postwar London. In the United States, by contrast, sociology rapidly evolved towards national survey analysis, distancing itself even further from practical application in city planning. In general, then, the theory and practice of knowledge about cities remained separate in the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and the United States.

As a sequel to the Convivialist Manifesto: A Declaration of Interdependence (2013), The Second Convivialist Manifesto: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World was originally published in French and signed by three hundred intellectuals from thirty-three countries. Convivialism is a broad-based humanist, civic, and political philosophy that spells out the normative principles that sustain the art of living together at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Over and against neoliberalism, productivism, and populism, it values relations of cooperation that allow humans to compete with each other without hubris and violence, by taking care of one another and nature.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement, centered on fighting racial injustice and inequality (particularly in the criminal justice system), has garnered a great deal of media attention in recent years. Given the relatively recent emergence of the movement, there exists very little scholarly research on media portrayals of the movement. In this article, I report findings from a qualitative examination of major newspaper portrayals of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement between April and August 2016, before the particularly divisive 2016 presidential election. Inductive textual analyses of 131 newspaper articles indicate that, although the movement’s goals were represented positively and from the perspective of members of the movement, the newspapers politicized and sensationalized the movement, and they focused far more on supposed negative consequences of the movement. I discuss these findings by drawing on the “protest paradigm” and the “public nuisance paradigm” in media coverage of social protest movements, arguing that the latter is particularly useful for interpreting portrayals of Black Lives Matter in the prevailing US political climate.

This article discusses issues of public communication. It does so in terms of the ethics of verbatim theatre and public sociology. The issues raised are exemplified through the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair, which has been subject to extensive media reporting and public inquiries of various kinds as well as legal processes. In that sense, there have been various “courts of public opinion” where the affair has been “staged.” In this article, it is understood as an injustice visited upon a community of British Muslims and the teachers and governors responsible for their schools, an injustice that was largely a consequence of provocative media reporting and peremptory government action. The article addresses the role of verbatim theatre in staging the injustice for public reflection and the role of public sociology as a project of writing for justice.