ABSTRACT This article argues for the analysis of public engagement as an essentially mediated activity. Although recent studies note that academic knowledge is increasingly available for consumption by nonacademic audiences, they tell us little about how it gets recontextualized while passing through the hands of media professionals on its way toward such audiences. In Burawoy’s (2005) influential call for the rebirth of public sociology, as in the debates his work provoked, the media is treated solely as a means for the transportation of knowledge. But as this article demonstrates, the media does not simply transport knowledge; it also, and at the same time, translates that knowledge in various, rhetorically consequential ways. Focusing on the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, their initial contribution is compared to its subsequent translation(s) across various British newspapers. A discursive analysis reveals the techniques via which a classic form of public sociology came to be recontextualized such that, remarkably, these authors were left appearing to voice nothing but their own petty prejudices. The article concludes by noting that where public engagement involves mediation, public sociology should pay more attention to the recontextualizing affordances of media discourse.

中文翻译：

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对于公共（和重新语境化）社会学：媒介传播时代公众参与的承诺和危险

摘要 本文主张将公众参与分析为一种本质上是中介的活动。尽管最近的研究指出，学术知识越来越多地可供非学术受众消费，但它们很少告诉我们，它是如何在通过媒体专业人士的手中传递给这些受众的过程中重新语境化的。在 Burawoy（2005）对公共社会学重生的有影响力的呼吁中，正如在他的工作所引发的辩论中一样，媒体仅被视为传播知识的手段。但正如本文所表明的那样，媒体并不仅仅传输知识；它还同时，以各种不同的修辞方式翻译这些知识。关注一组学者试图与学术界以外的受众建立联系的中介轨迹，他们最初的贡献与后来在各种英国报纸上的翻译进行了比较。一项话语分析揭示了公共社会学的经典形式被重新语境化的技术，以至于值得注意的是，这些作者似乎只表达了他们自己的小偏见。文章最后指出，在公众参与涉及调解的情况下，公共社会学应该更多地关注媒体话语的重新语境化可供性。