Publicness and teaching: public knowledge as collective process of repoliticization of daily life

Starting from the categories proposed by Burawoy, this paper presents a particular type of public sociology, which I call “teaching-as-research”: a sociological work which is both “professional” - to return to the American sociologist - since it is carried out by teachers in the classrooms of public universities, and “critical”, since it is carried out through a cognitive process that involves both students and social groups, aimed at critically reviewing sociological categories in the light of the direct experience of subordination. What characterises the paper is therefore the critique of the epistemological and operational division between sociological research and teaching in Academia, and the proposal to rethink the division between the “first” (teaching), “second” (research) and “third” (knowledge positioning) university “missions” in the area of social sciences.