In the concluding part of the book, we address the different ways in which social science engages with publics beyond the confines of the academy. What does social science represent for those in community and youth work or for individuals facing the challenge of teaching and learning in an inner city school? What, finally, have our own students learnt from the direct experience of undertaking social science in the community?

The first contribution, ‘Social science and severely troubled children – working in partnership, working in and on relationship’, by Cummins and Thomas, outlines a public engagement initiative involving social scientists at the University of the West of England and the Mulberry Bush School in Oxfordshire, which works with highly disturbed children. While focusing on the practical, collaborative character of their work with the school, the authors also emphasise the distinctive intellectual traditions in British sociology and Northern and Central European approaches to social pedagogy, which they drew upon in their work. As with other contributors in this volume, the authors propose a broadly psychosocial understanding of individual and collective behaviour. In this perspective, the role of attachments to others and the inner world of the individual are foregrounded. While registering this broad orientation to the social as a psychically invested space, Cummins and Thomas note a shift in their work from a publicly engaged sociology towards policy implementation, as the practical impacts of their particular interventions were formalised and consolidated within a specific institutional setting.

Another example of public engagement relating to education with school children is provided in the chapter by Tansy Clark, ‘The professional impact of Social Science in the City’. This is a first-hand, biographical account from a teacher working in a school in an economically and socially deprived part of Bristol. Tansy explores some of the insights and collaborative approaches to research gained from attending the Social Science Café. She links this with the experience of her work with school children living in one of the most deprived areas in Bristol. Overall, this has resulted in a revised approach to her teaching in the discipline of sociology, where she now acts as a ‘coinquirer’ with her students.