About the book

This book is a key reading for the times we are living in - a fraternal book full of resonances. Built on the perplexities of the pandemic and attentive to the great dilemmas of our time, Elísio Estanque offers us a set of essays and opinion pieces that deserve to be read and discussed. This is also an autobiographical book, a careful collection of texts that could only be written by a full-bodied sociologist.
Sociology is expected to offer the critical thinking found here, questioning and challenging the powers that be. More than a gallery of cult authors, Elísio Estanque proposes a Sociology of action. The texts gathered here are based on a critical reflection that ranges from the sociology of labour and social classes to the sociology of youth cultures, inequalities and social movements.
This is also a book of concerns. Risk, uncertainty, entropy, resentment and conflict are evidence of our time, a time of crossroads. The author's “sociological self” is based on an ethical and ontological perspective with a strong commitment to the collective solutions that can be built from human compassion and solidarity. More than an academic book, this is an admirable exercise in public sociology.
_{Álvaro Garrido. Historian, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra}

In his latest book, Elísio Estanque (EE) brings together a wide range of texts on some of the themes that have characterised his career as a teacher and researcher. In a subset of more theoretical texts, gathered in Part I, «A Sociological Path», EE discusses his vision of a sociology that is both analytical and socially and politically committed, as well as some of the key themes of his research: labour, trade unionism, social inequalities and youth cultures. In Part II, «Public Sociology and Public Debate», EE brings together a series of texts published in the press on these topics and others that have preoccupied him recently (the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, etc.). A fundamental work of Portuguese Public Sociology.
_{André Freire. Professor of Political Science at ISCTE-IUL}

About the author

Elísio Estanque is a sociologist with a degree from ISCTE-IUL in 1985 and a PhD from the University of Coimbra in 1999. He is a retired professor at the Faculty of Economics and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the same university. His main academic areas include Labour Relations, Social Classes, Social Movements and Trade Unionism, on which he has published extensively. In recent years he has travelled to various international universities as a visiting professor, including UNICAMP, Brazil; Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena - Germany; UNESP-Franca/SP, Brazil; and currently at UFBA - Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. He also has a regular presence in the media, particularly in opinion articles in the Público newspaper.