THE RED FEATHER INSTITUTE
     8085 Essex, Weidman, Michigan, 48893   Ph. 517 644-5176

PUBLICATION POLICY OF THE INSTITUTE:    Enclosed is an article(s)
or other materials which may be of aid to your work.  These are
always free to graduate students in sociology since the graduate
students of today are the professors and scholars of tomorrow. 
We ask that graduate students share all the articles they receive
with other graduate students in their various departments in
order to minimize cost to us and maximize distribution of the
Series to those who will inherit the task of generating social
knowledge.  Others are asked to pay $2.00 per article to cover
the costs of printing and mailing.  All articles may be
duplicated without limit or cost for use in the classroom as part
of our service to the profession and discipline.

     The purpose of the Transforming Sociology Series is to
encourage those missions and methods of the knowledge process
which serve the human interest in emancipatory change and
renewal.  Rather than the quest for general theory and universal
laws in society and nature, the RFI works from the view that all
such theory is a poetics and a politics whether those who work
the field recognize the way they fit in the larger knowledge
process or not.  Theory is a poetics in that the basic concepts
used in any theoretical paradigm come from the conceptual scheme
that is used in a society to frame its own problematics:
authoritarian societies tend to use metaphors of force, power,
stratum and deviancy in theoretical formulations while more
participatory societies tend to use metaphors of cooperation,
integration and intersubjectivity.

     All such theory is a politics since to the degree it is
used, it enters back into the social life world from which it
came to legitimate or challenge existing social relations.  We
tend to think that those who claim their research is value-free
simply draw artificial boundaries between their work and the uses
which, for ill or for good, others make of it and thus transfer
their own moral agency to others.  The only interesting question
remaining is whose interests and agendas will be served.  A
morally informed discipline should, in our view, also serve the
information and political needs of those least privileged by
existing relations.

     Finally, we should like to announce the Black Underclass
Studies Series.  The series is designed to study, create and
advocate social action/movement/empowerment of the black
underclass in America.  The Series Editor is Theodoric Manley,
Jr., of the Sociology Department at DePaul University, Chicago,
Ill., 60614.  Black sociologists, especially graduate students,
are invited to submit manuscripts to Dr. Manley which clearly and
simply inform black underclass persons, action groups and
community organizations of the ways social research projects
and/or social theory can help or harm them.  The first set in the
series is scheduled for the Fall of 1991 in time for classroom
use in Black Studies, Race and Class, Stratification and
political sociology courses.  Please help us get started by
spreading the word.