Humanity & Society
academic journal
Humanity & Society is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by SAGE Publications, and is the official journal of the Association for Humanist Sociology (AHS). Established in 1977, the journal covers all aspects of sociology while focusing on issues of injustice, human suffering and social activism from a humanist point of view. The editors-in-chief are Dresden Lackey (Wofford College) and Cameron Lippard (Appalachian State).
The journal awards an annual Distinguished Paper Award to "the article that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of empirical, methodological, and/or theoretical research in humanist sociology."
An associated publication, The Humanist Sociologist, serves as a newsletter and features shorter reports and opinion pieces.
Background and history
At the 1976 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), the founding organizational meeting of the Association for Humanist Sociology was held. The president of the ASA, Alfred McClung Lee, having run into resistance against his efforts to reform the ASA, organized the formation of the AHS to be distinct and outside of the structure of the ASA. The first issue of The Humanist Sociologist newsletter was published later that year, and the first issue of the Humanity & Society journal was published in 1977, the only issue published that year. Beginning in 1978, the journal was published quarterly.
With the journal's focus outside of mainstream sociology, article themes have included "human liberation", "unity and coalition building", "analysis of oppression and inequality", "studies of specific minority and disadvantaged minority groups" and "social change".
The journal would also inform potential contributors that, "authors of articles will be asked to include information as to the primary moral and/or value commitments, as well as their commitments to any particular sociological paradigm ... [and] 'domain assumptions' that undergird their analyses."
The first editor of the journal was sociologist Charles P. Flynn.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Humanity & Society” is academic journal. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Humanity, Society and academic, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “academic journal” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18350356. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1976 and 1978.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Humanity & Society” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.