With over 13,200 members, ASA encompasses sociologists who are faculty members at colleges and universities, researchers, practitioners, and students. The organization's mission is to build a tradition of scholarship that will serve African-American people in perpetuity.
Membership is neither currently, nor has ever been restricted to scholars of African descent.
Their interests, however, define the focus of the organization's work. Project South Project South is a community-based membership institute that develops and conducts popular political and economic education and action research for organizing and liberation. It organizes and develops popular educators from grassroots and scholarly backgrounds, bringing them together on the basis of equality to join in the process of understanding and transforming our society. The SSSP works to solve these problems and to develop informed social policy. SSSP members are an interdisciplinary community of scholars, practitioners, advocates, and students interested in the application of critical, scientific, and humanistic perspectives to the study of vital social problems.