GD 15.1 - April 2025

This year, Global Dialogue (GD) is fifteen years old. It all started in a handcrafted way thanks to the extraordinary impetus of Michael Burawoy. In his first editorial in September 2010, Michael wrote: “We want this newsletter to become the center for the exchange of ideas within our global community.” At the end of 2014, after the XVIII ISA World Congress in Japan, Global Dialogue ceased to be a newsletter and became a magazine. Gradually, it went from being published in four languages to seventeen, combining online articles with four (and then three) issues per year, and took on an increasingly professional design. Lola Busuttil and August Bagà, who have been involved in the making of GD since the beginning, have great merit in this achievement.

At the end of 2017, Michael Burawoy wrote a short history of Global Dialogue in the GD7.4 Editorial, which I highly recommend. From there, Brigitte Aulenbacher and Klaus Dörre took over this legacy, consolidating GD. In their five years at the project’s helm, they diversified the magazine while maintaining its accessible, critical, and pluralistic perspective. Accompanied by Carolina Vestena and Vitória Gonzalez, I assumed the position of editor in 2023, identifying three central challenges: building public and global sociology from the ISA but also beyond the ISA, reorganizing and providing stability to the editorial sections of Global Dialogue, and redefining its communication and dissemination strategies.

We have made progress on several axes, but many others remain to tackle. The fifteenth anniversary of Global Dialogue and the fifth ISA Forum of Sociology in Rabat will be a good opportunity for this. Throughout this year, some of the key challenges for public and global sociology will be discussed in our pages. We will also open various dialogues with all those interested in contributing to this project. Amid global turmoil, Global Dialogue must be able to provide global responses to the crises of our time, building bridges between different realities and academic cultures and proposing intellectual and political alternatives.

This issue opens with an interview by Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Shelukhin with Catalan intellectual Joan Martínez-Alier, one of the leading figures in the fields of political and economic ecology. In this conversation, they examine the legacy of Serhii Podolynsky, one of Ukraine’s most prominent nineteenth-century intellectuals, and the ecological turn in social theory.

The first section of this issue presents a broad overview of sociology in Morocco, covering among other topics the institutionalization of sociology in Morocco, the tension between colonial and foreign sociological schools and the emergence of a “Moroccan school of sociology,” as well as some of the most relevant authors and issues in the national debate, and trends in sociological practice. Ahead of the ISA Forum to be held in Rabat next July 6-11, I recommend reading these articles signed by Adbelfattah Ezzine, Abdellatif Kidai, Driss El Ghazouani, and Kawtar Lebdaoui together with the section on Sociology from the Maghreb published in 2021 in GD11.3.

The following section invites us to think about public and global sociology through the lens of open science. Edited by Fernanda Beigel, who served as Chair of the UNESCO Advisory Committee on Open Science, it presents key reflections on the relationship between Open Science and inclusion and interculturality (F. Beigel); the specificity of open science in different cultural contexts (Eujing Shin and Jae-Mahn Shim); the possibilities of decommercializing science (Ana María Cetto); the trends of citizen science, open to dialogues with community science, participatory science and public involvement in science (Sarita Albagli); and the relationship between open science, care and epistemic justice (Ismael Ràfols).

In the Theoretical Perspectives section, two of Argentina’s leading contemporary sociologists, Gabriel Kessler and Gabriel Vommaro, seek to answer the question of how to study political polarization by offering an interesting conceptual framework anchored in empirical studies of Latin American reality.

Finally, the Open Section begins with a lucid analysis by Haitian intellectual Jean-Marie Théodat of the logic underlying the current debacle in the Caribbean country. In the following article, Mariana Walter, Yannick Deniau, and Viviana Herrera Vargas map and analyze 25 cases of conflicts related to green extractivism in the Americas. The last two articles on Latin American sociology include Miguel Serna’s account of the state of sociological associations in Latin America and the Declaration approved by the Assembly of the Latin American Sociological Association (ALAS) at its last congress held in November 2024 in the Dominican Republic.

Stay tuned to our next issues for more news. Long live Global Dialogue, and thank you all for making it possible!

Breno Bringel, editor of Global Dialogue

PS: When this issue’s edition was already closed, we received the news of the tragic death of Michael Burawoy. We have lost an outstanding scholar, a global promoter of public sociology, the founder and great enthusiast of Global Dialogue, and a fantastic and generous human being. As a tribute to everything he stood for, we will dedicate our next issue to his memory.

Global Dialogue can be found in multiple languages.
Submissions should be sent to globaldialogue@isa-sociology.org.