Michael Burawoy

Over 40 years ago, the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (ISA), meeting in Poland, also met Izabela for the first time, standing dignified amid drifting snowflakes to welcome us. As the niece of Magdalena Sokołowska, I assumed this doctoral student was only helping with local arrangements. How wrong can one be? This was not one week off her thesis on Virginia Woolf but an introduction to four decades of working for the ISA...

Erik Olin Wright was a pioneer in the reconstruction of Marxism. His work on contradictory class locations – intermediating relations between Marx’s fundamental classes – turned into a global project, and inspired class analysis across the globe. He wrestled with the logical foundations and empirical correlates of class until his dying days. Among his most important books are Classes (1985), Class Counts (1997), and his...

On July 5, 2021 the world lost one of its great sociologists. After battling with cancer for more than two years, Mona Abaza finally succumbed. To the end she was determined to live her life to the full, to the end she followed the ebb and flow of politics and the pandemic; to the end she followed the life of her friends. Suffering from interminable pain, having lost the functioning of several organs, she nevertheless continued teaching her students at the...

Where did it begin? It’s difficult to say. Erik himself liked to trace his interest in utopias to 1971 when he was a student at the Unitarian-Universalist seminary in Berkeley, avoiding the draft. It was then that he organized a student-run seminar called “Utopia and Revolution” to discuss the prospects for the revolutionary transformation of American society. He then worked at San Quentin State Prison as a student...

Karl Polanyi has become a canonical thinker in sociology and beyond. His book The Great Transformation, has become a classic that touches on almost every subfield of sociology. Its influence extends far beyond sociology to economics, political science, geography and anthropology. Being a critique of the market economy for the way it destroys the fabric of society, it has gained ever more followers over the last four decades of neoliberal...

The Opening Ceremony of the Yokohama World Congress of Sociology featured the ISA’s new and only association-wide award, the Award for Excellence in Sociological Research and Practice. The award was widely advertised to encourage the broadest possible nominations from ISA members. From among a number of impressive candidates, the seven-person committee drawn from the ISA Executive Committee chose Immanuel Wallerstein as the first recipient. The...

Manuel Antonio Garretón is one of the most well-known social scientists in Latin America. He graduated from the Catholic University of Chile and received his PhD from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been the director of many academic institutions, taught in foreign and national universities and has been advisor of national and international, public and private organizations. There is little...

After being Minister of Finance, Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected President of Brazil for two terms, 1995-2003. He was President of the International Sociological Association (1982-1986), toward the end of the Brazilian dictatorship. He was already then a world-famous sociologist with pioneering work on the interaction between dependence and development in Latin America. His dissertation was a classic study of slavery in southern Brazil...

Rahman Embong, distinguished Malaysian sociologist and long-time public intellectual, traces the interweaving of his biography and the development of Malaysian sociology from the colonial period through the postcolonial struggles and then repression to the new opening after 1991. MB: Let’s begin at the beginning. Growing up under colonialism, how did you manage to obtain your education? This seems like an extraordinary...

This interview was conducted by Michael Burawoy for Global Dialogue with the mediating work of Professor Yuan Shen, Lina Hu and Xiuying Cheng. Liping Sun is one of the leading public intellectuals in China today. He is a Professor of Sociology at Tsinghua University, Beijing.   MB: Recently you have...

In its annual meeting the ISA Executive Committee met for five days at the American University of Beirut (AUB), generously hosted by Professor Sari Hanafi and his colleagues in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies. Two days of our meeting coincided with a wonderful International Symposium on “The Arab Uprisings” (reported on in this issue of Global Dialogue), sponsored by AUB, the Lebanese Sociological Association...

For its annual meeting the ISA Executive Committee (EC) assembled in Bilbao for five days at the University of the Basque Country, generously hosted by Professor Benjamín Tejerina, EC member, and his colleagues in the Department of Sociology. Two days of our meeting coincided with a fascinating International Conference on “Beyond the Crisis: Sociology Facing New Forms of Risk, Uncertainty and Precarity,” which drew on members of the Executive...

In the previous issue of Global Dialogue (2.5), we learned how a young Polish student was recruited to the ISA and how she became the indispensable organizing brain of the Association. In this second and final part of the interview, Dr. Barlinska tells us the story of the consolidation of the ISA into the powerful organization it is today.   MB: We left off the story with you in Amsterdam entertaining the famous...

Everyone in the ISA knows the name Izabela Barlinska – and she knows almost everyone! Efficient and creative, loyal and dedicated, soft-spoken but resolute, she has been associated with the ISA for some 35 years. Mistress of many languages, including English, French, Spanish, Russian and her native Polish, she occupies the hot seat in the ISA, directing operations from Madrid. Aided by her devoted assistants, Nacho and Juan, she deals...

The ISA Executive Committee spent 5 days meeting in Mexico City, generously hosted by the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in particular by its Dean, Dr. Fernando Castañeda Sabido, who is also President of the Mexican Sociological Association, and Dr. Raquel Sosa Elízaga who is also Vice-President of the ISA for Program. The 5 day marathon began with a day-long meeting...

Over 5,000 sociologists from 103 countries assembled in Gothenburg for the 17th. World Congress, July 11-17, 2010. This was the largest attendance ever, greater than Bielefeld in 1994, Montreal in 1998, Brisbane in 2002 or Durban in 2006. We should thank and congratulate the Program Committee shepherded by Hans Joas; the Local Organizing Committee headed by Ulla Björnberg working with our conference organizer, Congrex; and above all the Madrid Secretariat...