Michel Wieviorka

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...

I was proud and happy to be ISA President and I gained enormously from it. Four years later, I would like to first make three short points about our Association. First, we always have known the ISA to be open to those sociologists that cannot easily join us due to political reasons, as was the case for communist countries during the Cold War, and more recently for China’s association because of diplomatic issues posed by the inclusion of Taiwan’s...