As I write Raewyn Connell is on the picket line at the University of Sydney, giving expression to   her vision of sociology as a vocation laid out in this issue.  She joins the strike of academic and non-academic staff at her university who are protesting the erosion of tenure, casualization, and threats to academic freedom […]

by Raewyn Connell, University of Sydney, Australia Raewyn Connell, an Australian sociologist, made her mark with research into class power, and the relation of class and gender in schooling. She rose to fame with her theory of the institutional basis of gender relations in Gender and Power (1987), and established herself as a global figure […]

by Randolf S. David, University of the Philippines, Quezon City, Philippines Randolf David is a public sociologist extraordinaire. A distinguished academic with an award-winning book, Nation, Self, and Citizenship: An Invitation to Philippine Sociology, Randy David is best known outside the university for his Sunday column, “Public Lives,” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which he […]

by Nazanin Shahrokni, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Parastoo Dokouhaki, Journalist, Tehran, Iran   On August 6, 2012, with the new academic year approaching, the government-backed Mehr News Agency in Iran posted a bulletin that 36 universities in the country had excluded women from 77 fields of study. The reported restrictions aroused something of […]

by Simin Fadaee, Humboldt University, Germany The Green Movement of Iran emerged after supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main rival in the presidential election of 2009 took to the streets and protested the election results. The protestors then transformed themselves into a complex and popular movement that is active in actual and virtual space. In light […]

by Abbas Varij Kazemi, New York University, USA   In 2009, Iran experienced an unusual social movement, known then and now as “The Green Movement.” This was not an environmental protest but was prompted by contested presidential election results, youthful desire for expression and reform, and a collective wave of national political optimism. Iranians at […]

by Mona Abaza, American University of Cairo, Egypt A large number of Egyptians keep on wondering how they are surviving the vertiginous daily violence perpetrated by the regime of the Muslim Brotherhood. This has led many to have second thoughts about the past two years since January 2011. Many seem to be flirting with the […]

by Satendra Kumar, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, India Worldwide the university is facing the double pressures of regulation and commodification, and the university in India is no exception. In the late 1990s, following global trends and World Bank dictates, the Government of India declared that institutions of higher education should make efforts to raise […]

by Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich, and Ingo Singe, Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena, Germany Universities and institutions of higher education across the globe are being impacted by structural change, guided by principles of the entrepreneurial university. The imposition of New Public Management principles means that universities are increasingly being managed like private enterprises. Resources are being allocated according […]

by Ana Villarreal, University of California, Berkeley, USA   Carolina took her seven-year-old girl to see Rapunzel in a movie theatre and deeply regretted it. For months to come, little Mariana kept bringing up her fear of having someone climb through her window to kidnap her. “I feel there are bad people out there,” she […]

by Gonzalo A. Saraví, Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico Inequality seems to be endemic in Mexico. After a decade of moderate economic growth and improvements in some social indicators, the country continues to show very high levels of social inequality. Overall levels of education have risen, coverage of some […]

by Sawako Shirahase, University of Tokyo and member of the Local Organizing Committee for the 2014 ISA World Congress in Yokohama, Japan In postwar Japan, inequality debates were revived in a peculiar way, so that the blurred divisions of class and Japanese uniqueness were oddly drawn together. Japan was the first Asian country to successfully […]

by Koichi Hasegawa, Tohoku University, Sendai, and Chair of the Local Organizing Committee of the ISA 2014 World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama, Japan “Haiku” is the shortest form of poetry in the world. It was originally a part of traditional Japanese culture; yet, today, it is widely enjoyed in other cultures and languages. A […]

by Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley, USA and ISA President 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 […]

by Karolina Mikołajewska, University of Warsaw and Kozminski University, Poland In autumn 2011 we founded a student organization called the Public Sociology Lab (in Polish: Koło Naukowe Socjologii Publicznej) affiliated to the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw. We are students attending undergraduate, graduate, as well as postgraduate courses, who were joined by a common […]

by Patrizia Albanese, President-elect, Canadian Sociological Association; Chair, Local Organizing Committee of the 2018 ISA World Congress; and Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada Canadian sociologists are pleased to share the news that Toronto, Canada, has been selected as the host city for the 2018 ISA World Congress. In the run-up to the World Congress in 2018, […]

Responses to Feras Hammami on Israeli Universities (Global Dialogue 3.2) Dear Editor: It is instructive to contrast the article by Feras Hammami “Political Crisis in Israeli universities,” (GD3.2) with others in the same issue. André Béteille writes that as a sociologist he does not consider it his role to moralize, while Jacklyn Cock writes in […]