Collective indignation continues to blaze a trail across the world – of late, carrying its torch from Gezi Park and Taksim Square to the major cities of Brazil and now, as I write, Egypt has been reignited by a popular uprising of unprecedented proportions. The crowds in Tahrir Square display a great refusal of the […]

An Interview with Fernando Henrique Cardoso 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 […]

by Chizuko Ueno, University of Tokyo, Japan Chizuko Ueno, a leading Japanese sociologist, feminist critic, and public intellectual, has been a pioneer in women’s studies and the author of many books, including Patriarchy and Capitalism (1990), The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Modern Family (1994, English translation 2004), Nationalism and Gender (1989, English translation […]

 by Vladimir Yadov, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences and former ISA Vice-President, 1990-1994 Vladimir Yadov was a pioneer of sociology in the Soviet Union, where the subject assumed a precarious existence as a “bourgeois” science. At Leningrad University he was a central figure in creating the first sociology laboratory in the 1960s, followed […]

by Bianca Freire-Medeiros, Getulio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Favela tours in Rio de Janeiro, township tours in Cape Town and Soweto, slum tours in Mumbai, Manila, Jakarta, Cairo, Nairobi. Since the early 1990s – and in a context of accelerated economic integration, neoliberal urban governance regimes and globalized media cultures – territories […]

by Mallika Shakya, South Asian University, Delhi, India The collapse of a factory building in Savar, Bangladesh in April 2013 killed more than 1,100 garment workers. Despite the public outcry, little has been said so far about the underlying systems of exploitation that permitted a disaster of this scale. Those familiar with the turbulent history […]

by Jeffrey J. Sallaz, University of Arizona, USA Like most scientists, I long had but a fuzzy conception of what happens to my papers after they’ve been accepted for publication in one of sociology’s journals. If pressed, I might have supposed that the journal editor hands my paper off to an experienced copy editor working […]

by Sujata Patel, University of Hyderabad, India, and Editor of Sage Studies in International Sociology ISA members will be very happy to know that henceforth all books published under the Sage Studies in International Sociology (SSIS) title will be available to them for 9.99 pounds sterling, almost a tenth of their old price. And this […]

by Mariya Ivancheva, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary While studying in London in 2004, I attended a meeting for solidarity with Venezuela that focused on the Bolivarian educational reforms. The guest lecturer, Venezuelan educator Oscar Negrin, started by saying: “In Venezuela instead of making children memorize abstract terms, we teach them the most important words […]

by Martin Petrov, Sofia University, Bulgaria They have no property and take no part in the production of capital, not even by returning empty beer bottles. They inhabit a public space where they drink their medical alcohol bought from the pharmacy and diluted with water from public fountains in a bottle fished from a garbage […]

by Georgi Medarov, Sofia University, Bulgaria As we know from Maurice Halbwachs, social memory is intimately linked with forming collective identities. After 1989, the heated public debates about the fate of the Bulgarian Jewish population during the WWII, tell us much about the way the past can shape the politics of the present. In the […]

by Shamsul A.B., The National University of Malaysia (UKM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Long before they were officially introduced as university subjects with their own academic departments, anthropology and sociology contributed to the construction of the colonial knowledge that informed the idea of Malaya and, after 1963, of Malaysia. During the colonial era, colonial knowledge provided […]

An Interview with Dato Rahman Embong 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 […]

by Mounir Saidani, University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia Three contradictory aspects of the current Tunisian situation are shaping the work of sociologists: tremendous political change, an expanded freedom of expression, and the advent of a new wave of social movements. Given the rapidity of social change, Tunisian sociologists have largely responded in individualistic ways. […]

An Interview with Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand, University of Evry, France Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand are a husband-and-wife team of cinematic sociologists at the University of Evry’s Center Pierre Naville, just outside Paris. After having devoted two rich decades to the sociology of work, in 1995 Sebag and Durand’s lifelong fascination with the […]