Between 2011 and 2014 Global Dialogue reported optimistically on the social movements engulfing the world – Arab Uprisings, Occupy movements, Indignados, labor movements, student movements, environmental movements, and struggles against rural dispossession. The optimism was short-lived as these movements set in motion changes that have led to a wave of reactionary populist movements and authoritarian […]

by Nandini Sundar, Delhi School of Economics, India Nandini Sundar is a well-known sociologist of political violence. She has spent more than 25 years studying Bastar, an intense zone of conflict within the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. She first lived there while doing research for her PhD dissertation, published as Subalterns and Sovereigns: An […]

by Cihan Tuğal, University of California, Berkeley, USA Turkey’s sharp authoritarian turn has surprised many observers: not so long ago, the country was celebrated as an exemplar of liberalism that stood out in a region marked by turbulence. Analysts now seek the causes of this transformation in President Erdoğan’s personality or exceptional characteristics of Turkish […]

by Ruy Braga, University of São Paulo, Brazil and Member of ISA Research Committee on Labor Movements (RC44). In general, analyses of Brazil’s current political and economic crisis emphasize the economic policy “errors” of the government, inherited by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) from her predecessor, Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva. While […]

by Rodolfo Elbert, Conicet and University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and member of the ISA Research Committee on Labour Movements (RC44) On November 22, 2015, Argentines elected Mauricio Macri as President for the 2015-2019 term, by a margin of less than three percent. Macri’s defeat of the Peronista candidate Daniel Scioli marked the end of […]

by Arlie Russell Hochschild, University of California, Berkeley, USA As in much of Europe, India, China and Russia, the American political right is on the move. In some ways, America’s leftward cultural shift – a first black president, a potential female one, gay marriage – may obscure this rise. But it’s there. Over the last […]

by Huw Beynon, Cardiff University, UK British universities are changing, in ways so fundamental that it is not easy to predict where it will end. Certainly working and studying in a university here today is a very different experience than it would have been just a decade ago. Stefan Collini recently maintained that “what we […]

by Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University, Canada, and Antony Puddephatt, Lakehead University, Canada At the turn of the 21st century, several senior scholars sounded alarm bells about the state of Canadian sociology. Bruce Curtis and Lorna Weir argued that English Canadian sociology suffered from “a weak sense of sociology as a craft with distinctive knowledges, skills, […]

When you’ve known someone for a long time, it’s hard to separate the person from their work, and it’s probably best not to try. John Urry contributed to social science not just by publishing, but through example, by his way of being an academic. He showed that to be an effective researcher or teacher, there […]

John Urry, who recently passed away, was one of the UK’s most cited sociologists, with some twenty books, many of them very influential. After graduating from Cambridge University, John spent his whole career at Lancaster University, where he and I were colleagues from 1977-1998. We wrote two books together, The End of Organized Capitalism (1987) […]

John Urry’s unexpected death shocked his family, friends and colleagues. He and I first formed a bond as postgraduate students in Cambridge University in 1967-1970, sharing supervisors and interests, interacting thereafter in the Conference of Socialist Economists as well as in sociology conclaves, and becoming colleagues again in 1990 when I was appointed to a […]

British sociologist John Urry sadly passed away in March, just as we were celebrating the publication of our co-written article “Mobilizing the New Mobilities Paradigm” in the new journal Applied Mobilities – an article in which we assessed the impact of the mobilities paradigm in the social sciences over the past decade. We were also […]

by Ana Vidu, University of Barcelona, member of ISA Research Committee on Economy and Society (RC02) and Tinka Schubert, Loyola University Andalusia, member of ISA Research Committee on Women in Society (RC32)[1] The University of California-Berkeley has long been central to debates about sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, not because it has an […]

by Ignacio Santa Cruz Ayo, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain and Eva Alonso, University of Barcelona, Spain As scholars conducting research on cooperatives, we would like to thank Global Dialogue for opening up debate about coops, and for allowing us to respond to Sharryn Kasmir’s assessment of the Mondragon Cooperative published in Global Dialogue 6.1 […]

by Costinel Anuța, Corina Brăgaru, Anca Mihai, Oana Negrea, Ion Daniel Popa, and Diana Tihan, University of Bucharest, Romania This article describes the genesis and structure of Global Dialogue’s Romanian editorial team, focusing on its development and working process, as well as some of the team’s idiosyncratic practices. The Romanian editorial team was initiated by […]