Excerpt from Keynote Speech at UC Merced Symposium, “A World in Crisis – Dialogues and Decisions: On the Legacy of Michael Burawoy” 

We live in a time of pain. Israeli bombs, supplied by the United States, continue to obliterate the people of Gaza. The President of the United States is sending migrants – men who survived horrors to seek refuge in the United States – to a prison camp outside the country, where there is scarce space to breathe. Quite explicitly, the only way out is a coffin. 

For almost two decades, I have worked with undocumented immigrants, recent deportees, and asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border, studying the nature and implications of the US detention and deportation machine. This is not a fluke. US immigration enforcement is made to banish people. Especially brown people. Especially men. Its endpoint is their social death. Yet, even as a so-called expert, I did not foresee how Trump would turn this system of torture into his central tool of repression: ICE as the US Gestapo. 

Scholars can no longer pretend that immigration enforcement is “outside” academia. Inspiring students – Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and others whom people in this room may know – have been sent to detention camps, without having been charged of a crime. This spring, my advisee, in her fifth year of the PhD, had her student visa revoked. She spent nearly ten days in hiding, away from her home. Then she gave up. She texted me when she arrived back in Mexico: “I wanted to let you know that now I am safe.”

With this and other tactics, the administration assails the university as we know it. Just last week, I learned that the US Department of “Justice” demanded the names of any UC faculty who had signed a petition against the continued assault on Gaza. The UC complied. As Michael Burawoy (2025) put it last year, “The war has broken into our fortress … Academic freedom is … evaporating before our very eyes” (251). 

Michael’s Legacy: A Compass and A Roadmap

Michael was a brilliant sociologist, a mentor to me and thousands of others, and a model of integrity in a messed-up world. My first thought, when I heard of his death, was “How will we face this cruelty without his leadership?” I realize now that sociologists of conscience will do it – we must do it – by living into the words he wrote, the example he set, and the communities he created.

Michael underscored that the assault on pro-Palestinian protest was “the thin edge of the broader war against universities … We can hide behind the claim of ‘neutrality’, but even so we will be mowed down. If we don’t take a stand for university autonomy, we are likely to end up with no place to stand” (Burawoy 2025, 251). If sociology is doing its job, he predicted, it would be an early target – reason itself to be at the vanguard of the resistance. As scholars, he made clear: “We can defend ourselves and retreat, or we can advance” (Burawoy and Benson 2025). We can make concessions, or we can fight for a university – especially a public university – under siege.

But if sociologists do speak out, “What should our contribution be?” (Burawoy 2025, 249). “What makes sociology special, not just as a science, but as a force for the public good?”

Michael’s writing and public speaking give us three points on a compass. In writing, Michael argued that sociology had three key tools for fighting despotism and defending the oppressed: 

1) Through comparison, sociology gives us a sense of possibilities. 

2) Sociology takes the standpoint of civil society, defending humanity against state despotism and market fundamentalism (Burawoy 2005, 24).

3) Doing sociology requires dialogue. While Michael approached all of his work as dialogue, it is especially crucial to public sociology.

Michael often said—modestly—that he was more of an evangelist for public sociology than a practitioner. He urged students to work with movements, workers, migrants, and the dispossessed. At Berkeley, he was the fulcrum of a community of scholars embedded in union organizing, anti-capitalism, anti-carceral work, and social justice of every stripe. If we assume publics live outside academia, then Michael spent less time doing such work himself (leaving aside his forays in Zambia in the 1960s and the picket lines at Berkeley before he retired). 

But if we look at how Michael lived – and I think he would have liked to call this “Living Sociology,” a title he preferred for his final book – there are three additional lessons, which he did not always put down in writing.

Looking back at The Sociological Imagination last week, I was struck by how aptly Michael embodied its principles. C Wright Mills – whom Michael taught as the first book of first-year graduate theory – argued that the sociologist’s public role was 1) “to turn personal troubles and concerns into social issues and problems open to reason” and 2) “to help build and to strengthen self-cultivating publics” and “combat all those forces which are destroying genuine publics” (Mills 1959, 186). 

Michael’s practice embodied three additional elements of public sociology: a roadmap.

1) Teaching. Michael emphasized that students were our first publics. He made students into a sociological public by helping them locate themselves in structural contexts – listening deeply, then linking their struggles to social problems.  

2) Building publics. Michael connected people relentlessly, bringing together students, scholars, workers, staff, and anyone in his orbit. He wove webs of responsibility, reminding us we were accountable to one another. In short, he built publics.

3) Defending the university. Finally, Michael spoke out for the public university and its workers, fighting the forces harming the UCs’ mission, and defending the university’s role in civil society. 

He theorized a more just society (his compass), and he also acted to build it (his roadmap), starting with the University of California.

From Berkeley to San Diego

During the introductions to students’ practice job talks, Michael sometimes yelled out, “Who are you!?” He wanted us to locate ourselves. So let me do that before I recount my attempts to build on his legacy.

I began my PhD at UC Berkeley in 2006, shortly after Michael’s 2004 ASA Presidential Address, “For Public Sociology.” Like many Berkeley students, I wanted to change the world. I had spent several years in Latin America, following the Zapatista Movement and the tradition of participatory action research. I was skeptical about sociology. But I was drawn to public sociology, and thus, to Berkeley. I soon found Michael, became a teaching assistant in his storied year-long theory course, then a research assistant for his project for a Global Sociology, and finally a mentee.

Michael taught me to do sociology as dialogue. Theory was a dialogue between scholars. Research – especially participant observation – was a dialogue between ethnographers and the people we met in “the field” (Burawoy 1998). Teaching was many dialogues: first, between teachers and students; then, among students themselves; and finally, between students and the wider world. And of course, public sociology meant dialogue among sociologists and the people they wanted to learn from – or, optimistically, collaborate with. In a discipline patterned on extracting information and delivering it to audiences that rarely included the people the data came from, this was a radical theme. 

As a sociologist, I have carried such dialogues with me. In 2014, I got a job at the University of California, San Diego. At the US-Mexico border, I have partnered with more than a dozen immigrants’ rights organizations to produce data for impact litigation, human rights advocacy, organizing, and to support the direction and re-direction of resources to desperate migrants. I do not work alone. Each year, 30 undergraduates and several graduate students join a research team that designs and carries out projects together. I sometimes tell friends that I am finally “living the dream” of public sociology. Under the surface, of course, the work is always more complex, riddled with failures, burnout, bureaucratic nightmares, dead-ends, and trauma. I always feel like I’m insufficient and could have done more. Yet as Michael showed me, the process is the point: if I am really listening to students, migrants, and partner organizations, there is always a direction to move in. 

…

Following Michael’s Footsteps: Public Sociology in Tough Times

Michael argued – vociferously and prolifically – that the tools of sociology lead to hope, a stand (for the dispossessed), and conversations with publics. In practice, he embodied three more tools: teaching as public sociology, building communities, and defending the university. These practices were his resistance “against the pressures that devalue our connections with one another and the world” (Burawoy and Benson 2025). By developing our rich and varied abilities in community with others, he argued (echoing Marx’s brief vision of communism, known as the “realm of freedom” (Tucker 1978, 441)), humans come to self-realization. 

Many scholars define public sociology narrowly as publicizing sociological findings to a larger audience. Yet, it also has many forms: it can entail co-designing research with grassroots activists or communities, producing data to inform social struggles, using sociological lenses to fuel the demand for justice, and many other versions of interplay between theory, data, and activism. For some, public sociology occurs “after hours” – a “third shift” of fighting against the reduction of the university to a business, or for students, comrades, friends, and families who face threats of deportation. For many, the most important public sociology is our work with students. 

This. Is. Hard. Academic reviews and hiring tend to prize top-down, individual work that ends in scholarly publishing. Universities are now defending their funding at the cost of this kind of work – just this month, UC Davis shut down its center for public engagement. A lot of people – sometimes including me – sidestep these contradictions by doing activism on top of scholarship. As Heba Gowayed posted recently on social media, “Today I 1) met with students about status, 2) met with colleagues about protecting students, 3) am at a know your rights meeting about traveling safely. I didn’t write. I didn’t read. The hidden cost is the tremendous expenditure of heart and time we’ll never get back.” I am sure I am not the only one in this room who has sacrificed sleep, food, or wellbeing – and “professional” scholarly writing to organize community care. It’s hard to get up these days to begin with. 

Yet, it has never been more important for scholars to listen to civil society or speak as publics ourselves. Michael showed that each class, each student, and each community is a possible public. Trump’s agenda – his very electability – hinges on people’s isolation and entrapment in online echo chambers rife with “alternative facts.” Such conditions also fuel US citizens’ fears of immigrants and the belief that academics are out-of-touch elitists divorced from the struggles of everyday people. Trump has convinced many people that scholars are not listening to them, but are locked in our ivory tower, debating amongst ourselves. And, he has punished academics with defunding, detention, or deportation if theys risk speaking up.

Public sociologists must be incredibly brave! Michael reminded his students to stand up to those in power who might shoot them down. On his wall, for instance. he posted the sabotage letter sent to Berkeley by a “mentor” (Edward Shils) who did not like his brand of sociology. He also enCOURAGEd us – made us feel brave – by delighting in anything students did that he found “subversive” and by connecting us with each other. 

As Burawoy (2024) wrote of Palestine: “Now is the time to stand up for the moral principles that brought so many of us to sociology: the commitment to egalitarianism and freedom that drove Marx; the commitment to solidarity and equality of opportunity that drove Durkheim; the commitment to liberal democracy and individual autonomy that drove Weber; the commitment to racial justice and socialism that drove Du Bois; the commitment to gender justice and reproductive rights that drove feminism and so on” (1012).

To Michael, I hope that you are having dialogues with all those theorists now, and beaming “BB’s” down on us, from your own realm of freedom. 

Michael said at his retirement that public sociology meant having a theory of change about one’s own work and inhabiting it. He gave us both theory and practice. It is humbling to think we can follow in – or even improve on – his footsteps. But he would insist that we take try.