When Berkeley graduate students reached out to ask if I would write a reflection about Michael Burawoy for the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, I immediately agreed. I have not yet contributed to the outpouring of remembrances because it is simply too painful. I thought the responsibility I feel to the BJS, where I spent many years happily arguing with my peers on the editorial collective—my first experience with the long, joyful process of collective decision-making—would force me to put some of the love and gratitude I feel for Michael in writing. I know Michael will forgive me for not being able to bear it just yet. Instead, I offer below the short reflection I shared with Michael and with the dynamic and beautiful community of scholars he created at his retirement celebration. Apparently, nothing says celebrate to Michael like a two-day conference titled “Conversations with Burawoy: Pedagogy, Power and Practice.” The prompt he gave us was: “I’d like you to tell us what you have been up to since you left Berkeley – this doesn’t have to be strictly scholarly accomplishments, it can be some form of public engagement or support for NGOs or teaching or sitting on the beach – whichever way you have taken your sociology.” Michael noted. “This arrangement is not just for my edification but for everyone’s edification, especially any demoralized graduate students who may be attending. But it would also be a way of introducing yourselves to one another across cohorts. That’s how I see this event – a way in which you can all learn about each other’s existence and accomplishments.” It was no surprise to me that Michael felt the best way to celebrate was to continue to connect his students to each other. Michael has given me personally and us collectively many gifts. I have always thought that his greatest gift was to give us each other.

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power	Practice 1: Russia’s War on Ukraine and the Gender Order of Neoliberalism
pedagogy	Practice 2: Teaching my local public elementary school about gender

In grappling with what to say about someone who so profoundly shaped the trajectory of the discipline and my life, a number of us thought about Michael doggedly asking us to organize our thoughts in 2×2 tables. Reactions from my fellow panelists ranged from “I never figured out how to do that” to feelings of profound comfort as order is imposed on a large data set of Michael anecdotes. I fall into the latter category. I am going to take seriously Michael’s conference title—Conversations with Burawoy: Power, Pedagogy and Practice—and try to organize a small fraction of the many conversations I have had both in person and in my head with Michael over 23 years into a 2×2. Imagine a 2×2 table and put power and practice 1 in the top two quadrants and pedagogy and practice 2 in the bottom two. I am going to use this 2×2 table to talk about how Michael’s obsession with analyzing power and his dedication to pedagogy have influenced two practices in my professional and personal life. Practice 1 is about power and my approach to public talks on Russia’s war on Ukraine also connected to a book project with my fellow Berkeley cohort member Smitha Radhakrishnan and Practice 2 involves applying lessons from Michael about pedagogy to teaching my local public elementary school about gender identity in the hopes that they more fully include my nonbinary 9-year-old and other gender nonconforming kids.

Power and Practice 1, the top two quadrants of the 2×2. Although Michael is not himself a feminist theorist, I do not think it strange that many of his students are because Michael so relentlessly analyzes power, urging ethnographers to map the “terrain of contestation” along various vectors of power. This is also unsurprising because Michael has invited a diverse group of thinkers to his intellectual table. My invitation was out of pity, I am pretty sure. I am an immigrant daughter, the first in my family to graduate from middle school. Although I felt I had found my people when I got to college, I knew I had bitten off more than I could chew when I arrived at Berkeley. I must have looked that lost wandering Barrows Hall in my first semester because Michael walked up to me in the hallway and said, “You. Put your name on my door once a week.” And so I did…most weeks for a decade! In Michael’s office hours, I found my footing. Out of those conversations came a book about how migrant grandmothers were building post-Soviet Ukraine transnationally and carrying that new nation on their shoulders. Just as I decided no one inside or out of the academy cared about Ukraine or the entire former Soviet Union, for that matter, besides me and Michael, Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, everyone was searching for folks who knew anything about Ukraine, and they were sure that gender does not matter when the bombs are dropping. But I’m a Burawoy student. We think about power. Gender is a vector of power that helps us understand the “terrain of contestation” and what is at stake in this war. In fact, Smitha and I have a book coming out in August, modestly titled The Gender Order of Neoliberalism, that thinks of Russia’s war as one consequence of neoliberalism’s gender order. It is a truly Berkeley sociology-Michael-and-Raka project, a result of being asked to learn a region well and then link it to other regions by tracing intersecting vectors of power.

The bottom two quadrants of the 2×2 are pedagogy and practice 2. I must preface this by saying I was never able to take a graduate course with Michael. He wasn’t teaching graduate courses at the time, but I was experiencing Michael’s pedagogy in (weekly!) office hours and dissertation group meetings. Michael is an intellectually intimate mentor. I remember walking into my grad student office after a meeting with Michael, and one of my officemates, perhaps projecting onto me her own feeling after a meeting with her chair, looked at me with concern, reached for a box of Kleenex, and whispered, “How did your meeting with Michael go?” I cheerily recounted the details of our meeting, and my officemate said, “Cinzia, why are you in such a good mood? You realize he basically told you your paper was crap and you have to start over!” She held out the Kleenex box. “True,” I replied, “but that is not what I heard. I heard he thinks the project is worth the work.” I never once left Michael’s office feeling defensive or defeated. I left feeling energized and convinced that gathering new data or writing a new draft was worth it. Yes, I was starting again, but Michael always made me feel: I could do it; the project was worth my time; I was worth his time. When my child came into their identity as nonbinary just before starting 1^st grade and the elementary school teachers and administrators gave me a “deer-in-the-headlights look” when we asked for they/them pronouns and gender-neutral language, I opened a conversation with Michael, not about content but pedagogy. How do I offer feedback that the school could hear? Feedback that left them feeling not defensive but energized? Feeling that they could do it, that creating a gender-inclusive classroom was a project worth their time, and for the 1^st grade teacher asking me for lesson plans, that she was worth my time. I am now conducting interviews with trans and nonbinary high school students, working with a team of teenagers to write a report to our school committee with data-driven suggestions for creating a more inclusive school climate. That’s my 2×2!

I wanted to end by saying a heartfelt thank you to Michael for the gift of his time and care, for the 2×2 table, for so effectively modeling how to analyze power and speak to different publics, and especially for the gift of each other—a network of scholars who proudly call themselves Burawoy students connected through Michael’s generosity of spirit. 

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In 2000, my first year at Berkeley, Michael invited my cohort to his apartment in Oakland. When we got there, Arlene Daniels, one of the first women to earn her PhD in Sociology from Berkeley, was sitting in his living room. She had a larger-than-life presence, and, in her colorful way, she offered us advice for graduate school and beyond. She warned us to choose our dissertation chairs wisely because they would be “significant others” in our lives. She told us that as graduate students and perhaps even beyond, in our academic lives, most of our pain and all of our joy would come from that relationship. I believe I chose wisely. I love you, Michael.