His hips and thighs clad in red on denim, with a gleeful smile, swaying to the rhythm at a Berkeley Sociology holiday party, while donning the infamous leather pants, which, apparently, he wore even to lecture in.  The bounce in his step when he walked toward me on the sidewalk outside the Merritt Station Café on a late afternoon in early November 2023. The hair on his brow and in his nostrils, as he sat across from me at a small table on a highchair, as we drank our lattes and talked.  The smile that lit up his face like a half-moon at the end of what had been a serious conversation.  Mourning Michael Burawoy in the days after he was killed in a hit-and-run in February 2025, not far from the café where I last met him, I experience my grief viscerally, down my legs into the soles of me; deep inside, into the bone marrow of me; the images that my mind conjures up are also intensely physical.

The physicality of my grief is partly in the nature of the beast.  A body that just recently was responsive to emails, agreed to drink coffee, and bounced in his step is no longer.  Sensing abrupt abandonment, our animal body fights, freezes, or huddles in fear.  CS Lewis compared grief’s sensations to fear.  Mine are more like those of a fight, my mind wrestling against the knowledge of this accident’s particularly cruel way of undoing a life.  

But I believe the physicality of Michael’s memory in my body and consciousness has another meaning.  The two images that float up—Michael gliding across the floor of a hall against the backdrop of students and colleagues, most of them less full-bodied partygoers, and Michael stepping decisively toward me on Grand Avenue—are separated by twenty-five years.  Yet the feeling —as I identify it now—is the same: I feel safe with Michael. I believe my body feels safe with Michael because Michael was good to and for women as intellectuals—not just in the spring of our mind’s awakening but at summer’s peak, when our mind’s accrued value has the potential to rock the patriarchy to its core.  

Best known as a theorist of capital, Michael’s most consequential praxis within the academy may have been to intervene in structural binds women confront as intellectuals, using his power to break rank and support us in a way that I will call “basing.” Support starts with belief, and belief starts with listening, specifically to what the body says.  

From my first few years as a graduate student at Berkeley sociology, my body remembers playing fierce soccer with Michael and scoring, surprisingly, because my peers underestimated what I could do with a ball.  It was the mid-1990s.  Manchester United was breaking records, on its way to win five champion league titles.  A newspaper cutout of men in white shorts and red shirts, embracing one another in ecstasy on Michael’s office door, brought color to the otherwise drab and unremarkable short end of the rectangle on Barrow Hall’s 4^th floor.  Michael’s soccer fever would prove infectious, spilling out into the field adjacent to the building, where a bunch of us would run around with him, getting sweaty on Berkeley’s spring evenings.  I was not especially skilled at what we would call in Europe, football, but I had grown up in Holland. So, I could receive, redirect, and kick hard.

Kicking hard, with no regard for the ego of the goalie, is what we graduate students did with Michael.  “Teaching graduate students is terrifying,” he would confide to his overwhelmingly female posse, exposing his vulnerability at finding himself in the crosshairs of our mind’s muscles.  And yet, he sought it out.  He invited graduate students, preparing for our oral exams in theory, to sit in on his undergraduate lectures and meet with him afterwards in small groups. There, unlike adoring undergraduates, we would argue with him and make our cases until our passionate contentions broke with a wide smile that let us know we had won.  He invited us to read his manuscripts and take him to town, even though most of us did not yet know the excruciating exposure writers feel circulating work we intend to publish.  Our trenchant critiques were recognized in the acknowledgement section of “the extended case method,” as the double-edged swords that those gifts were. 

My body also remembers the note that arrived at the start of November 1997, when my father had passed away from pancreatic cancer.  I had flown east three weeks earlier. It was early fall semester, when students quiver with the energies of the academic year ahead.  Instead, I sat in Yale University Hospital, trying to relieve my father from the unique indignities of dying in an American hospital.  Death and mourning are always messy.  But in a family as dislocated and kinless as mine—twice before I turned 21, it made the migration across the Atlantic—the mess can seep through the seams, like my mother’s scream at the sight of the coffin piercing the air.  But returning home after the burial, there it was, a handwritten note, sitting next to a big vase of flowers. “From your friends in Sociology.”  He was the department chair, but signed off as my friend, and stronger, a friend among many.

Kind and generous?  Yes.  The moniker, friend, though, was not entirely incorrect. Unlike many students alongside whom I ran trying to kick the ball, I would not go on to become one of Michael’s.  Early on, I had chosen a different role.  Michael and I studied Norbert Elias together, at his invitation.  In our meetings leading up to my oral exams in theory, I would bring him passages of the Civilizing Process, authored by a refugee from Nazi Germany who took up residence in an apartment above the Amsterdam home of the Dutch professor Johan Goudsblom.  His almost six-hundred-page, two-volume tome was considered a classic in Europe but not included in the canon in America.  I wrote essays comparing Elias to sociology’s “founding fathers,” and we sat together discussing them.  Decades later, he would, flatteringly, tell a colleague that it was I who had been his teacher.

We had a bond, but it was strongly differentiated.  For one, I was not a Marxist, or even a power theorist.  I was blind to institutional games.  Psychological pressure I recognized. There was a hint of that one day, when I wrote Michael to say that a paper would be coming late.  “I thought I could count on you,” came his reply, over email … then still in its early days.  Years later, I feel nothing but compassion for the experiences and feelings motivating that rebuke.  I recognize it as symptomatic of what some psychologists have called an “anxious attachment” style, which develops when a person suffers a traumatic loss as a child that leads them to overreact as an adult.  At age eleven, when fathers are still heroes, Michael had lost his.  In a different way, I lost my mother around the same age.  Today, I know what it is like to carry along old wounds that creep, unknowingly, into crevices of mentoring relationships.  At that time, Michael’s words were all the warning signal that I needed not to tie my future to a man who felt so easily abandoned. 

There was one more critical juncture at Berkeley.  In the early 2000s, I joined the team of graduate students, most of them Michael’s, who researched and wrote about the wages and working conditions of the UC Berkeley clerical and custodial staff.  Michael shared a draft of his ASA presidential address with us. Realizing he would need cases for his “Public Sociology,” I pulled the still inchoate writing together for Berkeley’s Betrayal: Wages and Working Conditions at Cal, just in time for our pamphlet to be cited as one.  But thereafter, it would be almost two decades before I sought Michael out again. When I did, what pulled me back to him had, I believe, the same root as what initially pushed me away.

For survivors of early trauma, academia can become the staging ground for the redo of a need that was never quite satisfied the first time around; the child’s exuberant attachment, ruptured suddenly, animates our intellectual muses and mentoring.  In some of us, the pain and isolation we experienced as children seed the will to intervene on behalf of victims whom others abandon.  The traumatized child that lives on in the adult detects the hidden anguish in others and drives an outsized responsibility to extend care.  Trauma can be a resource for empathy, springing a yearning for what Buddhists call enlightenment.  Enlightened or not, there is no doubt that Michael “got” the burdens placed on others, whose specific brand of pain he could not personally have experienced.  In response to suffering, he acted as someone and something stronger than what we tepidly call an “ally.”

“He really got gender, which is very rare in white heterosexual men, even the men he trained,” I wrote to one such man two days after the accident that took Michael’s life.  In response, he sent me the link to “In memoriam of Michael Burawoy. The kind of intellectual society needs today” by Martha Soler Gallart.  The content was news to me.  Three short paragraphs put Michael in an entirely new light: the friend, mentor, and sociologist who is an active and unrelenting supporter of survivors of gender-based violence in the academy.  

From Gallart we learn that Michael traveled to Barcelona to support a law that the Catalan government adopted unanimously.  The law addresses the problem of “Isolating Gender Violence.”  That concept pinpoints the weak link in gender violence prevention efforts: namely, individuals who intervene to protect the direct victims are then themselves mercilessly attacked.  It was not just abroad.  Closer to home, when the natural sciences at Berkeley became embroiled in sexual harassment scandals, The Guardian ran a string of articles, and every time, there was Michael, backing up the victims with his voice and clout.

My own story is both personal and universal—when the many faces of institutional sexism revealed themselves to me.  In several consequential conversations during what turned out to have been the last three years of his life, Michael listened intently and never disputed.  He got it.  Some parts he got before I did.  He accurately predicted the future and gave directives, which have helped me respond to that future, even after his life ended.  

Just as important, Michael reminded me of who I am—a thinker with heft who, as a student, had taught him something about a theory that lay at right angles with Marxism; a writer who practices my craft fast and fastidiously when I can run the show.  “Write books, not articles,” he advised, “articles will only frustrate you.”  That I now write four books—working on them, lazy-Susan style, one at a time—not four articles, is Michael’s doing: a teacher with a conscience who acts on the mission to make sociology the antiracist, equalizing, and empathy-building undergraduate learning practice that it is meant to be.  

Searching for the right concept to extend out and theorize the highly personal experiences that I and other women had with Michael, Sociology’s apparatus, though, falls short.  What comes to me, instead, is a concept from my other calling, dance.  In a fortuitous overlay with Marxism, the word “base” in Contact Improvisation (CI) refers to the dancer who uses her body to give another dancer the foundation and felt connection to the earth. When you “base” a person, you use your structure for the other to rest on and circle up in spirals, called “flying.”  This is what Michael did.  He used his stature as a man to base women as intellectuals.  He broke gender rank, fortifying ground for us to breathe and to fly.