The point, after all, is to change the world.
In the cramped and warm confines of his Oakland apartment, our research group would gather in early evenings, huddled over stacks of notes and well-worn books. The apartment itself was modest, almost sparse, save for the intellectual energy engulfing the space. His refrigerator was often empty, save for a jar of peanut butter and jelly […]
I got the shocking news about Michael’s untimely, tragic death with a phone call the following day, compassionately delivered by Stephanie Canizales, a former USC graduate student who is now an assistant professor in Berkeley’s sociology department. I was numbed by the news, but I also happened to be in the middle of writing an […]
In the Fall of 2008, I inadvertently set out to answer this question by enrolling in Michael’s Public Ethnography graduate seminar, which met on a twice-weekly basis for two hours, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, while simultaneously serving as Michael’s TA for his justly-famous social theory course. The latter met on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. […]
Back in 2020, we both started graduate school from afar in New Haven, Connecticut. In a time when everything felt so uncertain and so much of our lives were rectangular boxes filled with faces that were still strangers and a quiet solitude in our own homes, one thing that was both consistent and exciting was […]
Professor Michele Goodwin is a renowned bioethicist, constitutional legal scholar, prolific writer, and podcast host. Her scholarship and advocacy have forged a path for justice in reproductive health and rights, civil liberties, and educational access. Even more importantly, her work scrutinizes the policing of bodies and identities in American law and interrogates the narratives that […]
Dr. Heba Gowayed is a distinguished scholar and public intellectual whose research and writing push the boundaries of ethnographic approaches in Sociology and illuminate the human experience of migration, displacement, and borders around the world. She is an outspoken voice for justice, whose advocacy and work have impacted many immigrant communities across multiple countries. We […]
As two Asian Americans in Sociology, we were so excited when we got the chance to interview Anthony Ocampo. A leading public voice on the lives and experiences of queer Filipino Americans, his writings fuse together personal narrative and sociological research that inspire our own life and work. In the following conversation, we discuss his […]
Matthew Clair is a pathbreaking sociologist whose research broadly investigates how cultural meanings within our institutions reflect, reproduce, and challenge inequality and injustice. We first got to know Matt as a professor in an undergraduate sociology theory course at Stanford (for Janna) and as a scholar in law and society (for Tiffany). Through this serendipitous […]
Dorothy Roberts is a preeminent scholar, activist, and public intellectual whose work breaks through disciplinary molds to inform our knowledge of policing, family welfare systems, bioethics, and medicine. We were deeply honored to sit down with her for an interview, where she shares how her childhood and life experiences shape her principles for abolition in […]
When we started graduate school at Berkeley in 2020, many things were uncertain. We were part of the first, and quite possibly the last, cohort to start entirely virtually in the Sociology department, during a tumultuous historical period where one crisis seemed to bleed into the next in a compounding effect – an ongoing global […]
Introduction: When we decided to pivot the Berkeley Journal of Sociology to public sociology, we had to take stock of what was done before us. To guide us in our own project of relaunching a public sociology journal platform, we sought out resources for academic social scientists to translate their research to the public in […]