The point, after all, is to change the world.
Remarks revised from April 2025 symposium, “A World in Crisis: On the Legacy of Michael Burawoy,” UC Merced Other memorials have recounted Michael’s scholarly contributions, so I want to write specifically about Michael as a doctoral adviser. One can’t write about Michael without starting with his unbelievable generosity. He read something like fifteen drafts of […]
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 […]
Michael found it occasionally necessary to yell at me. I accepted this without complaint. I was a football player in my youth and had been called worse by more menacing authority figures. Fidan Elcioglu recently recalled Michael shouting at me across the table in our Public Ethnography seminar, when I kept insisting that the software […]
In 1981, in my first week in Berkeley’s graduate program, Michael Burawoy asked me why I had decided to come to Berkeley, and what I expected to do with my PhD? As it happened, I knew I could be honest because I had met Michael in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1973, when I was still in […]
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 […]
I worked with Michael during his pre-paradigm days, meaning prior to the publication of Ethnography Unbound (with et al. 1992) and Public Sociology: Between Utopia and Anti-Utopia (2021). When I started at Berkeley, he was finishing Manufacturing Consent (1979) and spending a lot of time in Budapest. That was okay with me. I revered him […]
As a former editor of the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, which Michael Burawoy encouraged me to join, it gives me great pleasure to remember him here in these pages. Michael was a huge influence in my life, in ways that only became clear to me as I got older. Firstly, I would never have become […]
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 […]
When I was applying to graduate school, I had no family experience or professional networks, I didn’t understand what a PhD meant other than spending a very long time on a very specific project. I had recently told someone I’d never do a doctorate, for how could anyone want to study just one thing for […]
I was living in Jordan when I applied to Berkeley’s graduate program. I had been living in Lebanon and Jordan for six years and hadn’t managed to keep up with what was happening in my field. Once accepted into the program, I turned to friends in Chicago and San Francisco to get a sense of […]
As Raka Ray says in her remembrance, Michael Burawoy’s greatest legacy “was in the people whose lives he changed. He was an extraordinary teacher who mentored and inspired thousands of students, changing their lives with his fierce intellect and kindness.” I was one of those students. I first encountered Michael roughly halfway through his time […]