The point, after all, is to change the world.
Although I formally stopped being Michael’s student more than two decades ago, I remember it vividly—almost viscerally. The nervous anticipation of waiting outside his door for the student before me to leave his office hours; the click of the doorknob signaling it was almost my turn. The relief and gratification when he thought I was […]
I suspect Michael Burawoy is rarely thought of as an Africanist. Rather the words that come to mind might be: a theoretician of work and the labor process, the advocate of public sociology, a leading figure in Marxist theory, global ethnography, studies of socialism and post socialism, race and class, a voice to reclaim the […]
Michael Burawoy had an enormous impact on the people he met and the world he inhabited. I am one of the many, many people who felt a special bond with Michael. He was a mentor, collaborator, friend, supervisor, and fellow traveller to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. His ability to make people feel a special […]
The first time I saw Michael Burawoy, he sped into my line of sight on a bike, three white stripes tracing down his arms and legs. We were meeting at Espresso Roma on College Avenue to begin a small, funded research project the summer before I began graduate school, something the department had set up […]
Reprinted from Jacobin, “Michael Burawoy Never Wavered” (February 14, 2025) Michael Burawoy had three lifelong passions. The first was English football, specifically Manchester United, the team he supported from childhood and to which he remained loyal for the rest of his life. The other two were Marxism and sociology, into which he poured his prodigious […]
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 […]
Michael Burawoy was an unabashed Marxist. One could argue, in fact, that his foremost life project was to advance a Marxist sociology. This was not a project of defending Marx and extolling his benefits. As he put it in 1977, “The man [Marx] was human. He is now dead. He doesn’t have to be saved. […]
Michael Burawoy liked to shout “BB!”—“bloody brilliant!”—when undergrads nailed an answer. But for his graduate students, there was an entirely different kind of BB—Think Big, Act Bold. Think Big: I learned from Burawoy that even the most minute aspects of our social world potentially reveal the larger whole. Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent showed how closely looking […]
Michael Burawoy was larger than life. He was a whirlwind of energy dedicated to reshaping sociology. He articulated the many faces of public sociology and invited us to honor them all. He connected American sociology with the wider world, focusing in particular on all issues of material want, political injustice, and social indignity. While in […]
From comments delivered on March 1, 2025, at a webinar in honor of Michael Burawoy by the Social Theory Network, based in Bangladesh. The webinar was titled “Public Sociology & the Global South.” Michael Burawoy was my PhD advisor and was in my life from 2001. I had the privilege of sharing a rich and […]
A larger-than-life figure in Sociology, I met Michael as my theory professor during my first year of doctoral studies at Berkeley. His passion for teaching was undeniable, and he was known for his animated lectures and for his copious responses to students’ memos and papers (even for the 100-word responses he demanded with a Saturday-night […]
“24 hours a day, seven days a week on sociology”—that’s how Michael described his life during his retirement gathering in April 2023. For him, sociology had always meant teaching, so it came as no surprise that he agreed to the event only on one “non-negotiable condition” that the event be an opportunity to bring together […]