The point, after all, is to change the world.
I have this one funny interaction with Michael emblazoned in my memory. I wasn’t yet his student, and we didn’t know each other well—honestly, I wasn’t even sure he knew who I was at that point. I was taking a seminar with his late friend Erik Olin Wright, who was then workshopping the manuscript that […]
I didn’t know Michael well the first time I went to his office hours. I was one of the teaching assistants for his social theory class, and I had been dazzled by his brilliance and charisma in lecture. But when I arrived, he was in a sour mood, something I hadn’t yet experienced (although I […]
It’s not easy to find words to say about Michael Burawoy, his passing is still so near, and others who knew him better have already spoken eloquently. We will be remembering him and debating his work for a long time. Let me thank the BJS editors for providing us an occasion for that remembrance in […]
This is a story about my first real encounter with ethnography—and, not coincidentally, with Michael Burawoy. We met during visiting week at Berkeley in 2006. I thought, “I’m a Marxist. He’s a Marxist. We’ll hit it off.” He took me to a Thai restaurant. I arrived ready for a spirited political discussion over noodles. Instead, […]
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. […]
Margaret Eby, Elizabeth Torres Carpio, Justin Germain, Thomas Gepts, and Natalie Pasquinelli spent several years working with Michael Burawoy on what they called the Extractive University Project, a collective ethnographic investigation of public higher education from the standpoint of graduate student workers. They share these reflections on their early days of the project with Michael […]
Cliché as it may be to say so, I find it next to impossible to conjure words to convey what has been lost with Michael Burawoy’s untimely death. The weight of his absence is enormous; its expanse vast and far-reaching; its reverberations still in motion, their endpoints still unknown. When forced to harness feelings into […]
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 […]