Michael Burawoy retired from teaching sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has conducted ethnographies of the working class in Zambia, the United States, Hungary and Russia and from those vantage points engaged sociology, and Marxism.
Nabil Echchaibi is an Associate Professor of media studies and Director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on the politics and poetics of Muslim visibility. His work has appeared in various journals and in many book volumes, and his opinion columns have been published in the Guardian, Forbes, Al-Jazeera, Salon, and Open Democracy. Nabil is currently writing his book, ‘Unmosquing Islam, Media, and Fugitive Muslimness’. He is the Co-editor of the journal Cultural Studies.
Peter Evans is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, He is best known for his work on the political economy of national development as exemplified by his 1995 book Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation.
Egor Fain is a Junior Research Fellow at Center for Stability and Risk Analysis in Higher School of Economics.
Jack A. Goldstone is the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has won fellowships from the Carnegie, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and has received the Ibn Khaldun Award and the Political Sociology Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Sociological Association. Goldstone is the author or editor of 17 books and almost 200 articles and book chapters on the topics of revolution and social change. He has also held faculty appointments at Northwestern University, UC-Davis, Caltech, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Konstanz University, and Chuo University
Leonid Grinin is a Senior Research Professor at the Center for Stability and Risk Analysis at the HSE University in Moscow, as well as Senior Research Professor of the Oriental Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a Co-editor of the international journals Social Evolution & History and the Journal of Globalization Studies, as well as a Co-editor of the international almanacs Evolution, History & Mathematics, and Kondratieff Waves. He is the author of more than 600 publications, including 30 monographs in Russian, English, and Chinese. His current research focuses on comparative political studies, theory of revolution, political anthropology, global economy, global history, historical sociology, and futurology. Among his monographs are The Cybernetic Revolution and the Forthcoming Epoch of Self-Regulating Systems (Uchitel, 2016, with Anton Grinin), Big History of Globalization: The Emergence of a Global World System (Springer 2019, in co-authorship with Julia Zinkina, David Christian, and others), Islamism, Arab Spring, and the Future of Democracy: World System and World Values Perspectives (Springer, 2019; with Andrey Korotayev and Arno Tausch). In 2004, he was awarded as a winner of the best publication of Socius journal during the year for the article ‘People of Publicity – a New Social Layer?’. In 2012, he was awarded the Gold Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation. In 2016, he received the Belyayev award for the book From Вifaces to Nanorobots (the book published in Russian in co-authorship with Anton Grinin).
Andrey Korotayev is a Russian anthropologist, economic historian, comparative political scientist, demographer and sociologist, with major contributions to world-systems theory, cross-cultural studies, theories of revolution, Near Eastern history, Big History, and mathematical modeling of social and economic macrodynamics. He is currently the Director of the Center for Stability and Risk Analysis at HSE University – Moscow, and a Senior Research Professor at the Eurasian Center for Big History and System Forecasting of the Institute of Oriental Studies as well as in the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has authored/co-authored over 400 scholarly publications, including monographs such as ‘Ancient Yemen’ (Oxford University Press, 1995), ‘World Religions and Social Evolution of the Old World Oikumene Civilizations: A Cross-Cultural Perspective’ (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), ‘Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth’ (URSS, 2006), ‘Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends’ (URSS, 2006), ‘Great Divergence and Great Convergence. A Global Perspective’ (Springer, 2015), ‘Economic Cycles, Crises, and the Global Periphery’ (Springer, 2016), ‘The 21st century Singularity and global futures: A Big History perspective’ (Springer, 2020), ‘Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century: The New Waves of Revolutions, and the Causes and Effects of Disruptive Political Change’ (Springer, 2022, with J. Goldstone and L. Grinin). He is a laureate of a Russian Science Support Foundation in ‘The Best Economists of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Nomination (2006); in 2012, he was awarded the Gold Kondratieff Medal by the International N. D. Kondratieff Foundation.
Zachary Levenson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida International University and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City.
Roi Livne is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Universality of Michigan, His research is situated at the intersection of the new sociology of morality, the sociology of culture, science and technology studies, medical sociology, and economic sociology. He has written about the relationship between moral and material life under capitalism, especially as it plays out in the US healthcare economy – a sector that accounts for some 18% of the country’s GDP. Livne’s book Values at the End of Life recounts the rise of ‘the new economy of dying’ – a multi-billion-dollar industry, embedded in strong moral convictions, popular sentiments, and professional practices that inform how clinicians and patients reach life-and-death decisions at the hospital bedside. His other research projects tackled the political and social consequence of applying economic knowledge in policymaking and the social inequalities structured into science and expertise. He is currently studying the moral economy of pricing in US healthcare, writing about COVID and its sociological significance, and pondering the question of limits in modernity.
Valentine M. Moghadam is a Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at Northeastern University, Boston. From January 2012 to May 2017, she served as Director of the International Affairs Program. Previously she was a Section Chief at UNESCO in Paris, where she led policy-oriented research on gender equality and development in the Social and Human Sciences Sector. Born in Tehran, Iran, Professor Moghadam received her higher education in Canada and the United States. Her areas of research are globalization, transnational social movements and networks, and gender, politics, and development in the Middle East and North Africa. Her most recent book, co-authored with Shamiran Mako, is After the Arab Uprisings: Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa (Cambridge, 2021). Her recent article, co-authored with Sahar Shakiba and Omid Ghaderzadeh, is ‘Women in Iranian Kurdistan: Patriarchy and the Quest for Empowerment’ (Gender & Society, vol. 35, no. 4, Aug. 2021: 616–642).
Sarah Mosoetsa is a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Human Sciences Research Council and is a Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She was the first Executive Director for the National Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) from 2014 to 2023. She is the author of several publications, including, Eating from one pot: Dynamics of Survival in poor South African households (Wits Press), and co-editor of Labor in the Global South: challenges and alternatives for workers (ILO) and Precarious Labor in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press). She has worked for various organizations, including the Society, Work and Politics Institute and the Development Bank of Southern Africa. Prof Mosoetsa sits on various boards and committees, inter alia, the National Minimum Wage Commission, the National Research Foundation Board, the University of South Africa Council, the University of Venda Council and the Advisory Board for the Southern Center for Inequality Studies.
Karin Pampallis has been working as a Freelance Editor and Indexer for more than 30 years. She has also worked with Eddie Webster as Publications Manager at the Chris Hani Institute (CHI) and as Project Manager of the Hidden Voices Project at the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her publications include: Nelson Mandela (Maskew Miller Longman, 2000, 2014); Challenging Corporate Capital: Creating an Alternative to Neo-liberalism (CHI, 2016, with Andreas Bieler and Robert O’Brien); The Unresolved National Question: Left Thought under Apartheid (Wits University Press, 2017, with Edward Webster).
Hyun Ok Park is a Professor of Sociology at York University. With archival and ethnographic research, her research investigates global capitalism in colonial, industrial, and financial forms, democracy, socialism, and post-socialist transition, especially in terms of the experience of laborers, ethnic and diasporic minorities, and refugees. She engages with the critical theory of modernity and otherness, postcolonialism, and transnational and global history, to which she contributes with her anchored sociological inquiry of capitalism and social change. She is the author of Two Deams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press 2005) and The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (Columbia University Press 2015)
Marcel Paret is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah, and Senior Research Associate in the Center for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Sharmila Rudrappa is a Professor of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, and her research is on issues related to gender, race, and labor. Her specific interests are on reproductive markets, with a focus on the United States and India. She is the author of Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India (New York University Press, 2015). She is also the author of Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2004), which explores race and activism in late 20th century Chicago.
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is a Palestinian sociologist, scholar, educator and activist. She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is most known for her scholarship on Zionist settler colonization and the Palestinian citizen population in Israel; her book Colonizing Palestine: the Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba was published by Stanford University press in August 2023.
Josh Seim is an Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston College. He is broadly interested in labor, medicine, punishment, welfare, cities, and state. He is the author of Bandage, Sort, and Hustle: Ambulance Crews on the Front Lines of Urban Suffering (University of California Press, 2020).
Alisa Shishkina is a Leading Research Fellow at Center for Stability and Risk Analysis in Higher School of Economics
Gay Seidman is a Martindale Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She first met Michael Burawoy in Lusaka in 1973; she ran into him again at UC-Berkeley, where he supervised her doctoral dissertation.
Eddie Webster was a Sociologist and Emeritus Professor at the Southern Center for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, who died on 5 March 2024. He was an intellectual, a teacher, a leader, an activist for social change, a builder of institutions, a rugby player and jogger, a man of great energy and integrity, and the life and soul of any party. As an intellectual and activist, he was always independent and critical, and always engaged, whether working with trade unions or with South Africa’s new democratic government. Eddie was one of those pioneering generations of scholar-activists at the university, white academics who identified with and supported the black resistance movement, and who saw the world in new ways and pioneered the production of new knowledge. His most recent publication was the edited volume Recasting Workers’ Power: Work and Inequality in the Shadow of the Digital Age (with Lynford Dor), Policy Press 2023.
Michelle Williams is a Professor and Head of Sociology and former Chairperson of the Global Labor University (GLU) at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg. Her research focuses on democracy, transformative socio-ecological projects, environmental sociology, alternative development and women’s participation in political and economic spaces. She is working on a book (with Vishwas Satgar), Transformative Alternatives in the Age of Polycrisis: Worker Cooperatives, Commons, and Deep Democracy (forthcoming). Her publications include Building Alternatives: the Story of India’s Oldest Worker Cooperative (co-authored with Dr. Thomas Isaac), looking at the 95-year-old cooperative in Kerala, India and a co-edited volume (with Vishwas Satgar) Destroying Democracy: Neoliberal Capitalism and the Rise of Authoritarian Politics, Wits University Press 2021 (https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50256) in which the threats to democracy are explored in South Africa, United States, Brazil, and India.
