International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2017

In personal tribute to Joshua A. Fishman, I tell a few stories about this remarkable scholar as I got to know him – a glimpse of the person behind the great ideas that have so powerfully shaped our thinking. My many vivid memories of things Fishman said or wrote in my personal encounters with him – often pithy one-liners – are testimony to the power of his mind and voice, his spirit and soul. From my first year of Ph.D. study when I took his course

Archives of Metallurgy and Materials, 2016

The following is the text of an oral presentation delivered at the Zener Medal Award ceremony in Hefei on 23 September 2015.

Philosophy Today, 2024

Special Issue of Philosophy Today (volume 68, no. 4) on the philosophy of Reiner Schürmann. Includes nineteen articles, an editors’ introduction, two testimonials, and a book review. The issue is available for free for a limited time: https://www.pdcnet.org/collection-anonymous/browse?fp=philtoday&fq=philtoday/Volume/8932%7C68/8996%7CIssue:%204/

Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond. Ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding. (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities 10.) Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010, 1–11.

A brief survey of the burgeoning Intelligent Design movement, its relationship to historic creationism, and relevance to the current "Kulturkampf" religious conservative political movement

SAJ. Serbian architectural journal, 2014

This late draft of a chapter now published discusses Bauman’s analysis of liquid modernity and Gellner’s approach to nation-formation processes and the dynamics of Islamic societies. Do they help us make sense of the uprisings and civil wars in the Middle East and North Africa since 2001 and the Eurozone crisis since 2007? These issues are contextualised through a brief discussion of the biographies of Bauman and Gellner, some of their key ideas, the challenge to those ideas posed by the new agenda of modernity, and the place on that agenda filled by recent transformations and crises in the Middle East, North Africa and the European Union. It is argued that Bauman’s contribution can best be adapted to a world ‘beyond Bauman’ by identifying three distinct versions of his approach to modernity. These three Baumans are mutually contradictory in some respects but each yields rich resources. They are the products of a particular biography that produced certain strengths as well as some inevitable gaps. Gellner’s different biographical path has produced work with some complementary strengths that help fill those gaps.

Donald Levine passed away in April. Committed to the value of international dialogue among sociological theorists, Don was an active member of this Research Committee. He contributed to the pages of Theory on several occasions, most recently with a stirring memorial to Schmuel Eisenstadt (in 2011) and a call to critically recover crucial ideas from the sociological heritage about agency and emancipation (in 2012). This issue of Theory is dedicated to Don’s memory. We include articles that testify to his intellectual and personal impact on the field, in its content and form. The notion of dialogue is the keynote. Indeed, through his final days, Don was working on a book, Dialogical Social Theory (which Transaction Press will publish), that would forward the concept of dialogue as the emergent guiding idea of his own oeuvre and as a potential lynchpin to a powerful reinterpretation of the theoretical tradition writ large. We are pleased to publish a brief selection from the introduction to Dialogical Social Theory here, and thank Howard Ungerman and Transaction Press for permission to do so. Jon Baskin introduces this selection by way of an account of what it was like to work with Don towards its completion. A University of Chicago graduate student and one of Don’s long-time friends, Baskin’s piece offers a moving portrait of how thought, teaching, and friendship fused in Don’s life. Other articles in this edition speak to issues that Don held dear. He was intensively concerned with questions about how to teach social theory, and believed that doing so well required careful reflection on the aims of education together with the broader situations in which teachers and students find themselves. Wolfgang Knöbl’s essay on his own practice as a theoretical educator ably demonstrates the importance of undertaking such reflection. Questions about the nature of social relations, processes, and structures also animated Don’s work, especially given his life-long engagement with the thought of Simmel and Parsons. Such issues are central in the “invitation to an ongoing experiment” we publish here, which records an ongoing conversation about relational sociology among several participants, with François Dépelteau and Jan Fuhse at the center. That this conversation appears as an unfolding dialogue, in all of its fits and starts, gives and takes, nearing and distancing, would be highly congenial to Don, we believe. In a similar experimental and dialogical vein, we include a link to “Theorizing from the South,” by Gabriel Restrepo. Finally, Don was a master at “inverting the lens” from the objects of social thought to its thinkers, their texts, and their relationships. The essay here by Cinthya Guzman and Dan Silver draws explicit inspiration from Don’s Visions of the Sociological Tradition in reporting ongoing work analyzing sociological theory syllabi in Canada and beyond.

Ettore Majorana Scientific Papers

2020