Conversations With Bourdieu ─ The Johannesburg Moment

Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most influential sociologist of our time. His works take in education, culture, class, philosophy, religion, law, media, intellectuals, methodology, colonialism, kinship, and politics. In Conversations with Bourdieu, Michael Burawoy constructs a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and his nemesis—Marxism—from which he silently borrowed so much.? Karl von Holdt, in turn, brings these conversations to South Africa, showing the relevance of Bourdieu’s ideas to a country he never visited.?Armed with Bourdieu, von Holdt takes up pressing social and political issues of contemporary South Africa. Conversations with Bourdieu pushes theory to its limits through dialogue—dialogue between theorists and dialogue between theory and the world it represents.

Michael Burawoy is a professor at the University of California–Berkeley. He is a sociological Marxist, best known as author of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism—a study on work and organizations that has been translated into a number of languages—and is the leading proponent of public sociology. In the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology he was elected president of the International Sociological Association (ISA) for the period 2010–2014. Karl van Holdt is a senior researcher at the Society Work and Development Institute at Wits University. Before that he was at the COSATU-linked policy institute, NALEDI. He is the author of Transition from Below: Forging Trade Unionism and Workplace Change in South Africa.