Our beloved colleague, Michael Burawoy, was killed the evening of February 3, 2025 when he was hit by a car while walking near his home in Oakland. Michael was a pillar of our community for decades, an intellectual giant, a dedicated mentor and educator, and a dear friend. Indeed, he played a central role in defining who we are as an intellectual and human community.
UPDATE: The American Sociological Association and International Sociological Association are hosting an online tribute to Michael Burawoy's life and legacy at 9am Pacific time on Saturday, February 8. You can watch it here: bit.ly/414VbLC
A Berkeley Sociology memorial service is being arranged. In lieu of flowers, we ask for contributions to the Burawoy Chair's Endowment for Sociology, which supports the graduate and undergraduate students to whom Michael was always dedicated.
To add your own remembrances below, please email sociologychair@berkeley.edu. Please be sure to include your name and any affiliation with UC Berkeley.
Professor Michael Burawoy, 1947-2025
Michael Burawoy, a world-renowned sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, died after being struck by a vehicle on Monday, February 3. He was 77.
Burawoy joined the Berkeley Sociology Department as an Assistant Professor in 1976, after earning his PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago (1976) under the supervision of Professor William Julius Wilson. Burawoy’s scholarship, graduate mentorship, undergraduate teaching, and professional leadership profoundly shaped the Berkeley sociology department, the discipline, the profession, the university, and sociological practice and publics around the globe. He retired in 2023 after 47 years of service to the university, but he continued to mentor graduate students and remained very active in the discipline.
For nearly five decades, Professor Burawoy was a leading intellectual influence in the discipline. He published 12 books and well over 120 papers, essays, and book chapters. Many of Burawoy’s published works, including Manufacturing Consent (1979), The Politics of Production (1985), and The Extended Case Method (2009), were translated into multiple languages. He is famous for his myriad generative contributions to sociological theory, sociological methods, analyses of labor processes in industrial worksites, analyses of the university as a place of work, and especially in more recent years, for his work to advance public sociology as a distinctive, legitimate mode of doing sociology in and through engagement with non-academic practitioners and collaborators, always with an orientation to the public good. His contributions to the profession have been recognized by numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Marxist Section of the American Sociological Association (2020) as well as the W.E.B. DuBois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (2024).
Burawoy was a transformative leader on campus and in the profession. He served as Sociology Department Chair (1996-1998, 2000-2002) as well as co-Chair and Secretary of the Berkeley Faculty Association (2015-2021). He was elected President of the American Sociological Association (2003-2004) as well as President of the International Sociological Association (2010-2014). Across these various constituencies and communities, Michael Burawoy’s leadership and service was characterized by intellectual vision, political commitment to raise voices of those at “the bottom” or the margins, dedication to advance the public good, and integrity, generosity, compassion, and good humor.
As President of American Sociological Association, Burawoy developed and advanced his call for “public sociology” a call that energized more diverse and younger generations of sociologists to practice sociology through proactive engagement with concerns and questions that emanate from communities beyond academia. As President of the International Sociological Association, Burawoy made sustained and effective efforts to build infrastructure for sustained scholarly exchange among and between scholars of the “global south” and the “global north.” His contributions as ISA president made a huge impact on American sociology by increasing openness and attention to global issues and exerting counter-pressure on some of the inward focused, provincializing tendencies of the discipline in the U.S. He was founding editor of a new ISA journal called Global Dialogue (2010-2017) that featured the work and ideas of sociologists from around the world, translated into multiple languages to reduce barriers to scholarly exchange, and to remove excuses for failure by U.S. based scholars to engage with scholars from the global south.
Burawoy’s teaching and advising were legendary, as were his commitments to the continual improvement of pedagogy and to sustaining accessible, high-quality public higher education. He won numerous accolades for his teaching and mentorship at the graduate and undergraduate levels over his career, including the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award (1979), the American Sociological Association Distinguished Teaching Award (2003), and the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of GSIs (2007). His impact on students was profound. He supervised no fewer than 80 dissertations. And for four decades, he taught the department’s required undergraduate theory sequence and was renowned for learning the name of each and every undergraduate student he taught by the second week of class, even in large lectures with more than 200 students.
Upon his retirement, Professor Burawoy was awarded the Berkeley Citation (2023), one of the campus’ top honors, reserved for “distinguished individuals or organizations…whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields.”
Remembrances
Like many others I am reeling from the news of the death of my beloved mentor and friend Michael Burawoy, UC Berkeley Sociology professor emeritus. This is a tremendous loss for me personally, to our Social Sciences community, UC Berkeley, and to sociologists worldwide, from England to South Africa, and from India to Brazil.
Michael dedicated 47 years of his life to Berkeley, contributing immeasurably to the discipline, transforming the fields of labor, ethnography and theory. He was past president of the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association. His greatest legacy, though, went far beyond the many books and articles he published or prestigious awards he received -- it was in the people whose lives he changed. He was an extraordinary teacher, who mentored and inspired thousands of students, changing their lives with his fierce intellect and kindness.
He mentored me when I first arrived at Berkeley as an assistant professor. I learned to love Berkeley through his eyes. I learned what it meant to teach, to mentor, to do research seriously, and above all, what devotion to one’s calling looked like. I am grateful that in my present position as dean, I will always have his voice in my ear, reminding me that it is my duty to think above all about the needs of those most disadvantaged, the powerless, those who had to fight to get here.
I will miss him always as a beloved friend, mentor and comrade. An unimaginable loss.