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In Almost Home, H. B. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian-born scholar who has spent three decades working and living in the United States, reflects on his life as an immigrant and places his story within the context of the larger history of immigration.
    Due to both his family background and the prevalence of U.S. media in Latin America, Cavalcanti already felt immersed in U.S. culture before arriving in Kentucky in 1981 to complete graduate studies. At that time, opportunities for advancement in the United States exceeded those in Brazil, and in an era of military dictatorships throughout much of Latin America, Cavalcanti sought in the United States a nation of laws. In this memoir, he reflects on the dynamics of acculturation, immigrant parenting, interactions with native-born U.S. citizens, and the costs involved in rejecting his country of birth for an adopted nation. He also touches on many of the factors that contribute to migration in both the “sending” and “receiving” countries and explores the contemporary phenomenon of accelerated immigration.
    With its blend of personal anecdotes and scholarly information, Almost Home addresses both individual and policy-related issues to provide a moving portrait of the impact of migration on those who, like Cavalcanti, confront both the wonder and the disorientation inherent in the immigrant experience.

Long a dominant figure in the French human sciences, Pierre Bourdieu has become internationally influential in the fields of sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. A major figure in the development of "practice" as an organizing concept in social research, Bourdieu has emerged as the foremost advocate of reflexive social science; his work combines an astonishing range of empirical work with highly sophisticated theory.

American reception of his works, however, has lacked a full understanding of their place within the broad context of French human science. His individual works separated by distinct boundaries between social science fields in American academia, Bourdieu's cohesive thought has come to this country in fragments.

Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives provides a unified and balanced appraisal of Bourdieu's varied works by both proponents and skeptics. The essays are written from the varied viewpoints of cultural anthropology, ethnomethodology and other varieties of sociology, existential and Wittgensteinian philosophies, linguistics, media studies, and feminism. They work around three main themes: Bourdieu's effort to transcend gaps between practical knowledge and universal structures, his central concept of "reflexivity," and the relations between social structure, systems of classification, and language.

Ultimately, the contributors raise a variety of crucial theoretical questions and address problems that are important not only to understanding Bourdieu but to advancing empirical work of the kind he has pioneered. In an essay written especially for this volume, Bourdieu describes his own "mode of intellectual production" and the reasons he sees for its common misunderstanding.

The contributors are Hubert Dreyfus, Paul Rabinow, Charles Taylor, Aaron Cicourel, James Collins, William Hanks, Beate Krais, Nicholas Garnham, Scott Lash, Roger Brubaker, and Loic Wacquant, and the editors.

At the age of eighty, one of the most influential yet reclusive intellectuals of the twentieth century consented to his first interviews in nearly thirty years. Hailed by Le Figaro as "an event," the resulting conversations between Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon (a correspondent for Le Nouvel Observateur) reveal the great anthropologist speaking of his life and work with ease and humor.

Now available in English, the conversations are rich in Lévi-Strauss's candid appraisals of some of the best-known figures of the Parisian intelligentsia: surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst, with whom Lévi-Strauss shared a bohemian life in 1940s Manhattan; de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, the stars of existentialism; Leiris, Foucault, Dumézil, Jacob, Lacan, and others. His long friendships with Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty are recalled, as well as his encounters with prominent figures in American anthropology: Lowie, Boas (who suddenly died in his chair beside Lévi-Strauss at a banquet at Columbia University), Benedict, Linton, Mead, and Kroeber.

Lévi-Strauss speaks frankly about how circumstances and his own inclinations, after his early fieldwork in Brazil, led him to embrace theoretical work. His straightforward answers to Eribon's penetrating questions—What is a myth? What is structuralism? Are you a philosopher?—clarify his intellectual motives and the development of his research; his influential role as an administrator, including the founding of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology and of the journal L'Homme; the course of his writings, from Elementary Structures of Kinship to The Jealous Potter; and his thoughts on the conduct of anthropology today. 

Never before has Lévi-Strauss spoken so freely on so many aspects of his life: his initial failure to be elected to the Collège de France; his reaction to the events of May 1968; his regrets at not being a great investigative reporter or playwright; his deep identification with Wagner, Proust, and Rousseau. This is a rare opportunity to become acquainted with a great thinker in all his dimensions.

"Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial." This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall—how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights.

Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity.

With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.

This groundbreaking study details the intellectual development of George Herbert Mead as a thinker of great originality and as a practitioner of social reform. Gary Cook traces the genesis of Mead's social psychological and philosophical ideas by analyzing his journal articles and posthumously published writings.
 

For most sociologists, their life’s work does not end with retirement. Many professors and practitioners continue to teach, publish, or explore related activities after leaving academia. They also connect with others in the field to lessen the isolation they sometimes feel outside the ivory tower or an applied work setting. 

The editors and twenty contributors to the essential anthology Journeys in Sociology use a life-course perspective to address the role of sociology in their lives. The power of their personal experiences—during the Great Depression, World War II, or the student protests and social movements in the 1960s and ‘70s—magnify how and why social change prompted these men and women to study sociology. Moreover, all of the contributors include a discussion of their activities in retirement.   

From Bob Perrucci, Tuck Green, and Wendell Bell, who write about issues of class, to Debra Kaufman and Elinore Lurie, who explain how gender played a role in their careers, the diverse entries in Journeys in Sociology provide a fascinating look at both the influence of their lives on the discipline and the discipline on these sociologists’ lives. 

Contributors include: David J. Armor, Wendell Bell, Glen H. Elder, Jr., Henry W. Fischer, Janet Zollinger Giele, Charles S. (Tuck) Green, Peter Mandel Hall, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Debra Renee Kaufman, Corinne Kirchner, Elinore E. Lurie, Gary T. Marx, Robert Perrucci, Fred Pincus, Thomas Scheff, Arthur Shostak, David Simon, Natalie J. Sokoloff, Edward Tiryakian, Joyce E. Williams, and the editors.

Published in collaboration with the American Sociological Association Opportunities in Retirement Network.

"Rationalist theories of political behavior have recently risen in status to that of a new—or, more accurately, rediscovered—paradigm in the systematic study of politics. Brian Barry's short, provocative book played no small part in the debate that precipitated this shift. . . . Without reservation, Barry's treatise is the most lucid and most influential critique of two important, competing perspectives in political analysis: the 'sociological' school of Talcott Parsons, Gabriel Almond, and other so-called functionalists; and the 'economic' school of Anthony Downs and Mancur Olson, among others."—Dennis J. Encarnation, American Journal of Sociology

Stuart Hall’s Voice explores the ethos of style that characterized Stuart Hall’s intellectual vocation. David Scott frames the book—which he wrote as a series of letters to Hall in the wake of his death—as an evocation of friendship understood as the moral and intellectual medium in which his dialogical hermeneutic relationship with Hall’s work unfolded. In this respect, the book asks: what do we owe intellectually to the work of those whom we know well, admire, and honor? Reflecting one of the lessons of Hall’s style, the book responds: what we owe should be conceived less in terms of criticism than in terms of listening. 
 

Hall’s intellectual life was animated by voice in literal and extended senses: not only was his voice distinctive in the materiality of its sound, but his thinking and writing were fundamentally shaped by a dialogical and reciprocal practice of speaking and listening. Voice, Scott suggests, is the central axis of the ethos of Hall’s style. 
 

Against the backdrop of the consideration of the voice’s aspects, Scott specifically engages Hall’s relationship to the concepts of "contingency" and "identity," concepts that were dimensions less of a method as such than of an attuned and responsive attitude to the world. This attitude, moreover, constituted an ethical orientation of Hall’s that should be thought of as a special kind of generosity, namely a "receptive generosity," a generosity oriented as much around giving as receiving, as much around listening as speaking.

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly.

This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants.

Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt.

"Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher

"Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd

A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity.

According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.

The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them.

The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them "children of the '60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation's private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle.

In July 2009, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) began publishing book reviews by an individual writing as Barbara Celarent, professor of particularity at the University of Atlantis. Mysterious in origin, Celarent’s essays taken together provide a broad introduction to social thinking. Through the close reading of important texts, Celarent’s short, informative, and analytic essays engaged with long traditions of social thought across the globe—from India, Brazil, and China to South Africa, Turkey, and Peru. . . and occasionally the United States and Europe.

Sociologist and AJS editor Andrew Abbott edited the Celarent essays, and in Varieties of Social Imagination, he brings the work together for the first time. Previously available only in the journal, the thirty-six meditations found here allow readers not only to engage more deeply with a diversity of thinkers from the past, but to imagine more fully a sociology—and a broader social science—for the future.