John Foran (born 1955) is an American sociologist with research interests in global climate justice; radical social movements, revolutions, and radical social change; Third World cultural studies; and Latin American and Middle Eastern studies. He has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. Modernization refers to a model of a progressive transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. Modernization theory originated from the ideas of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), which provided the basis for the modernization paradigm developed by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979). The theory looks at the internal factors of a country while assuming that with assistance, "traditional" countries can be brought to development in the same manner more developed countries have been. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991 but remains a controversial model.
Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American scholar. He is currently the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was previously Professor of Sociology and Middle Eastern studies and held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He served as Academic Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and ISIM Chair of Islam and the Modern World at Leiden University.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a long-time American historian, writer, and activist.
Andrew J. Hoffman is a scholar of environmental issues and sustainable enterprise. He is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS). His research uses a sociological perspective to understand the cultural and institutional aspects of environmental issues for organizations. In particular, he focuses on the processes by which environmental issues both emerge and evolve as social, political and managerial issues. He has written extensively about: the evolving nature of field level pressures related to environmental issues; the corporate responses that have emerged as a result of those pressures, particularly around the issue of climate change; the interconnected networks among non-governmental organizations and corporations and how those networks influence change processes within cultural and institutional systems; the social and psychological barriers to these change processes; and the underlying cultural values that are engaged when these barriers are overcome. His Ph.D. was conferred by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He is an expert in environmental pollution and has published thirteen books and over one-hundred articles and book chapters.
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
James L. Gelvin is an American scholar of Middle Eastern history. He has been a faculty member in the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1995 and has written extensively on the history of the modern Middle East, with particular emphasis on nationalism and the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East.
Padraic Jeremiah Kenney is a professor of history and International Studies at Indiana University. Previously, he was Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Arif Dirlik was a US historian of Turkish origin who published extensively on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and post-colonial criticism. Born in Mersin, Turkey, Dirlik received a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in History at the University of Rochester in 1973.
Cedric Robinson was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
Postdevelopment theory holds that the whole concept and practice of development is a reflection of Western-Northern hegemony over the rest of the world. Postdevelopment thought arose in the 1980s out of criticisms voiced against development projects and development theory, which justified them.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse is a Dutch-born scholar whose work centers on global political economy, development studies and cultural studies. He currently serves as the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Distinguished Professor of Global Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Stephen Gill, FRSC is Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is known for his work in International Relations and Global Political Economy and has published, among others, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Power, Production and Social Reproduction, Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations (1993), American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (1990) and The Global Political Economy: Perspectives, Problems and Policies.
Raymond Carey Bush is a Professor of African Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is also a member of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) advisory board and deputy chair of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE). Bush is married to Dr. Mette Wiggen, a fellow academic at POLIS.
Henry Veltmeyer is a professor of Sociology and International Development Studies at Saint Mary's University (Halifax), Nova Scotia, Canada. He is a prolific author on matters of Development and Globalization. He is also on faculty at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, in the Unidad Académica en Estudios de Desarrollo.
Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.
J. Richard Peet is emeritus professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA. Peet received a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, and has remained there with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand. He is married to geographer Elaine Hartwick and lives in central Massachusetts.
Eric Selbin is a political sociologist whose primary research interests are revolutions and related forms of collective behavior as well as International Relations Theory. Much of his work has focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, and his volume on Modern Latin American Revolutions is frequently used as a textbook in courses in Latin American Studies and contentious politics. He holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota and is Professor of Political Science at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he has also been appointed a University Scholar. In 2013, Selbin was appointed a research fellow at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at the University of Texas at Austin and he has held appointments at Sweden’s Umeå University (2003-2006) and at the Tallinn Postgraduate Summer School in Social and Cultural Studies (2012). In 2014, he was appointed to the Lucy King Brown Chair, one of six endowed, Brown Chairs at Southwestern University.
Cultural studies is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.
Chela Sandoval, associate professor of Chicana Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, is a noted theorist of postcolonial feminism and third world feminism. Beginning with her 1991 pioneering essay 'U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World' Sandoval emerged as a significant voice for women of color and decolonial feminism.
