Judith Butler
1956 - Present (66 years)
Judith Butler is the Maxine Ellio Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler earned a bachelor of arts in philosophy at Yale University in 1978, and her PhD at Yale in 1984. In addition to UC Berkeley, Butler has taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and the University of Amsterdam. Drawing on critical traditions including phenomenology, feminism, cultural criticism, and philosophy of language, much of Butler’s work focuses on issues of gender.
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Jürgen Habermas
1929 - Present (93 years)
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher mostly associated with the influential Frankurt School in Germany, part of the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt, and historically an important center for research on social theory and critical philosophy. Habermas, now 90, earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1954. Habermas is a famed philosopher who has taught a number of influential philosophers, including Hans Joas at the University of Chicago. Habermas is known for his work on communicative rationality, a position that place emphasis on rational...
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Bruno Latour
1947 - Present (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Actor Network Theory, Social Theory Bruno Latour is an anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tours. Soon after graduating, he became interested in anthropology, and set out on a study of race and decolonization in Ivory Coast. He is best known for his work, Nous n’avons jamais ete modernes: Essais d’anthropologie symetrique (translated: We Have Never Been Modern). This theme, of challenging methods and findings of scientific inquiry, is revisited in his later work, Pandora’s Hope. His work in Science, Technology and Modernity has been provocative, to say the least.
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Anthony Giddens
1940 - Present (82 years)
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities. He has academic appointments in approximately twenty different universities throughout the world and has received numerous honorary degrees.
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Peter L. Berger
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Peter Ludwig Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theoretical contributions to sociological theory.
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Patricia Hill Collins
1948 - Present (74 years)
American sociologist Patrician Hill Collins currently holds the title of University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She previously was a professor of the University of Cincinnati (where she was also head of the Department of African-American Studies). Collins also holds the distinction of being the 100th president of the American Sociological Association, the first African-American woman to do so. Collins completed her BA in sociology at Brandeis University in 1965, her MA in social science education at Harvard in 1970, and her PhD at Brandeis in 1984. Colli...
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Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
1981 - Present (41 years)
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie , is a French far-left philosopher and sociologist. He is the author of several books, articles and lectures pertaining to social and political philosophy, epistemology and critical theory, and the sociology of culture and intellectual life; with a particular interest in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.
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Warren Farrell
1943 - Present (79 years)
Warren Thomas Farrell is an American political scientist, activist, and author of seven books on men's and women's issues. Farrell has been described as the "father of the men's movement." Farrell initially came to prominence in the 1970s as a supporter of second wave feminism; he served on the New York City Board of the National Organization for Women . Farrell advocates for "a gender liberation movement", with "both sexes walking a mile in each other’s moccasins".
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Chandra Talpade Mohanty
1955 - Present (67 years)
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is a Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, Sociology, and the Cultural Foundations of Education and Dean's Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University. Mohanty, a postcolonial and transnational feminist theorist, has argued for the inclusion of a transnational approach in exploring women’s experiences across the world. She is author of Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity , and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism , Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures , Feminism and War: Confronting U.S.
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Gail Dines
1958 - Present (64 years)
Gail Dines is professor emerita of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. A radical feminist, Dines specializes in the study of pornography. Described in 2010 as the world's leading anti-pornography campaigner, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. Dines is co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality .
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Luc Boltanski
1940 - Present (82 years)
Luc Boltanski is a French sociologist, Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, and founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, known as the leading figure in the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology. His work has significantly influenced sociology, political economy and social history.
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Jeffrey C. Alexander
1947 - Present (75 years)
Jeffrey Charles Alexander is an American sociologist, and one of the world's leading social theorists. He is the founding figure in the school of cultural sociology he refers to as the "strong program".
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Mark Granovetter
1943 - Present (79 years)
Mark Sanford Granovetter is a professor at Stanford University. He is a prominent sociologist who earned an A.B. in history at Princeton University and a Ph.D in sociology from Harvard University. He is one of the most cited experts in the field, best known for his paper called The Strength of Weak Ties, which has been cited over 50,000 times. He has also conducted research in economic sociology. His article, Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness, is said to have inspired a new field of inquiry in economic sociology. In 2014 he was believed to be a Nobel Prize contender and was placed on Thomson Reuters’s list predicting winners for economics.
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Edward O. Wilson
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Myrmecology, Biodiversity, Sociobiology Edward O. Wilson is the world’s leading expert on ants, a specialty known as myrmecology, but that’s not all. He is also considered the father of biodiversity and the father of sociobiology. He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus of Entomology at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a lecturer at Duke University. He earned his BS and MS in biology from the University of Alabama. He was named to the Harvard Society of Fellows, which enabled him to travel around the world studying ant species from Australia to Cuba.
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Martina Löw
1965 - Present (57 years)
Martina Löw is a German sociologist. Vita Martina Löw graduated in 1993 at the Goethe-University Frankfurt by Marianne Rodenstein with the thesis "Raum ergreifen. Frauen zwischen Arbeit, sozialen Beziehungen und der Kultur des Selbst“. The habilitation was completed in 2000 in the Department of History, Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and she was awarded the Christian Wolff Prize for her previous work, in particular for her habilitation thesis on Sociology of Space. From January 2002 to July 2013 she was Professor of Sociology at the Technica...
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Laurent Thévenot
1949 - Present (73 years)
Laurent Thévenot is an influential sociologist and professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, or, translated: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Born in 1949, he is now considered one of the most influential thinkers in Economic Convention Theory and a fresh interpretation of French pragmatic sociology. He has written two major works with colleague and frequent collaborator, Luc Boltanski, On Justification and On Justification: Economies of Worth. On Justification inspired a new French Pragmatic Sociology with its examination of current methods of examining the interrelationships between politics, economics, and society.
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Manuel Castells
1942 - Present (80 years)
Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
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Richard Sennett
1943 - Present (79 years)
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
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John Bellamy Foster
1953 - Present (69 years)
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He was born in 1953 in Seattle, Washington. After earning his B.A. from Evergreen State College, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D from York University. He is a well-known scholar in Marxist theory, ecological crises, and the political economy of capitalism. At first, Foster’s research interests focused on capitalism and Marxian political economies, later blended with ecological crises. His work on redefining Marxist views on ecological concerns introduced the idea of a “metabolic rift”, an...
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Harry Collins
1943 - Present (79 years)
Harry Collins, , is a British sociologist of science at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Career While at the University of Bath Professor Collins developed the Bath School approach to the sociology of scientific knowledge.
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Neil Smelser
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Neil Joseph Smelser was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
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Erik Olin Wright
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Erik Olin Wright was an analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
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Theda Skocpol
1947 - Present (75 years)
Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She earned a B.A. from Michigan State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D at Harvard University. She went on to become the first female sociologist to achieve tenure at Harvard University. A scholar of historical institutionalism, comparative sociology, and political science, she has studied the phenomena of social revolutions and impacts on social policy and engagement. Her best known work is States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Her book Protecting So...
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Zygmunt Bauman
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
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Meera Kosambi
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Meera Kosambi was an Indian sociologist. Biography She was the younger daughter of the illustrious intellectual, historian, linguist, statistician and mathematician, D.D. Kosambi, and granddaughter of Acharya Dharmananda Damodar Kosambi, a Buddhist scholar and a Pāli language expert. Her mother's name was Nalini Kosambi . She received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Stockholm. She is the author of several books and articles on urban sociology and women's studies in India.
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Rodney Stark
1934 - Present (88 years)
Rodney William Stark is an American sociologist of religion who was a longtime professor of sociology and of comparative religion at the University of Washington. He is presently the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University, co-director of the university's Institute for Studies of Religion, and founding editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion.
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Harrison White
1930 - Present (92 years)
Harrison White is a highly regarded sociologist, currently the emeritus Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1930. A precocious student, he began studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at only 15 years of age. By the age of 25, he had earned his first Ph.D, in theoretical physics. He then went on to earn a second Ph.D in Sociology from Princeton University. Aside from his substantial influence on current and future sociologists, he has also been a prolific writer. His best-known works are Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge and its rewrite, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action.
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Harald Eia
1966 - Present (56 years)
Harald Meldal Eia is a Norwegian comedian, and sociologist. In recent years, Eia has also made TV-documentaries and written books. Eia became a household name in Norway in the mid-90s and has since then been one of country´s most well-known comedians.
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George Ritzer
1940 - Present (82 years)
George Ritzer is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. Born in New York City, New York in 1940, he is a sociologist studying modern and postmodern social theory, globalization, and consumption. He earned his B.A. in psychology from City College of New York, his M.B.A. from University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and a Ph.D in organizational behavior from Cornell University. Even without a degree in sociology, he still was a pioneer in social theory. He is best known for the concept of McDonaldization, which has four rationalizing dimensions: efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control.
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Howard S. Becker
1928 - Present (94 years)
Howard Saul Becker is an American sociologist who teaches at Northwestern University. Becker has made contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Becker also wrote extensively on sociological writing styles and methodologies. Becker's 1963 book Outsiders provided the foundations for labeling theory. Becker is often called a symbolic interactionist or social constructionist, although he does not align himself with either method. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Becker is considered part of the second Chicago School of Sociology, which also i...
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Hans Joas
1948 - Present (74 years)
Hans Joas is a German sociologist and social theorist. Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2011 until 2014 he was a Permanent Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies ; from 2002 until 2011 he was the Director of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. He is also Visiting Professor of Sociology and Social Thought and a Member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Hans Joas is Ordinary Member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akadem...
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Immanuel Wallerstein
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein was an American sociologist and economic historian. He is perhaps best known for his development of the general approach in sociology which led to the emergence of his world-systems approach. He was a Senior Research Scholar at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2019, and published bimonthly syndicated commentaries through Agence Global on world affairs from October 1998 to July 2019.
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Matthew Desmond
1979 - Present (43 years)
Matthew Desmond is an American sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab. Education Desmond studied as an undergraduate at Arizona State University, serving at the same time as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in Tempe. In 2002, he graduated from ASU with a B.S. degree, summa cum laude in communications and justice studies. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was formerly the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard...
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Jutta Allmendinger
1956 - Present (66 years)
Jutta Allmendinger is a German sociologist. She is the president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a professor of educational sociology and labor market research at Humboldt University. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
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Randall Collins
1941 - Present (81 years)
Randall Collins is a contemporary social theorist focused on the sociology of intellectuals, politics, and economic change. He earned his B.A. in psychology from Harvard University, under the instruction of Talcott Parsons. He graduated from Stanford University with an M.A. before transferring to University of California, Berkeley to earn an M.A. and Ph.D in sociology. His book, Interaction Ritual Chains, had a substantial influence on the power of ritual and habit within social structures and interactions. His theory suggests that there are two parts of the linkage between two people: emotio...
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Thomas Luckmann
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Thomas Luckmann was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany. Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck. He married Benita Petkevic in 1950. His contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science. His best-known titles are the 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge , The Invisible Religion , and The S...
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William Julius Wilson
1935 - Present (87 years)
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
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Ulrich Beck
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Ulrich Beck was a well known German sociologist, and one of the most cited social scientists in the world during his lifetime. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability, ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age, and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity" or "reflexive modernization". He also tried to overturn national perspectives that predominated in sociological investigations with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison de...
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Travis Hirschi
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Travis Warner Hirschi was an American sociologist and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. He helped to develop the modern version of the social control theory of crime and later the self-control theory of crime.
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Eva Illouz
1961 - Present (61 years)
Eva Illouz is a professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. She was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
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Julia Kristeva
1941 - Present (81 years)
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a professor emerita at the University Paris Diderot. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 F...
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Dorothy E. Smith
1926 - Present (96 years)
Dorothy Edith Smith is a Canadian sociologist with research interests in a variety of disciplines, including women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies, as well as in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. Smith founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
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Paul DiMaggio
1951 - Present (71 years)
Paul Joseph DiMaggio is a professor of sociology at New York University and A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He earned his B.A. from Swarthmore College, and his M.A. and Ph.D in sociology from Harvard University. DiMaggio’s body of work has included social inequality, the advent of “high culture”, and organizational structures. His work suggests that organizational behavior is driven less by efficiency and more by the desire for the approval of outside stakeholders. Faced with this tension, organizations stifle creativity and innova...
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Tibisay Lucena
1959 - Present (63 years)
Tibisay Lucena was the president of the National Electoral Council or CNE until 2020, one of the five branches of government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. She was first elected to this post in 2006, and was reelected in 2009 for the 2009-2013 period. The Supreme Tribunal of Justice appointed Indira Alfonzo on June 12, 2020 as the new president of this entity.
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Saskia Sassen
1947 - Present (75 years)
Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor for the London School of Economics. Born in 1947 in The Hague, Netherlands, she grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her father was a Nazi journalist and a member of the Waffen SS. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Notre Dame and an additional master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Poitiers. A recognized expert in urban sociology, Sassen is credited with coining the term, “global city” used to describe a population center integral to a larger global economic network.
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Charles Perrow
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Charles B. Perrow was an emeritus professor of sociology at Yale University and visiting professor at Stanford University. He authored several books and many articles on organizations, and was primarily concerned with the impact of large organizations on society.
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Nandini Sundar
1967 - Present (55 years)
Nandini Sundar is an Indian professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics whose research interests include political sociology, law, and inequality. She is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for Social Sciences in 2010. She was also awarded the Ester Boserup Prize for Development Research in 2016 and the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies in 2017.
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David Bloor
1942 - Present (80 years)
David Bloor is a British sociologist. He is a professor in, and a former director of, the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh. He is a key figure in the Edinburgh school and played a major role in the development of the field of science and technology studies. He is best known for advocating the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, most notably in his book Knowledge and Social Imagery.
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Eric Klinenberg
1970 - Present (52 years)
Eric M. Klinenberg is an American sociologist and a scholar of urban studies, culture, and media. He is currently Helen Gould Shepard Professor in Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. Klinenberg is best known for his contributions as a public sociologist.
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Barry Wellman
1942 - Present (80 years)
Barry Wellman is a Canadian-American sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D.
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