Mentoring, Methods, and Movements: Colloquium in Honor of Terence K. Hopkins by His Former Students and the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations

Book excerpt: Terence Kilbourne Hopkins (1929-1997) was a hidden gem of the field of world-systems studies who contributed indispensably to its foundation amid a lifelong collaboration and friendship with Immanuel Wallerstein. His pedagogical humanism, methodological rigor, and scientific commitment to social change, merged with his creatively flexible administrative skills to found the Graduate Program in Sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY). The student-centered, autonomous program fostered the formation of critically-minded scholars who pursue transdisciplinary sociology while fusing deeply personal commitments to long-term, large-scale social change. In this significantly updated twentieth anniversary second edition of Mentoring, Methods, and Movements, Terence K. Hopkins’s former students organizing and contributing to a colloquium in his honor a few months before his untimely passing in January 1997 share key insights about what made him so unique and impactful in shaping their practices of engaged sociology—informed by an always open, dynamic, and self-reinventing World-Systems Analysis. The new edition includes a comprehensive chronological works/citations bibliography of Terence K. Hopkins, a new postscript essay reflecting and building on other contributions in the volume, updates on the contributors’ background and works, a reorganized photo gallery and cover design, and a detailed subject index that can be a helpful guide to the many aspects of Hopkins’s thought and pedagogy from the points of view of his students/colleagues. From the Inside "For several years now we sociologists have heard much talk about structure and agency .... This distinction can make little sense to students of Hopkins, who always insisted that social structures are formed, reproduced, and reformed by the agency of actors. ..."-Walter Goldfrank, U.C. Santa Cruz "How did Terry do it?" -William G. Martin, Binghamton University "Hopkins's insistent questioning opened the door to the creation of an alternate apparatus of discourse, the very flexibility of which allows the emerging debates of world-scale historical social sciences to be joined ...."-Ravi A. Palat, Binghamton University "... Hopkins was attacking the idiographic-nomothetic distinction through the pedagogy. The pedagogy assumed that the student had to work hard as a student "inventing" and then had to continue inventing forever after."-Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University "But then again I cannot think of a better way to reflect on Hopkins's work than approaching it from a personal perspective. That is how he always approached his own work, after all, and he encouraged us to do so as well." -Resat Kasaba, University of Washington "... The vision of methods Terence Hopkins has offered includes this invitation to a special sort of imaginative social action: think the past to make a past with the purpose of making the future by thinking a future." -Richard Lee, Binghamton University "This is not going to be a personal speech, but the invisible hand of Terence K. Hopkins lies about me and in most of what I've written since I left Binghamton. ... " -Philip McMichael, Cornell University "The study of regionalism vis-a-vis globalism parallels the two poles of Terence Hopkins's own intellectual development which began with the study of small group interaction and culminated with a focus on the dynamics of the world-system. ..." -Elizabeth McLean Petras, Scholar and Author "... even the Hopkins phrases were not immune to skeptical support. Exhibiting his characteristic penchant for sustained auto-critique, Hopkins wrote in the margins of the paper ..." -Beverly Silver, Johns Hopkins University "... He was a tireless and merciless critic. Yet I never felt demeaned or belittled. ... He pounded home time and again that it was not helpful to view race and class as binary opposites, ...." -Rod Bush (1945-2013), St. John's University "... key points in the work of Hopkins elucidate productive ways of meeting the criteria set by feminists for the study of gender. ...World-systems analysis has thus far not dealt with subjective and objective, self and society as dimensions of the modern world-system. Critique of these as discrete units of analysis is implicit in world-systems analysis, but focused attention on these is the contribution of feminist theory to the discussion of unit of analysis."-Nancy Forsythe, Feminist Scholar and Activist "... The time I was fortunate to spend with him allowed me to have a sense of his profound concern about the welfare of humanity and commitment to the cause of the unprivileged ...." -Lu Aiguo, Inst. of World Economies and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Beijing "It was not what Hopkins actually said to me that mattered, not his educational program nor even his parenthetical letters, but what he is (and now what he was), a style of being alive, a magical dance he does with his body or with you or with parts of who he was ... a dance in which he laughs, turning away just enough to help you see it is not you he is laughing at, but us." -Evan Stark, Rutgers University "Gathered in this volume ... are sociologically imaginative world-systems analyses of Terence K. Hopkins, amid the world-historical public issues that deeply troubled him personally and are even more prevalent today." -Mohammad H. Tamdgidi, UMass Boston /OKCIR