The translation of the book by Bourdieu and Sayad, called Uprooting, is important because it means that most (though still not all), of the books written by the most widely cited sociologist in the world, Pierre Bourdieu, are now available in English. Uprooting is a study of the brutal policy of the French army in Algeria during the Algerian war of Independence from their French colonizers, in which around a quarter of the colony's Muslim population was coercively uprooted from their villages and forced to resettle in camps governed by special units of the French military. The book is the most valuable eye-witness account of those camps, and is a pioneering work of the sociology of colonialism, empires, labor, and urban space. For more information and to join this virtual event, view the event flyer here.
The panelists are experts in Bourdieu, colonial history, displacement.
George Steinmetz is a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the author, most recently, of the forthcoming book The Colonial Origins of French Social Thought (Princeton University Press) and editor of the forthcoming publication The Social Sciences through the Looking-Glass. Studies in the Production of Knowledge (Duke University Press).
The other expert panelists include:
Amin Perez, sociologist at the Université du Québec à Montréal and the author, most recently, of a new edition of Pierre Bourdieu's Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Paris, Editions Raisons d'agir, 2021) and of the forthcoming book Combattre en sociologues. Abdelmalek Sayad et Pierre Bourdieu dans une guerre de libération coloniale.
Silvia Pasquetti, sociologist at Newcastle University in the UK and author, most recently, of Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Loic Wacquant, sociologist at UC-Berkeley and author with Pierre Bourdieu of An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (University of Chicago Press 1992), and of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Duke University Press, 2009), inter alia.
