Mohammad H. Tamdgidi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the Founding Editor of Human Architecture:Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge.

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

The inspirational writings of cultural theorist and social justice activist Gloria Anzaldúa have empowered generations of women and men throughout the world. Charting the multiplicity of Anzaldúa’s impact within and beyond academic disciplines, community trenches, and international borders, Bridging presents more than thirty reflections on her work and her life, examining vibrant facets in surprising new ways and inviting readers to engage with these intimate, heartfelt contributions. Bridging is divided into five sections: The New Mestizas: “transitions and transformations”; Exposing the Wounds: “You gave me permission to fly in the dark”; Border Crossings: Inner Struggles, Outer Change; Bridging Theories: Intellectual Activism with/in Borders; and “Todas somos nos/otras”: Toward a “politics of openness.” Contributors, who include Norma Elia Cantú, Elisa Facio, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Aída Hurtado, Andrea Lunsford, Denise Segura, Gloria Steinem, and Mohammad Tamdgidi, represent a broad range of generations, professions, academic disciplines, and national backgrounds. Critically engaging with Anzaldúa’s theories and building on her work, they use virtual diaries, transformational theory, poetry, empirical research, autobiographical narrative, and other genres to creatively explore and boldly enact future directions for Anzaldúan studies. A book whose form and content reflect Anzaldúa’s diverse audience, Bridging perpetuates Anzaldúa’s spirit through groundbreaking praxis and visionary insights into culture, gender, sexuality, religion, aesthetics, and politics. This is a collection whose span is as broad and dazzling as Anzaldúa herself.

Featuring Immanuel Wallerstein, Joseph Massad, Marnia Lazreg, and other well-known and emerging new authors, this book seeks a more accurate understanding of Islam and Islamic societies' role and relations to global cultural and economic realities. The book confronts a trend today of analyzing Islam as a "cultural system" that stands outside of, and even predates, modernity. The authors see this trend as part of a racist discourse unaware of the realities of contemporary Islam. Islamic societies today are products of the world capitalist system and cannot be understood as being separate from its forces. The authors offer a more carefully constructed and richer portrait of Islamic societies today and forcefully challenge the belief that Islam is not part of, nor much affected by, the modern world-system.

In this collaboratively authored book world-system scholars critically synthesize Asia's re-emerging centrality despite the myriad financial crises that have punctuated the end of the U.S.-dominated Cold War world order. From different vantage points the authors review the turbulent landscape of the region that points toward a new Asian world order as well as contradictory symptoms and signals. The text highlights the salience of Northeast Asia; the resurgence of Russia and Eurasianism; and the class, gender, and ecological implications of a conflict-ridden regional ascent for the future of the North-South divide and for the struggle between the spirit of Davos and the spirit of Porto Alegre.

This Fall 2013 (XI, 1) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, is entitled and dedicated to “Conversations with Enrique Dussel on Anti-Cartesian Decoloniality and Pluriversal Transmodernity.” Despite the long established recognition and reputation of Dussel as the most prolific, creative, and influential living Latin American philosopher, a limited portion of his writings has hitherto appeared in English. Exiled to Mexico from his native Argentina more than 35 years ago, Dussel has written more than 70 books and hundreds of articles ranging from theology to history, from philosophy to politics. Increasing interest in his work has been emerging among students and educators interested in developing liberating social theories and philosophies from the Global South. The present volume is one emerging response among many to Dussel’s call for a “South-South Philosophical Dialogue” in order to advance the cause of decolonization and liberation of inner and global human realities. Contributors include: Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Linda Martín Alcoff, Lewis R. Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel (also as journal issue guest editor), Dustin Craun, Rehnuma Sazzad (including both her article and her review of the book of poetry by the Palestinian-American poet Lisa Suhair Majaj), Linda Weber, George Ciccariello-Maher (as journal issue guest editor), and Mohammad H. Tamdgidi (also as journal editor-in-chief). Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

In this major new study in the sociology of scientific knowledge, social theorist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi reports having unriddled the so-called ‘quantum enigma.’ This book opens the lid of the Schrödinger’s Cat box of the ‘quantum enigma’ after decades and finds something both odd and familiar: Not only the cat is both alive and dead, it has morphed into an elephant in the room in whose interpretation Einstein, Bohr, Bohm, and others were each both right and wrong because the enigma has acquired both localized and spread-out features whose unriddling requires both physics and sociology amid both transdisciplinary and transcultural contexts. The book offers, in a transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framework, a relativistic interpretation to advance a liberating quantum sociology. Deeper methodological grounding to further advance the sociological imagination requires investigating whether and how relativistic and quantum scientific revolutions can induce a liberating reinvention of sociology in favor of creative research and a just global society. This, however, necessarily leads us to confront an elephant in the room, the ‘quantum enigma.’ In Unriddling the Quantum Enigma, the first volume of the series commonly titled Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian toward Quantum Imaginations, sociologist Mohammad H. Tamdgidi argues that unriddling the ‘quantum enigma’ depends on whether and how we succeed in dehabituating ourselves in favor of unified relativistic and quantum visions from the historically and ideologically inherited, classical Newtonian modes of imagining reality that have subconsciously persisted in the ways we have gone about posing and interpreting (or not) the enigma itself for more than a century. Once this veil is lifted and the enigma unriddled, he argues, it becomes possible to reinterpret the relativistic and quantum ways of imagining reality (including social reality) in terms of a unified, nonreductive, creative dialectic of part and whole that fosters quantum sociological imaginations, methods, theories, and practices favoring liberating and just social outcomes. The essays in this volume develop a set of relativistic interpretive solutions to the quantum enigma. Following a survey of relevant studies, and an introduction to the transdisciplinary and transcultural sociology of self-knowledge framing the study, overviews of Newtonianism, relativity and quantum scientific revolutions, the quantum enigma, and its main interpretations to date are offered. They are followed by a study of the notion of the “wave-particle duality of light” and the various experiments associated with the quantum enigma in order to arrive at a relativistic interpretation of the enigma, one that is shown to be capable of critically cohering other offered interpretations. The book concludes with a heuristic presentation of the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of what Tamdgidi calls the creative dialectics of reality. The volume essays involve critical, comparative/integrative reflections on the relevant works of founding and contemporary scientists and scholars in the field. This study is the first in the monograph series “Tayyebeh Series in East-West Research and Translation” of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (XIII, 2020), published by OKCIR: Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). OKCIR is dedicated to exploring, in a simultaneously world-historical and self-reflective framework, the human search for a just global society. It aims to develop new conceptual (methodological, theoretical, historical), practical, pedagogical, inspirational and disseminative structures of knowledge whereby the individual can radically understand and determine how world-history and her/his selves constitute one another. Reviews “Mohammad H. Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology: From Newtonian Toward Quantum Imaginations, Volume 1, Unriddling the Quantum Enigma hits the proverbial nail on the head of an ongoing problem not only in sociology but also much social science—namely, many practitioners’ allegiance, consciously or otherwise, to persisting conceptions of ‘science’ that get in the way of scientific and other forms of theoretical advancement. Newtonianism has achieved the status of an idol and its methodology a fetish, the consequence of which is an ongoing failure to think through important problems of uncertainty, indeterminacy, multivariation, multidisciplinarity, and false dilemmas of individual agency versus structure, among many others. Tamdgidi has done great service to social thought by bringing to the fore this problem of disciplinary decadence and offering, in effect, a call for its teleological suspension—thinking beyond disciplinarity—through drawing upon and communicating with the resources of quantum theory not as a fetish but instead as an opening for other possibilities of social, including human, understanding. The implications are far-reaching as they offer, as the main title attests, liberating sociology from persistent epistemic shackles and thus many disciplines and fields connected to things ‘social.’ This is exciting work. A triumph! The reader is left with enthusiasm for the second volume and theorists of many kinds with proverbial work to be done.” — Professor Lewis R. Gordon, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and author of Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Routledge/Paradigm, 2006), and Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, forthcoming 2020) "Social sciences are still using metatheoretical models of science based on 19th century newtonian concepts of "time and space". Mohammad H. Tamdgidi has produced a 'tour de force' in social theory leaving behind the old newtonian worldview that still informs the social sciences towards a 21st century non-dualistic, non-reductionist, transcultural, transdisciplinary, post-Einsteinian quantum concept of TimeSpace. Tamdgidi goes beyond previous efforts done by titans of social theory such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Kyriakos Kontopoulos. This book is a quantum leap in the social sciences at large. Tamdgidi decolonizes the social sciences away from its Eurocentric colonial foundations bringing it closer not only to contemporary natural sciences but also to its convergence with the old Eastern philosophical and mystical worldviews. This book is a masterpiece in social theory for a 21st century decolonial social science. A must read!" — Professor Ramon Grosfoguel, University of California at Berkeley​​​​​​​ "Tamdgidi’s Liberating Sociology succeeds in adding physical structures to the breadth of the world-changing vision of C. Wright Mills, the man who mentored me at Columbia. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics can help us to understand the human universe no less than the physical universe. Just as my Creating Life Before Death challenges bureaucracy’s conformist orientation, so does Liberating Sociology“liberate the infinite possibilities inherent in us.” Given our isolation in the Coronavirus era, we have time to follow Tamdgidi in his journey into the depth of inner space, where few men have gone before. It is there that we can gain emotional strength, just as Churchill, Roosevelt and Mandela empowered themselves. That personal development was needed to address not only their own personal problems, but also the mammoth problems of their societies. We must learn to do the same." — Bernard Phillips, Emeritus Sociology Professor, Boston University

This Spring 2008 (VI, 2) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge includes two symposium papers by Klaus Fischer and Lutz Bornmann who shed significant light on why the taken-for-granted structures of science and peer reviewing have been and need to be problematized in favor of more liberatory scientific and peer reviewing practices more conducive to advancing the sociological imagination. The student papers included (by Jacquelyn Knoblock, Henry Mubiru, David Couras, Dima Khurin, Kathleen O’Brien, Nicole Jones, Nicole [pen name], Eric Reed, Joel Bartlett, Stacey Melchin, Laura Zuzevich, Michelle Tanney, Lora Aurise, and Brian Ahl) make serious efforts at developing their theoretically informed sociological imagination of gender, race, ethnicity, learning, adolescence and work. The volume also includes papers by faculty (Satoshi Ikeda, Karen Gagne, Leila Farsakh) who self-reflectively explore their own life and pedagogical strategies for the cultivation of sociological imaginations regardless of the disciplinary field in which they do research and teach. Two joint student-faculty papers and essays (Khau & Pithouse, and Mason, Powers, & Schaefer) also imaginatively and innovatively explore their own or what seem at first to be “strangers’” lives in order to develop a more empathetic and pedagogically healing sociological imaginations for their authors and subjects. The journal editor Mohammad H. Tamdgidi’s call in his note for sociological re-imaginations of science and peer reviewing draws on the relevance of both the symposium and other student and faculty papers in the volume to one another in terms of fostering in theory and practice liberating peer reviewing strategies in academic publishing. Anna Beckwith was a guest co-editor of this journal issue. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge is a publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics). For more information about OKCIR and other issues in its journal’s Edited Collection as well as Monograph and Translation series visit OKCIR’s homepage.

This Summer 2006 (IV, Special) issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge includes the proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Social Theory Forum (STF), held on April 5-6, 2006, at UMass Boston on: “Human Rights, Borderlands, and the Poetics of Applied Social Theory: Engaging with Gloria Anzaldúa in Self and Global Transformations.” Walking along and crossing the borderlands of academic disciplines, contributors engaged with Anzaldúa’s gripping and creative talent in bridging the boundaries of academia and everyday life, self and global/world-historical reflexivity, sociology and psychology, social science and the arts and the humanities, spirituality and secularism, private and public, consciousness and the subconscious, theory and practice, knowledge, feeling, and the sensual in favor of humanizing self and global outcomes. Central in this dialogue was the exploration of human rights in personal and institutional terrains and their intersections with human borderlands, seeking creative and applied theoretical and curricular innovations to advance human rights pedagogy and practice.

This book explores the life and ideas of the enigmatic twentieth century philosopher, mystic, and teacher of esoteric dances George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, performing a hermeneutic textual analysis of all his writings to illuminate the place of hypnosis in his teaching. Foreword by J. Walter Driscoll.