Mentoring, Methods, and Movements

> For several years now we sociologists have heard much talk about structure and agency as if they referred to different phenomena or to radically distinct aspects of the same thing. 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. -W. Goldfrank, U.C. Santa Cruz > How did Terry do it? -William G. Martin, Binghamton Univ. > 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... -R. Palat, Binghamton Univ. > 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. -I. Wallerstein, Yale Univ. > 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. -R. Kasaba, Univ. 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. -R. Lee, Binghamton Univ. > 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. -P. McMichael, Cornell Univ. > 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. -E. McLean Petras, Scholar and Author > [E]ven 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. -B. Silver, Johns Hopkins Univ. > 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. -R. Bush (1945-2013), St. John's Univ. > [K]ey 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. -N. 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. -L. 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 that had failed him, or weren't there to begin with, a dance in which he laughs, turning away just enough to help you see it is not you he is laughing at, but us. -E. Stark, Rutgers Univ. > 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. -M. H. Tamdgidi, UMass Boston / OKCIR