Globalizing Knowledge

Through Globalizing Knowledge, Kennedy explains how intellectuals and their knowledge institutions and networks shape, and are shaped by, global transformations. This cultural political sociology of knowledge and change is informed by his analysis of public engagements around inequality, nationalism, solidarity and energy across the world, especially in the USA, Europe and Eurasia.  His recently published book, "Globalizing Knowledge," has led to a number of lectures and book panels whose extensions are available here. Together with former Brown University student Merone Tadesse, he has recently extended this work to engage decolonizing universities and racism.

Solidarity and Social Change

Kennedy’s first book concerned the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980-81, but he now returns to the cultural politics and social movements underlying its translation across different contexts.  This research arc finds expression in three broader collaborations:

1. Through the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and its partner in the project, Foundation Jean Jaurès, Kennedy participates in an international initiative committed to the development of a  "New Global Progressive Construct" building on his past work with FEPS around solidarity http://www.feps-europe.eu/assets/94d2a134-9f28-4efb-9c0f-29748cb03310/next_8_framing_a_progressive_narrative.pdf
2. Together with colleagues in Kosova and building most recently on this work https://www.opendemocracy.net/michael-d-kennedy-linda-gusia/we-are-seeing-you-protesting-violent-democracies-in-kosova, he works to figure how projects around social justice, especially around opposition to violence and restitution for its victims, might realize greater recognition and effect in international policy regimes.
3. Together with colleagues in Poland http://watson.brown.edu/events/2015/globalizing-solidarity-step-step and in the United States https://slought.org/resources/love_driven_politics, he explores the ways in which different conceptions of love and solidarity might inform political dialogue and social transformation

Projections of Identity and Transformations of Capacity

In this research arc, Kennedy analyzes and elaborates cultural practices that enable the transformation of human and social capacity.  

a)     Recognizing the value of attachment to realize transformation, he has explored his own hometown’s search for grounding through the memorialization of a lost industry, Bethlehem Steel https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/biography/v037/37.1.kennedy.pdf. 

b)     Together with Brown University graduate students Prabh Kehal and Laura Garbes, he develops a knowledge cultural sociology addressing how knowledge’s symbols, schemas, institutions, and networks shape the terms of social reproduction and transformations (https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0221.xml?)

c)     He is currently writing about the process and consequence of transformations of self and community through heroic identifications and artistic projections across national and social differences. https://www.aaihs.org/the-black-panther-white-supremacy-and-double-consciousness/ 

d)     Kennedy also anticipates in the coming years to turn his work teaching about Martial Arts, Culture and Society (https://www.academia.edu/4319567/_2013_Martial_Arts_Culture_and_Society_Fall_2013_Syllabus_in_Sociology_for_students_at_Brown_University) into a more general cultural transformational sociology that articulates proprioceptive awareness in social change.

Spring 2020: Social Forces, and Introduction to Sociology

Spring 2020: Martial Arts, Culture and Society

Fall 2019: Ethics, Justice and Transformations of Engaged Scholarship

Fall 2019: Contradictions, Solidarities and Reflexivities