Piet Strydom

Piet Strydom was born in South Africa in 1946, studied and worked there as a journalist, social researcher and academic, but under the impact of his political experience and intellectual commitment to critical theory he felt compelled in 1974 to leave for Europe as an émigré from the apartheid regime. Following a year each at the Universities of Louvain, Belgium, and Liverpool, United Kingdom, he accepted a position in the Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland, in 1976.

At UCC he founded – supported by a year at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in 1983 – a critical theory tradition; was in 1986-87 embroiled in a controversy about apartheid and protest at UCC covered in the media; was founder-director of a centre for European social research acting as responsible scientist of a variety of collaborative projects within European research programmes; coordinated a European programme for the establishment of sociology departments at two universities in Hungary after the collapse of the Iron Curtain; since the 1990s developed a unique version of cognitive sociology on which he was visiting professor at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France; was the recipient of an Arts Faculty research achievement award open to senior academics; 2009 saw the publication of a book of essays in his honour; in 2011 received a high grade in an ERC (European Research Council) evaluation. Since 2011 he is a retired member of the School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork.

He is currently still associate editor of the European Journal of Social Theory, the founder-editor of which is his protégé. Since 2009, he is a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of the book series ‘Creative Multiverse: New Explorations in Transformative Learning and Research’ published by Shipra Publications, New Delhi; and since 2014, he is also a member of Academic Advisory Board, Swami Vivekananda University of Social Work and Social Transformation, India.

Besides many articles, some well noted, in leading journals, anthologies and encyclopaedias, major publications include Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), New Horizons of Critical Theory: Collective Learning and Triple Contingency (New Delhi: Shipra, 2009), Risk, Environment and Society (Buckingham & Philadelphia: Open UP, 2002), and Discourse and Knowledge (Liverpool UP, 2000). He edited and introduced Philosophies of Social Science (Open UP, 2003, with Gerard Delanty) as well as special issues of the European Journal of Social Theory 10/3, 2007 (‘Social Theory after the Cognitive Revolution’) and the Irish Journal of Sociology 19/1, 2011 (‘Key Issues in Contemporary Social Theory’). He was also invited to write on ‘Philosophies of the Social Sciences’ for the massive online UNESCO Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems.

Among other descriptions, he has been recognised as: ‘the most inspirational and outstanding teacher in the social sciences at UCC’ (Seamus O’Tuama); ‘someone with unusual credentials and theoretical imagination, an author little constrained by convention’ (Alan Sica); an author of ‘inspiring work’ (Ulrich Beck); one of ‘the major risk theorists’ (John Tulloch); one who ‘has blazed a trail by developing a form of cognitive sociology’ (Patrick O’Mahony); and ‘one of the truly leading theorists in his discipline’ (Yves Laberge).

At present, he is continuing his pursuit of a new version of a critical-pragmatic social science vitally enriched by an often misunderstood cognitive component. Recent works that draw more or less heavily on his cognitive sociology are: Gerard Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, Palgrave, 2013, and in particular Patrick O’Mahony, The Contemporary Theory of the Public Sphere, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013.