Ari Sitas

Ari Sitas (born 1952 in Limassol, Cyprus) is a South African sociologist, writer, dramatist and civic activist.

Sitas studied sociology and political philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and was one of the founder members of the celebrated Junction Avenue Theatre Company. In 1978, he received the Olive Schreiner Award for his play, Randlords and Rotgut, and, in 1981, won an award for his video Howl at the Moon. He completed his PhD on the emergence of a social movement of trade union workers on the East Rand under the supervision of Eddie Webster and David Webster (who was assassinated by the Apartheid regime). After a number of years of part-time jobs and creative and political activism, he was employed in 1982 by the University of Natal, Durban. Since then, Durban, despite his travels, has remained his spiritual and material home. Based at the Industrial Organizational and Labour Studies (IOLS) department, he became a pivotal intellectual in the anti-apartheid struggle and worked actively with trade unions and community organisations. He was key to the explosion of cultural movements and organisations in the late Apartheid period and was one of the most important leaders in negotiations leading to a transitional cultural dispensation. He has been recognised as both one of the most defining poets of his own generation and a creative, though quite unorthodox, sociologist.

In May 2009, he joined the University of Cape Town as a Professor in the Department of Sociology.

His PhD work and a number of defining essays show a sense for qualitative research and pointed exposition. Most of his early essays are all about the emergence of an anti-apartheid labour movement and its creativity. His experimental text, “Theoretical Parables” (2004), is both a critique of post-modernism and a celebration of language and narrative. His main argument is that to construct a sociology of "civic virtue" one has to theorise "with", rather than "about", people and, therefore, the use of parables that are embedded in popular cultures is presented as a way into co-theorizing. It has its devoted supporters and detractors. What has received attention is his notion that there is always an asymmetry between institutions and their subjects and an ever-present recoiling and refracting agency in people: a source of creativity, dissonance and resistance. As a president-elect of the South African Sociological Association and a past executive of the International Sociological Association, he has penned a number of innovative essays on the tasks and role of sociology in South Africa and the South.

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