‘Alī Al-Wardī, ‘Texas sociologist’?

In his analysis of a professional association and its tactics, John McCumber’s Time in the Ditch asserts, ‘American philosophy during the McCarthy era seems to have confronted difficulties well beyond those faced by other disciplines’. In response, Lewis Gordon developed a thesis around what he called a ‘teleological suspension of disciplinarity’, a willingness to go beyond disciplines in the production of knowledge. During the Cold War, ‘Alī al-Wardī completed his training at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned two graduate degrees. This article addresses al-Wardī’s early work in a series of historical and regional perspectives: first, referring to C. Wright Mills as a model for a ‘Texas sociologist’; second, identifying Sociology Department faculty members whom al-Wardī thanked in his thesis; and, through them, revealing a network of scholarship and activism identified with Cold War Texas.