Abdelmalek Sayad
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Abdelmalek Sayad (November 24, 1933, in Beni Djellil, Algeria – March 13, 1998, in Paris, France), was a sociologist, first as an assistant to Pierre Bourdieu, then as a research director at the French CNRS and at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He studied migration issues in French social sciences.
Abdelmalek Sayad was born in 1933 in Aghbala, in the Beni Djellil commune in Kabylie, a Berber region in Northern Algeria. The third child and only boy of a family of five children, he started attending his village's primary school at seven. He then went on to study in Béjaïa's highschool, before training to be a primary school teacher in Algiers. He was then appointed a teacher in a school in the Casbah of Algiers. He continued studying at Algiers university in parallel, where he met Pierre Bourdieu.[1]
Sayad moved to France in 1963, after the Algerian independence in 1962. He started working on short-term contracts at the Centre de sociologie européenne at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. In 1977, he was hired at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), as research director in sociology.
Sayad died on March 13, 1998. He was married to Rebecca Sayad, who, after his death, donated his archive to the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (Paris) in 2006. The library of this museum is named after him. The Association of the friends of Abdelmalek Sayad has organised events surrounding his thought,[2] and contributed to make his work known in France and in Algeria, via an exhibition,[3] conferences and workshops.
