Michael Watts is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left.
11 Facts About Michael Watts
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Michael Watts received his PhD in geography in 1979 from the University of Michigan.
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Michael Watts joined the faculty of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley in 1979 and remained there his whole career.
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Michael Watts served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Institute of International Studies, a program that promotes cross-disciplinary global and transnational research and training.
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Michael Watts has supervised over 75 PhD students and post-docs, including those contributing to a festshrift volume in 2017 edited by Chari, Friedberg, Gidwani, Ribot and Wolford.
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Michael Watts is married to Mary Beth Pudup, who is a UC Santa Cruz faculty member, and has two children.
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Michael Watts is a member of the Retort collective, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.
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Michael Watts is on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA, a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
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On 25 July 2007, Michael Watts was shot in the hand in Port Harcourt, Nigeria by unknown gunmen who attacked the office of the National Point newspaper, apparently in an attempted robbery.
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Michael Watts has explored issues of global agriculture and food availability, gender and households, irrigation politics, and Islam.
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Michael Watts's work has been much debated in the social sciences, in terms of its attachment to Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and in terms of the appropriate role for academic thinking in contemporary struggles against inequality and poverty alleviation.