Introduction to Special Issue: Celebrating Ari Sitas.

Part one: Ari's intellectual journey Ari arrived in South Africa in 1972 from Cyprus at the age of twenty to join his parents who had immigrated to South Africa. Ari Sitas, in his response in this special issue, divides his working life into two parts: 'If the first direction of my work was all about a new labour studies, the second has been historical, starting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the last few years moving deeper into the eighth, tracing narratives from "that" then to the fifteenth century in AfroAsia ... What opened all this up', he continues, 'was creative work in poetry and music between Indian and South African creative pioneers'. It is this creative tension between Ari as social scientist and Ari as artist, and Ari as a deeply committed (South) African and Ari as a passionate cosmopolitan, that has made his career such an exceptional and innovative one. In Keim's contribution to this special issue, she returns to her argument that Ari was a central part of a counter-hegemonic sociology and traces how Ari was crucial to her conceptualisation of her earlier argument. [Extracted from the article]