Evan Stark’s vivid biographical reflections on issues of domestic violence and battery in women’s lives and studies offer further insights about how world-systems analysis is not just about “long-term, large-scale social change” but also, simultaneously, about the short-term, small-scale dynamics of personal self-knowledge and change in everyday here and now, and that the two can never happen apart from one another, so long as we consider the key role played, amid a dialectical and relational context, by agencies and actors in building alternatively better, utopistic futures amid and beginning from the presents of the modern world-system.

Evan Stark’s contribution stands apart from others in the volume in that he subjects academia itself to serious criticism, revealing the political and social constructedness of academia in highly graphic and personal terms, in order to make us aware of how often we take the university itself for granted, even when we acknowledge the unique and liberating ways in which Terence K. Hopkins personally and/or administratively outmaneuvered the academic system to make way for alternative mentoring, methods, and movements.