Ari Sitas (born 1952 in Limassol, Cyprus) is a South African sociologist, writer, dramatist and civic activist.
[1] Sitas studied sociology and political philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and was one of the founder members of the celebrated Junction Avenue Theatre Company.
[2] Based at the Industrial Organizational and Labour Studies (IOLS) department, he became a pivotal intellectual in the anti-apartheid struggle and worked actively with trade unions and community organisations.
His main argument is that to construct a sociology of "civic virtue" one has to theorise "with", rather than "about", people and, therefore, the use of parables that are embedded in popular cultures is presented as a way into co-theorizing.
What has received attention is his notion that there is always an asymmetry between institutions and their subjects and an ever-present recoiling and refracting agency in people: a source of creativity, dissonance and resistance.
[6] The study focused on the experiences, historical and contemporary, of two generations – fifty-year-olds who were in the prime of their youth in the early 1970s and their “children” who were born after 1974.
His creativity, like his sociology, is marked by collaborations with some of the most important contemporary artists of the avant-garde and of the popular arts: William Kentridge, Ramolao Makhene, Ingoapele Mondingoane, Alfred Qabula, Jürgen Bräuninger, Jeeva Rajgopaul, Omar Badsha, and many, many others.