Andrew Jakubowicz is an emeritus professor at UTS, and is one of Australia’s pre-eminent scholars of cultural diversity, multicultural communities, and racism. For over 30 years Andrew was Professor of Sociology at UTS. He has remained actively engaged in the Faculty since his retirement, and the UTS Andrew Jakubowicz lecture in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was established in 2018 in his honour.
A major theme of each event is the responsibility academic researchers have in shaping public discussion of major societal issues of wide relevance.
Voice: Making a Postcolonial Multicultural Nation
In 2023, the Andrew Jakubowicz lecture looks to the Voice. What might a postcolonial nation look like in Australia, and what is the place of the Voice Referendum in that process? Just over half of Australians were born overseas or have one migrant parent, and nearly a quarter speak a language other than English at home. Multicultural communities will be crucial to the Referendum. This event takes up the question of both diverse communities and support for the Voice Referendum, as well as the longer-term efforts around treaty and reconciliation. Find out more and book here.
Previous Andrew Jakubowicz lectures
Diversity within Diversity: The Lost Voices
In 2018, the Andrew Jakubowicz lecture was delivered by Professor Saba Bebawi from the UTS journalism program. Saba drew on her experiences as a journalist, and internationally renowned researcher on media power and the role of media in democracy-building, to deliver the lecture: Diversity within Diversity: The Lost Voices.
This was a discussion around the extent to which the nuances within diverse groups are heard. And whether those diverse voices within different groups remain silenced as they do not fit certain stereotypes. This was focused on Arab media representations.
Who speaks for the Earth? Global change science and the politics of expertise in ‘the age of consequences’
In 2021 Professor Noel Castree, Associate Dean (Research) and Professor of Society & Environment in the Faculty of Arts & Social Science at UTS delivered the Andrew Jakubowicz lecture on Global change science and the politics of expertise in ‘the age of consequences’.
In this lecture, Noel Castree showed that geoscience – while having helpfully sounded the metaphorical alarm – has struggled to narrow the gap because it constitutively lacks the means to do so. The so-called ‘human dimensions’ of global environmental change require analytical attention and practical action, yet geoscience has a tendency to strip these dimensions of their political, affective and moral components.
He aimed to move beyond critique to suggest one means of infusing public and governmental discourse about the Earth with richer consideration of these ineliminable components. That means is global environmental assessments, retooled for the 21st century and what might be called our unprecedented ‘age of consequences’.