Laureation address: Professor Ann Phoenix PhD FBA FAcSS FRSA
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Dr Gurchathen S Sanghera, School of International Relations
Friday 17 June 2022
Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Professor Ann Phoenix.
Professor Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at University College London. To say that her achievements are outstanding would be an understatement. We simply run out of superlatives to describe them.
Professor Phoenix is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is internationally recognised and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Linköping in Sweden, Roskilde in Denmark, and Tampere in Finland. Professor Phoenix has over 200 publications and over 14,000 citations. She has held several highly competitive research grants from the Economic and Social Research Council, including its prestigious Professorial Fellowship, and obtained funding from the EU, and the Nuffield Trust.
She was one of the first Black female professors in the UK and a trailblazer for Black and minority ethnic academics who have come after her. In 2019, she was one of just 25 Black female professors in the UK, which highlights one of the most shocking features of British academia. More recently, she was a member of the Behavioural Advisory Group that informed Independent Sage, a group of scientists that published independent advice for the government during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Graduates, perhaps most importantly, on such an auspicious day when you celebrate your graduation, Professor Phoenix has one very significant thing in common with all of you: she too graduated from the University of St Andrews in Psychology in 1978. So, in many respects, she knows what it is like to be sat where you are and to be graduating from this University.
Born in St Vincent in the Caribbean in 1955, Professor Phoenix joined her parents in London in 1961 as part of the Windrush generation.
Even at a young age, she excelled at school and was seen to be academically gifted and exceptional. She attended Haberdashers’ Aske Grammar School in New Cross, London, where she flourished. After finishing school, she did not go straight to university and decided to work instead. But, after a year of working, which, in her own words, she found to be ‘so boring’, she decided to go to university. She was encouraged to go by schoolteachers and a Major Brian Hordle, who acted as a mentor when she left school. He was her first boss, who, as his title may suggest, was certainly a man of his time and who today would be considered to have very outdated views about women and immigrants. Despite these views, he recognised the brilliance of the young person working for him and was instrumental in encouraging Professor Phoenix to go onto higher education. And she was the first member of her broader family to do so.
Encouraged by a schoolteacher who had graduated from St Andrews, Professor Phoenix decided to apply to study Psychology here. She had never travelled to Scotland and, at the time, the train journey used to take eight hours from London to Leuchars. Some things do not seem to change, do they?
For much of her undergraduate degree, Professor Phoenix was the only Black student at the University. Towards the end of her studies, there was another Black woman and a Black man, and some Asian students, but they were very few and far between. It was a time when overt forms of racism were rife and considered acceptable even amongst polite society. Even in sleepy, genteel St Andrews. When Professor Phoenix was elected class representative in Psychology, she received poison pen letters because of her race. To some it was simply unconscionable that someone ‘like her’ could hold a position that represented ‘them’. But she wasn’t fazed by this and continued to excel in her studies. Indeed, Professor Phoenix has many fond memories of her time at St Andrews. The staff were young and dynamic, and she cherished what she describes as ‘a fantastic education’ that was to be ‘prized’. She also met students who were brilliant, academically gifted, and who helped with her critical thinking.
As I have mentioned, Professor’s Phoenix’s academic career is simply outstanding. Although at times easily overlooked, much of this is down to her own commitment to her intellectual craft and sheer dedication and hard work. She is an internationally renowned expert in psychosocial development. Her research interests include motherhood, social identities, young people, racialization, and gender. Feminist epistemologies and methodologies inform her research agenda.
Professor Phoenix was researching and publishing on intersectionality well before it became part of the current zeitgeist in the academy. This is particularly important because at the time many editors discouraged her from using the word ‘intersectionality’ and suggested that she remove it from her work. Sixteen years ago, reflecting on the complex interplay between the theoretical and practical implications of the concept of intersectionality, Professor Phoenix and her colleague, Professor Pamela Pattynama, observed:
‘Long before the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the concept it denotes had been employed in feminist work on how women are simultaneously positioned as women and, for example, as Black, working-class, lesbian or colonial subjects (see Brah and Phoenix, 2004). As such, it foregrounds a richer and more complex ontology than approaches that attempt to reduce people to one category at a time. It also points to the need for multiplex epistemologies. In particular, it indicates that fruitful knowledge production must treat social positions as relational. Intersectionality is thus useful as a handy catchall phrase that aims to make visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it.’
They went on to conclude about the imperfectability of all concepts, the need to continuously interrogate our intellectual tools, including the concept of intersectionality itself. Many academics and practitioners using the concept today, overlook this very important cautionary observation.
For those of us who know her, whenever you mention Professor Phoenix, indeed as I did when I told close friends and colleagues about today’s laureation, without hesitation they always remark about her integrity, erudition, humility, infectious laugh and, perhaps more importantly, her kindness.
I have been fortunate enough to have experienced this generosity of spirit and kindness too. Equally, it is important to recognise that all of this is buttressed by a steely determination as well.
Chancellor, in recognition of her major contributions to psychosocial studies and feminist epistemologies and methodologies, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Professor Ann Phoenix.