Belatedly, but with no less enthusiasm or joy, we invite you to celebrate with us the 70th birthday of Professor Susan Wright and her lifelong contribution to, and achievements in, the academic world as an internationally highly acclaimed researcher, scholar and teacher. Beyond her academic achievements, we also wish to celebrate Sue as a unique traveller and interconnector of worlds, cultures, ‘thoughtscapes’ and practices. We wish to celebrate Sue as an anthropologist of ‘the in-between-ness’ of (the) world(s), and her singular and deeply original skill in exploring hidden, unrecognised and unacknowledged connections, interrelations and potential for co-existence and collaborations.
The project started out as a series of conversations between Cris Shore, Jakob Ørberg, Penny Welch and Søren Bengtsen, who all have known and worked closely together with Sue in various academic contexts in Denmark and the United Kingdom. After initial conversations, the group decided to move forward with the idea of editing a special issue and making it into a ‘Festschrift’ celebrating and giving thanks to Sue. After the decision, Cris and Søren took on the role of co-editors of the special issue, with Penny as the guiding journal editor. We wanted to bring forth the various and diverse topics and institutional, social and cultural contexts Sue has researched over her career, and we invited contributors from each topic area, which resulted in an excellent line-up of contributors from all around the world, with whom Sue has a long-standing and close collaboration and academic friendship. We wish to thank all contributors to the Festschrift, who have helped to enact (in writing) the engagement, passion, criticality and vision that characterise Sue's work and achievements. Thank you all very much! We also wish to thank Penny for her kind and critical expertise, wisdom and guidance throughout the project, and we wish to thank Jakob for his support and encouragement.
As will be visible in the celebratory articles in this special issue, Sue's work and writing have spanned five decades and have taken place in various national and institutional contexts from south-western Iran, the North of England, Denmark and the United Kingdom to those organisations that constitute the de facto world system of governance including the OECD, international accountancy firms, the World Bank and the IMF. She is known internationally for her pioneering contributions to the study of higher education, particularly university reform, gender, leadership and management in universities, university rankings, the study of organisations and the anthropology of policy.
At the heart of Sue's work lie the notions of ecology and politically reflexive practice, themes that have recurred throughout Sue's entire career but that are perhaps most clearly conceptualised and theorised in her later work. An ecology can be defined as a cohesion without a centre and as a community without commonalities. An ecology emerges and sustains itself when actors connect with each other without reducing their individual and diverse goals into one common and dominant goal. An ecology takes shape only as a pluralism and plurality of beings – never as a totality of being. Sue has researched, conceptualised and enacted the notion of ecology within different fields, but always with the same driving aim of building cohesion and community without reducing differences into a sameness.
At the same time, Sue has both theorised and embodied the idea of ‘politically reflexive practice’, a disposition that lends itself to a constant critical questioning – and self-questioning – of the issues under investigation with the aim of seeing how we ourselves are positioned with regard to the people, problems or practices we are trying to study. This idea stems from feminist scholarship and its characteristic concerns with gender, patriarchy, class, ethnicity and power, but Sue's work has taken it further – as a teaching method and practice as well as an analytical perspective. That perspective was nurtured by her early fieldwork encounters in the mountains of south-western Iran, wherein she learned about British colonial history from the perspectives of her Bakhtiari interlocutors and, like most anthropologists, tried to earn the trust of the communities she worked with. It also featured prominently in her work with working-class women and rural communities in northern England and in her later work on higher education reform and university management and governance. Being a reflexive practitioner is one of the hallmarks of Sue's work. It is also central to her ecological approach to teaching, learning and critical scholarship.
So here's to you, Sue. We make this toast that is the special issue in your honour, and the special issue is itself an ecology of voices and an ecology of academic friendships, a testimony to your influence and inspiration. We congratulate you for making a real difference in the worlds you both inhabit and enact, and we are proud of and thankful for being part of them. A toast to the many worlds to come!
Warmest regards,
In friendship,