Honorary degree for one of our first Sociology graduates
Published: 11 September 2019
As part of the 50 years celebration, Professor Angela McRobbie, one of the first graduates of the newly created Department of Sociology, has been awarded an honorary degree of Doctors of Letters
2019 sees Sociology at Glasgow reach the ripe golden age of 50 years old. As part of the event to mark this milestone, the University awarded Professor Angela McRobbie the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters on Tuesday 10 September.
Following its creation as a then department in 1969, Angela was among the first graduating cohort. After gaining her degree she moved to the Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, a ground-breaking research centre addressing questions of representation, exclusion and inequality in the context of the media and popular culture.
Angela moved to Goldsmiths University in 1986 and is currently Professor of Communications there. Over five decades she has made a significant impact on the understandings of gender, media, popular culture and the creative economy, and her work has revealed the persistent and hidden disadvantages in these contexts, specifically ones which affect women, those from racialised communities, and the young.
On receiving the degree Angela reflected that 'This award matters more than any other form of recognition I can think of. I grew up in Glasgow and I benefited not just from the liberal education the University of Glasgow had to offer but also the intermeshing of pedagogy with research which was then and remains so today, a defining feature of the social sciences at the University. My time here studying topics such as media moral panics, crime and deviancy, gender and sexuality prompted my sociological eye. It delights me that younger generations of feminist scholars pursue topics that even now have been off the radar for reasons of shame or fear of exposure. Their contribution means that our own career pathways can be made more compatible with our wider social obligations’.
Head of School, Professor Michele Burman, said 'We are delighted to be conferring this honorary degree on Professor Angela McRobbie, an alumna of the University of Glasgow, and one of the UK's leading researchers on issues of gender, media, and popular culture. Professor McRobbie has played a crucial role in helping to make public the persistent forms of inequality which characterise these parts of our social life'.
First published: 11 September 2019
<< 2019