Professor Ann Phoenix to give 2022 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture

Professor Ann Phoenix

The Department is delighted to announce that Professor Ann Phoenix will give the 2022 Sidney Ball Memorial Lecture in person at St John’s College in Oxford on Friday 11 November 2022. 

Professor Ann Phoenix’s lecture is titled “Who are we? Contesting and transforming racialised histories and futures in the Carolean era”. Set against the backdrop of the 21st century - the global Covid-19 pandemic, the revitalising of Black Lives Matter by the US murder of George Floyd by a policeman, the Russian war against Ukraine, the murder of Sarah Everard by a UK policeman and the accession of King Charles – the lecture will draw on the ways racialisation features in contemporary society to discuss three central issues:  

-          Recognition that no one social category can explain differences, making intersectional perspectives crucial

-          Social disruptions make some previously unheard stories sayable, hearable and potentially transformative

-          Histories come alive in new ways at such times, revitalising the present and future in ways that make the contestations likely to mark the Carolean age important to all of us

Ann Phoenix is a Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Department of Social Science, UCL Institute of Education. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It includes racialised and gendered identities, mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, motherhood, families, migration and transnational families.  

The Sidney Ball Memorial lectures began in 1917, shortly after Barnett House was founded in 1914. The first lecture was published as the Barnett House Papers No.1 by Oxford University Press in the same year.  When Sidney Ball, chairman of the Barnett House Committee, died in March 1918, the annual talks were renamed as the Sidney Ball Memorial lectures. This historic lecture has been a signature event in DSPI since 1917. 

The lecture will take place from 5 – 6pm on 11 November in the Auditorium at St John’s College and will be followed by a drinks reception. Registration is required. Book your free place on Eventbrite.  

The lecture will be recorded and released online. For recordings of previous Sidney Ball Memorial lectures please go to Sidney Ball Memorial Lectures.