In 2020 I left my job at The Guardian as editor-at-large and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. The shift from mainstream journalism to academia over the past three years has forced a reckoning with and reflection upon the notion of impact — a concept of which I was previously unaware as it related to the academy. In this keynote I plan to explore the meaning of impact on two intersecting levels: the philosophical and the practical. Philosophically I will seek to draw out the distinction and tension between depth of subject and breadth of reach; enduring resonance and fleeting impression and small, elite audiences and popular consumption and acclaim. Practically I intend to use the case study of the story of mixed-race German born children of African-American servicemen, illegally adopted and taken to Denmark after the war, that I have been researching since I became an academic. Using that story, I intend to map the relationship between academia and journalism and the full spectrum of what might be termed 'impactful' from the way that I found the story to the question of what I should do with it.
When: Saturday, 22 October 2022, 11.00-12.30: Closing Keynote.
When: Gary Younge will give his keynote in Aula (Campus North) and it will be streamed to Per Kirkeby Auditorium (Lake Auditoriums – Campus South).
Bio: Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian, he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media. He has written five books, most recently Another Day in the Death of America, A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Award in 2017. He has also written for The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books. Granta, The New York Times, The Financial Times, GQ and The New Statesman, among others, and made several radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit. His journalism has won him several prizes most recently in 2018, when he received (Broadsheet) Feature Writer of the year at the Society of Editors Press Awards Feature of the Year from the Amnesty Media Awards. In 2015 he was awarded the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center. “It’s the powerless on whose behalf he writes,” said the Center’s director. His other books include. The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s Dream; Who Are We? And Should it Matter in the 21st century; Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South.
