 I'm very sorry that I cannot be with you in person, which of course I would want to be, but I'm afraid I'm extremely vulnerable to the COVID virus and so I'm not able to do long distance travel at presence. My thanks, my very deep thanks for the award of this doctorate, honorary doctorate. I am truly honored by this. The award of an honorary degree is supposed to be a festive occasion, so it should be followed by party. Our party will have to be electronic, as far as I'm concerned, but I'm delighted that we will hear a performance of that splendid medieval drinking song, Gaudéanos Iquitula, at the end of the ceremony. I went to university as a student, back in the legendary 1960s, did not feel legendary at the time. At the end of that decade, I became a full-time academic and worked in various universities for 44 years before retiring just a few years back. In all cases, in social sciences, they're moving from one area of social science to another. At the time I began as a student, when I first was spending my time in universities, it was a time of considerable trouble in my country, in Australia. We faced war abroad, because Australia was a small participant in the war in Vietnam. And we faced multiple forms of oppression at home under a corrupt and conservative political regime. The universities at the time seemed to me to be conservative and complacent institutions, not what young intellectuals would want as their workplace. And I, like many others, began to ask what knowledge was actually relevant to the process of changing the kind of society that we lived in, in the direction of social justice, peace, and in due course, the security of the society and the species. And I came to the conclusion that the kind of knowledge that was needed was knowledge in social science. That's why I moved into social science as a graduate student. And that's an opinion I still have, that it's the social sciences, above all, that will produce the knowledge that is most important to us in grappling with contemporary issues of violence, oppression, and of course, climate change as well. Well, that was a decision that I made to go into the social sciences. And some of the directions that decision has led me, you've just heard in the kind statements of our colleagues giving the Laudadium. I've, in the course of my career in social sciences, have worked on multiple social structures, multiple institutions. I've worked collecting life histories from quite a variety of different social groups. And I find myself doing research in schools, in offices, in high-rise buildings, in working-class firms, in the outer suburbs, in ruling-class firms, in privileged suburbs, besides the harbour. I've even found myself doing research in a sewage treatment plant. So, become a social scientist and you see the world in one way or another. Much of my work, as you've already heard, was concerned particularly with the structure of gender relations and within that territory, with the specific issues about masculinities, our masculinities were made, what differences exist between different patterns of masculinity and how forms of masculinity changed through time, both within a single lifetime and on the macro-scale at the historical level. And I was fortunate enough to be involved in formulating these questions and launching this research at a time when those issues began to appear significant to considerable numbers of other people in feminist movements, in education, in health research and the like. So, as I began formulating my material, studying the interviews, considering the institutions and beginning to get those findings out through the journals, eventually in the form of books through talks of conferences and talks with practitioners, such as health workers and teachers, it really felt a bit like hatching a wave feels to a surfer where you put in a certain amount of effort and then you find all around you a surge happening and a truly remarkable change occurs. I guess particularly important for me at that moment was finding that the research that I was doing in an academic context truly had practical applications and applications that I had not necessarily thought of at all. So, a new departure in that particular field of social science initially as a conceptual debate and as beginnings and beginnings of empirical research was suddenly relevant to and useful to a whole range of users in other institutions and contexts. That was truly exciting and is the kind of experience that I wish to all my colleagues in the sciences whether social, natural science either that can happen. Experience of working with a range of colleagues with a range of users was something that made me think also about the nature of my own practice as an intellectual worker and it made me particularly conscious of the collective character of the process of developing knowledge. Something that was not just local either I mean about half of my research I guess has been done in teams the other half in one way or another individually but even the individual research and writing that I did was always in a social context of support from other university workers academics and non-academic workers as well and as I increasingly realised a global context of knowledge producers and knowledge users so that for instance I truly learnt about the division of labour in knowledge work from an African philosopher not an Australian, not from the global north but from an African philosopher Aline Ntonjie who I think formulated more clearly than anyone else the notion of the global division of labour in knowledge and I learnt my understanding of the historical character of human sexuality from a Brazilian feminist above all a wonderful, wonderful thinker who is little known in the Anglophone world but I hope will become more so over time and those kinds of learning those experiences of learning and of understanding more of my own context that led me to think, to theorise and to a certain extent research also about the global economy of knowledge the shape of the transfers of information the circulation of concepts and the struggles around knowledge that occurred on a world scale and it's that kind of realisation that eventually led me to the work that became my book Southern Theory and the work I've also done on the shape of gender theory around in different parts of the global south and those lines of research and lines of thought led me to think also about the nature of the knowledge workforce something that I think is much underplayed in the contemporary discussions about universities because when you think of it the intellectual work of the contemporary time however much individual academic stars and leaders ever much we rightly admire their work and their contributions nevertheless the basic process of developing knowledge is a collective process involving a large workforce including what are called the operations workers the non-academic workers in universities as well as the academics universities I've worked in universities all my working life as I said universities are in many ways privileged institutions we have powers we have weight in the world and we have capacities especially I think the capacity to communicate this fundamental power of universities we do this through our referee journals of course but it's also relevant to the well-being and value of universities that it should be a place where poetry and music and drama are also present also active in the formation of consciousness and the development of understanding in my view the fundamental business of universities fundamental role of universities is a service role servicing the people as a whole not just the particularly privileged groups who form policies in the world not just the people who turn up as our students or our clients so to speak but the whole of the people and that's why the issue of social justice is in my mind core business the universities we also know now that our service has to be a service to the planet to the well-being of the whole of the life on this planet and even the material the non-living elements of our planetary life that I think that process of serving populations and the planet has become harder over time it's become harder in our generation than it was when I began to think along these lines and began to work in universities partly because the economic context of the universities has changed university systems have massified but they have also privatized they're less likely universities now are more likely to be profit making corporations or closely associated with profit making corporations and are more likely to have borrowed their management techniques and their formulations of energy from the corporate managing techniques of the profit making economy we also face in this generation more intense opposition to the making of organized knowledge than we did before we've faced anti-intellectual movements, climate denial and so causation denial movements the anti-gender movement which has already been mentioned and we can expect other movements of opposition of organized knowledge to come down the track too in that environment the work of intellectuals can be uncomfortable can be difficult and challenging I think than I ever expected it to be but the fundamental role of universities, academics and intellectual workers in general to my mind remains the same it's our job to push the boundaries to challenge conventions through our work and in our research and teaching to establish and disseminate truths however uncomfortable those truths might be and however much they might be challenged and gender studies is now a clear example of that that the challenges to the development of knowledge and the spreading of knowledge about gender issues are now quite serious even in some contexts dangerous and for that reason among others I'm very glad of the recognition which is given to that field through the award of this honorary doctorate I'm now at the end of my academic career I still do some writing but I'm no longer doing funded research I rest on my laurels to some extent I think of myself as a senior as one of the older generation and I have been thinking about the specific role that seniors may play in the world of knowledge production of intellectual labour and I think our fundamental role as seniors is a support role now and it's a role where our experience can play and be valuable in a somewhat different way it's our role particularly to support and help protect the knowledge workforce as a whole the younger generations of the knowledge workforce who now constitute the collective intellectual of our time so my best wishes to the younger generations the rising generations in the field that I've worked in and to our colleagues in other fields thank you for listening to me thank you again for the very great honour of this award I'm most grateful, thank you