Spotlight On...Helen Beebee
This week Professor Helen Beebee, Director of Social Responsibility for the School of Social Sciences, talks about the upcoming ESRC Festival, and the recent Arthur Lewis Lecture.
You’re the Director of Social Responsibility for SoSS. What does that involve?
It’s great to have that role in a School where social responsibility themes – like equality, justice, ethics, race, gender and social class – permeate our teaching and research; it makes my job a lot easier! So I have been focusing a lot on equality and diversity. We have a 47-point Athena SWAN action plan to implement, and we’ve been setting up various initiatives at School level as well as in departments and research centres. For example, last month my colleagues in the School undergraduate office and I managed to get 700 first-year social science students to attend sexual consent training workshops, which I think is quite an achievement!
What’s the most exciting thing you’re working on at the moment?
We’ve got the national ESRC Festival of Social Sciences coming up in the first week of November, with a launch event on 31 October. Colleagues from across the Faculty – and from other parts of the University as well – are running a range of workshops, debates, exhibitions and so on. All of them are free and most of them are open to the general public. The Festival is a great opportunity to showcase social science research, and to collaborate with colleagues at Salford and Manchester Metropolitan University.
You were involved in last week’s Arthur Lewis Lecture, a significant event for us. Please can you share your thoughts on the evening?
It was such a humbling experience to have Tommie Smith here at Manchester. This is a man who was a world-class athlete – he was the first man to run 200m in under 20 seconds – who lost his entire career as a result of a single act of protest on the medal podium. It was fascinating to hear him talk about it, but also great for the 500-strong audience to have the opportunity to show their respect and admiration for him – he got more than one standing ovation!
What do you do when you’re not doing focusing on social responsibility?
Well, I’m in the final year of running an AHRC-funded project on the philosopher David Lewis. Pretty much nobody outside philosophy and linguistics will have heard of him, but he was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the second half of the 20th Century. I’m co-editing two volumes of his copious correspondence – we’re very lucky that he didn’t do joined-up handwriting – and we’re just starting to organise the end-of-project conference. Outside work, I just joined Stockport Symphony Orchestra, which I’d been failing to get around to for about the last three years. Of course I found myself playing in the viola section alongside a colleague from Social Anthropology.
- You can find out more about the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences in our news story on Humanities StaffNet.