Ocean Shores resident and Emeritus Professor, Baden Offord, has been named on the Queen’s Birthday 2021 Honours List, ‘For distinguished service to tertiary education in the field of human rights, social justice, and cultural diversity’.
He told The Echo, ‘I’m humbled and amazed to receive this recognition’.
Valued work
‘It’s very heartening to know that the work I do in social justice and human rights education is valued.
‘But you know, it takes a village to make change happen, and there are so many good people doing this work.
‘As an activist-educator in the humanities and cultural studies, I see culture as the lifeblood of political and social life.
‘Throughout my teaching, research and advocacy, I am most concerned with the critical relationship between lived experience, intersectionality and the everyday encounter and negotiation of structural and epistemic violence faced by many on account of their markers of difference – whether its race, disability, gender, age, sexuality and so on.
‘As an LGBTIQA+ identified and mixed-race person who comes from a family who has experienced actual and attempted suicide owing to intergenerational trauma, education has been key to how to respond to these things.
‘Education, at heart, is about our radical diversity as human beings.
‘The energies I bring to tertiary education have been to enable heart and soul as well as critical and creative thinking to how we live in the world, with each other and with the beautiful planet we owe our being to’.
Professor Offord added, ‘As a social justice educator, I like to start from the position that we are equally ignorant, and that in this peaceful co-existence we can learn together about each other and the world’.
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