Two new honorary doctors in Educational Sciences

Professor Marjorie Harness Goodwin carried out anthropological fieldwork among African-American children in their neighbourhoods in the northeastern US in the 1980s, long before interaction research had become established. After that, in several studies she has shown how girls establish complex social relations by taking part in conflicts and gossip.

Goodwin is a world-leading scholar who has pioneered an understanding of the embodied language practices that people use in various contexts to constitute their social world. In recent years she has challenged the view of how emotions are used in the interaction of children and adults in everyday upbringing. She has also help to develop multimodally based interaction analyses.

Professor David Mitch has studied the economic history of education since the late 1970s. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to identify and explore fundamental issues within this field of research, using a combination of traditional historical evidence and advanced statistical methods in extensive empirical investigations. An excellent example of this approach is the densely written monograph The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England (1992).

Mitch’s scholarship has extended over a wide variety of issues. He has, for example, made fundamental contributions to the study of literacy, and significant analyses of the relationship between education, human capital, and economic growth. His innovative research into the role played by parental choice, government involvement and the market in the expansion of mass education, also presents his scholarship with a lasting value.

The conferment ceremony will take place in January 2014.