New honorary doctorates in Social Sciences: Two professors and an editor-in-chief
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Emeritus Professor Robin Boadway from Queens University, Canada, Professor Richard Swedberg, Cornell University, USA, and Editor-in-chief Kay Glans have been awarded honorary doctorates by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University.
Professor Robin Boadway is a highly distinguished economist, who has contributed a number of important insights to the study of public economics. In his research, he notably discusses how to best design tax systems and systems for social security as well as how to efficiently divide responsibility between different levels of society like government and municipality. He has also held the position of president of the International Institute of Public Finance and editor of the Journal of Public Economics.
Professor Richard Swedberg is the most renowned founder of the field of economic sociology, owing in no small part to a number of works he authored in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. He has taken a special interest in the economic sociology of classical thinkers, such as Weber, Tocqueville, Schumpeter and Wicksell, several of which trace their academic origins to other fields. Through this line of inquiry, he has then pointed to how useful the work of classical thinkers can be in understanding contemporary society. For instance, Swedberg has studied the importance of interest for economics, entrepreneurship, and the relationship between laws and economics.
Kay Glans, Editor-in-chief of the journal Respons, has enjoyed a long career as a publicist, editor and opinion former. For instance, he was editor of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and the founder of the journal Axess, which focuses on topics such as science, society and culture. He has also been part of research projects in the social sciences and book publishing. The journal Axess is of particular note, as it occupies a unique position as an awareness-raising project with interdisciplinary analyses and debate on a number of important topics. Through his work, Kay Glans has increased the awareness of social and humanistic issues in Sweden. Not the least by authoring reviews of contemporary social sciences literature in the Journal Respons, in a time when these reviews were disappearing from the pages of the mainstream media due to a changing media landscape – even as published research was increasingly moving to the pages of English-language scientific journals.
The conferment ceremony will take place on 29 January 2016.
Anneli Waara