On the occasion of being awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece, 9 November 2018.

Rhodes, Greece: here we are assembled, and I am humbled for you to be honoring me in this place.

It has caused me to reflect again on what the meaning this place and this nation, has for me, for you, for the world? Who are its people? How am I one of you?

“Greece,” you will say, and we are, “Greeks.” This, it seems, is a straightforward answer, for most of you and for me as well—I was born in this country.

However, of course you know that any such answers are far too simple, and their very obviousness, their very simplicity, blinds us to more complex, more fractious, more fraught realities. I want to make some remarks today about the antinomies of identity—be these self-professed and or ascribed by others.

But before I begin to explore these antinomies, I want to acknowledge particular people in this particular place, some of the Greeks of Rhodes who I have been honored to know.

First of all, I want to acknowledge my longtime colleague and dear friend, Prof. Chrissy Vitsilakis who nominated me for this award, and to acknowledge the people of this University who I have come to know through her. In particular, I want to sincerely express my appreciation to the Department of Pre-School Education and Educational Design which grants the award today and the University Senate for confirming the degree as proposed.

Some of you might know that earlier this year I was honored by the University of Athens with an award like this one today. Both awards are meaningful to me because they allow me to become, symbolically, part of a community of scholars that I value and with whom I have worked for a number of decades. But each award is special in different ways and each has prompted different reflections.

You know your history better than I do, but for me the contrast is this: the University of Athens was founded in 1837 by King Otto, a Bavarian who was made King of Greece by Europeans who thought a monarchy would be good for this new country. Located in Athens and surrounded by ancient architectural remains, the grand neoclassical buildings the University of Athens make an unmistakable connection to another Greece: ancient Greece. In this way, the University of Athens makes an essentialist claim of continuity with an earlier, ancient academy.

By contrast, here I stand today at the University of the Aegean founded in 1984 by an act of the President of Greece, by now a republic, Konstantine Karamanlis. This is in every sense a much newer university, just 34 years old, with campuses across six islands of the sparkling Mediterranean.

Of course, The University of the Aegean also makes its obligatory claims to ancient Greece, but more importantly it professes a different kind of vision. Its new foundations were brave and ambitious, particularly given its distributed locations. The goal was to make higher education relevant to a wider range of students, accessible for them to explore and implement new ways of learning, interdisciplinary in spirit, and meeting the particular challenges of the contemporary world. Among these might be included its focus on new ways of engaging with the environment, technology, diversity and globalism. Given these purposes, this University has progressed magnificently as the latest quality assurance report attests. This fresh sense of mission, grounded in challenging realities, is laudable.

And now, another bright achievement, to have elected the first woman administrator to the highest position of a Greek university. Professor Vitsilakis has become Rector Vitsilakis. This a solid indicator of the caliber of the men and women who make up this university and shape its future. Congratulations to all of you for your sense of purpose and commitment to inclusivity. I could not be prouder standing among you today to be honored by your Rector and in your company.

I also want to acknowledge here the work of other outstanding scholars involved in the life of this university and with whom I have had the honor to work over the years—Professors Eleni Karantzola, Eleni Skourtou, Vasilia Kourtis-Kazoullis, Vangelis Intzidis and Eugenia Arvanitis.

Since I first visited this University fifteen years ago, I feel I have travelled at least some of this journey with you. I have participated a number of times in Prof. Vitsilakis’ online masters program on gender, new technology and learning. This program was not only at the cutting edge of innovation for its themes and media. It was also delivered bilingually, managing to reach out to students in the wider region of the Balkans and middle Europe. Prof. Dionysius Gouvias has collaborated with Professor Vistilakis to research the impact of this program, reflected on the lessons learned.

As a consequence I had the good fortune to supervise one of those initial students in Prof. Vitsilakis’ program, Kertaso Giorogiou, from the far North of Greece. She chose to write her masters thesis and then her doctoral dissertation in English, examining the educational opportunities of Muslim woman in Western Thrace and their use of computers as an entry point into the wider world of learning. Today she continues this important work at the Democritus University of Thrace.

In fact, the University of the Aegean has evolved as a leader in scholarship and action to support those thrust upon the shores of your island, having been uprooted from their homes by war and other upheavals. Indeed, you have understood the intersection between the cruel austerity measures imposed on so many of your fellow citizens and the desperate plight of those seeking refuge from the hardships of their homelands. Your humanitarian orientation to both challenges supersedes narrow self-interest and conventional notions of nationhood and rightful belonging. In this, you are an inspiration to the rest of the world.

And another of our many overlapping associations, we first held our International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities here at the University of Aegean in 2003. In the post 9-11 world, this initiative was focused on the ways in which a renewed vision for the humanities could address the fissures and fractures of globalization and diversity. Having set its agenda in Rhodes, this conference, now annual, is entering its seventeenth year. Since those beginnings in this place, over 3000 articles and 48 books have been published in its journal collection and book series, a remarkable legacy in a hotly contested field both in scholarship and wider public discourse.

We have been back for several other conferences in the ensuing years. Then, in 2015 my current university, the University of Illinois, signed an MOU of collaboration with the University in the Aegean.

***

And so, to continue with my theme today, the antinomies of identity, and in particular the disjunction between the imagination and reality of identity formation.

From what I have said already in my remarks about my encounters with the intellectual life of the University of the Aegean, you will already have a sense, I am sure, that Greece is a complicated idea for me. Just look around you in this town and you see traces of many occupations going by other names—Frankish, Ottoman, Italian—and many religious traditions whose presence in this place post-date the Greece of the classical imagination—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular. In fact this diversity has been, and is a key feature of the nation now called “Greece.”

You might have noticed that, because I have been speaking in English, I have been using the terms “Greece” and “Greek,” Latin derivative names for this one time province of the Roman Empire and its people.

Whether called Greece or the Hellenic Republic, this nation is young in its modern form, not yet two centuries old since its founding in 1821. It has been a complex and at time violent history: in the separation from the Ottoman Empire; then at the intersection of the great colonial powers, Britain, France, and Russia; the installation of a German King; proxy civil war at the frontier of communism and capitalism; and some would say today, the neo-imperialism of the European “troika.” Nation never bestows the independence and autonomy it purports. Greece has not yet simply been a nation-state in the sense that the idea of sovereignty might suggest.

The neo-Hellenism that regime after regime tried to forge as Greece’s overriding common identity—of place and people, many have claimed, as do I, can be regarded as its Achilles heel. Politicians, historians, poets, photographers, architects and any number of other kinds of aesthetic practitioner, have been harnessed to overlay across the diversity of actual people, a sense of uniformly lofty value and transcendent shared community. This purported identity harks back to a classical past, as if there were a real and continuous connection.

When I was speaking recently at the University of Patras, a student insisted to me that there was a straight line in DNA between modern and classical Greeks. This may or may not be true, and in a way it is irrelevant, because the historical and cultural connections are essentially a reinvention.

The Christianity that was co-opted for the new nation state is fundamentally different from classical polytheism. A modern capitalist economy is fundamentally different from a slave economy. A voting universal citizenry is different from the self-governance of the male slave-owning class of classical Greece.

For a millennium after classical Greece, no buildings had columns or pediments. After classical Athens and the wider Hellenistic world that followed, the philosophy stopped only to be recovered by Arabs—not Greeks—centuries later. And countless invasions have surely messed with people’s DNA.

Classicism today is good for tourism, but not much good for explaining the people of Greece or their contemporary proclivities. Classical allusions are in reality classical illusions, whose effect much of the time is what I would call classical occlusions. These are Greeks of the imagination, only.

This has been troubling me for a long time. How are we to understand and connect the Greeks of the imagination with the Greeks of the neighborhood?

I want to share a vignette from my youth to illustrate the nature of this question. We were poor in Australia when I was a child and lived in a small terrace in the inner city of Sydney, without a garden. So my mother would take her three children to Hyde Park, located in the center of the city. Once there she would steer us towards the Archibald Memorial Fountain. It was a magnificent fountain with an imposing six meter bronze statue of Apollo at its center with an arc of water spray, fanning out onto the statue clusters—Diana, Pan, Theseus. My mother had no formal education but she told us that here were the symbols of our origins, our glorious Greek heritage.

In truth, the allusions in the statuary were a hodge podge of Roman as well as Greek. My mother had no way of naming the statues or even telling us the stories associated with them. But she could speak fondly about her own memories of the animals in her village—here in bronze in the form of Theseus’ sacrificial goats and the horses of Apollo’s chariot.

Somehow, in this country that had recruited her and other Greeks as migrant workers, she had made a connection, searching for a point of pride. But the connection was vague and tenuous.

Indeed, in our lives as immigrants living in the distant southern hemisphere, and even in terms of the life my parents had left behind in our village in Greece, we could not by right call these statues “our” heritage any more than anyone else on the planet.

Classicism was reinvented in modern times, in the halls of Cambridge and Oxford, in the ancient myths and legends told to children, in the pretensions of the facades of banks, public buildings and homes of the rich, and in the romance of ruins on tourist brochures. These were all remote for the Greeks of the neighborhood, not only in modern Greece but even more so for the nine million people outside of Greece who can trace their migrant roots to this country. The idea of an Hellenic Republic has proven a poor grounding for the political economic and social changes needed to sustain its people and keep its children at home.

For Greeks are not only of a place. They also have a long history of migration and cultural and linguistic maintenance, often in difficult circumstances. Greek identity and the institutional means of maintaining it developed not only in a quest for continuity, but also as an act of resistance and defense against dominant cultures that appeared to undervalue the varied backgrounds of those in their midst or those they had accepted as immigrants.

This is how Greek identity in the diaspora—my Greek identity—has been formed of a peculiar mix of what I would call “outsiderness.” Greeks of the diaspora, my family included, become doubly outsiders, outside of the dominant cultures of their place of settlement and outside the culture of classical aspiration, the imagination of the homeland, and even here the symbolism to some degree rings hollow.

Those outside the powerful frame of either the mainstream of their adoptive countries where they are merely “ethnic,” or the national community of the homeland, cling nonetheless to the Greece of the Imagination. This ends up meaning that Greekness consists of parallel paths of awkward semi-exclusion, the one now local, the other originary. The gap between the Greeks of the imagination (Hellenism) and the Greeks the neighborhood—here or abroad—is enormous. But continuity with Hellenism or resistance against threats (the cry of oxi!) is not enough.

So, how to make sense of the antinomies of nation, ethnicity, diaspora and globalization? What about their underlying engines in the form of technologies of transportation and communication, and the human maelstroms of movement and diversity?

Then after making some sense of these, what to do? I have spent my career agonizing about these questions, taking as my adage the old injunction that our responsibility as intellectuals is not only to interpret the world, but to reshape the world. How do we make a bright sustainable, future rather than bask in the glory and relics of the past? This task is what has brought us together today and what has made me return to be among you so many times, admiring your stoicism, perseverance and creativity. I am drawn time and time again to the indomitable spirit of the people here and the sheer beauty of the land, sky and sea.

***

I want to now mention, albeit briefly, three ideas that I hope we share, at the very least aspirationally. These are practical ideas of the kind where theory meets practice and some the antinomies of identity can be addressed. There is an honorable word with Greek roots for such meeting places: “praxis.”

The first idea, “multiliteracies,” comes from my work as an educator interested in literacy, broadly conceived as learning to mean. In the past, schools taught standard forms of the written language, the “correct usage” of intellectual elites, and the edifying texts of the literary canon which somehow seemed to capture a singular, high cultural essence.

“Multiliteracies” is a term coined two decades ago by my colleagues and I in the New London Group. By this term, we mean to say that there is no singular literacy. We make meanings in different ways according to our cultural and social context. Rather than simply learning the rules, we need constantly to negotiate differences in meaning according to language, dialect, register, style, affinity group, specialism, technicality and a host of other variables. Multiliteracies is about understanding and negotiating our differences in meaning in order to facilitate success for learners of all backgrounds.

The second idea is what I call “civic pluralism.” This is a counterpoint to nationalism for an era of unprecedented global interconnectedness and mass human movement. Nation building is a modern phenomenon, fraught with ideas of uniformity, exclusion and rigid canons. Education systems set out to inculcate young people into the norms of nation—its standard forms of language and its singular narrative of affinity. The message: sameness is good. Social cohesion demands cultural homogeneity.

But what if we turned this around? What if our civic assurance was that you don't have to be the same to be equal? You can keep your diasporic affinities to whatever extent you desire, just as you can also determine your own sexuality, choose your own affinity groups, and sculpt your own identity.

Civic Pluralism is more than multiculturalism, which seems to start and end with ethnic color, spaghetti and polka, the acceptable manifestations of difference-at-a-safe-distance. Civic pluralism is more than this, it is a set of principles and practices guaranteeing autonomy and self-determination within the broad framework of liberal legality and inclusive sociality. In civic pluralism, it is possible to develop this as a post-nationalist sense of common purpose, a new kind of polity.

And now, my third idea: “productive diversity.” Differences do not have to be a barrier, a problem, a disadvantage. We can turn them to our collective benefit, but this demands a fundamental shift in our frames of mind and habits of orientation.

In our classrooms, instead of one-size-fits all curriculum, we need to open out learning so students can bring the differences in their life experiences and ways of thinking to create a collective intelligence. In our workplaces, diverse teams work best where team members offer different perspectives and suggest different approaches, and where outreach into differentiated markets and among diverse stakeholders is as fluent in the productive diversity practices of the team itself. In our families, we will open our lives to diverse friendships and embrace the richness of intermarriage and bicultural, multilingual children.

There is today a virulent backlash against these social goals. The backlash has intensified as we face growing numbers of people, in their masses, fleeing their homelands in search of a better life, even if this means camping on the shores of your many islands here in Greece.

Two reactions are possible—reactive nationalism grounded in fear, or a spirit more open to human diversity and welcoming of change.

I am a daughter of subsistence agricultural people, who left their war-torn villages for Australia, so I can feel the pain of these latest itinerants. I can testify that it was difficult and we migrants were viewed with suspicion and derision.

Today, the lofty vision of the EU, which grew in response to the terrors of war and avoiding it into the future, is fraying. Many nations are now turning to building walls, real or imagined, against others that are new to their neighborhoods.

***

Why do I bring up these points of dissonance, unpalatable as they might be? Can we hope to live in geographical spaces where a governing state respects and recognizes human diversity as a productive resource? Not one of us was able to negotiate with some divine power to be born into the place that we were. This was our fate—mira. This what we call culture—the creation of values, languages, religions to serve our basic human needs, material, emotional spiritual, they are what we have in common no matter what place we are born.

My own life history is the reason why I have dedicated my life—as historian, educator, and activist—to the goals of multiliteracies, civic pluralism, and productive diversity. My hope has been to contribute, in some meaningful albeit small way, to the creation of world where humanity prevails over the accident of birth and the divisive habits of xenophobia and racism become non-negotiably unacceptable.

We cannot either be proud or ashamed of the fate of our birth. The measure of who we are resides in the choices we make and the sociality that we reproduce during our short lives on our shared planet. Human movement across the globe, and human diversity that is the consequence of people’s creativity, is simply a feature of our species being. This is our shared humanity, our intrinsic potential to be different, and wonderfully so.

In this context, the University of Aegean, as a young university in a young nation, spreads its wings like a new born eagle without the same handicaps or burdens of the struggle between the Greeks of the imagination and the Greeks of the neighborhood. Unfettered, it is forward thinking, experimental, global, inclusive.

You understand Heraclitus’s wisdom. “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” You know the river of our times, with its peculiar twists and turns. You are preparing a new generation to navigate this river creatively and productively in the interests of humanity.

Together, we go forward.

Σας ευχαριστώ, θερμά, για την τιμή και την αγάπη σας.