STEPHEN CHAN

 

 

As a practising academic Stephen is committed to the principle of praxis, whereby the scholar engages with society as much as with books, whereby academic institutions are built as specialist aspects of civil society, and whereby academic freedom is no more than a specialist derivative of freedom of speech.

Stephen has for three decades been both a champion of Africa and of the view that the Western world must take seriously the intellectual and scholarly traditions, methodologies of thought and political expressions of the world now emerging to resist and challenge the West.

Stephen has led an international cosmopolitan life. The firstborn son of Chinese refugees to New Zealand, he was a national student president, publisher, newspaper editor, and international civil servant before he became an academic, firstly in Africa, and later in Britain.

Stephen presented a manifesto to do with international and multicultural understanding in his 2005 School of Oriental and African Studies Inaugural Lecture. Click here for Four Quartets for International Relations: Sixteen Graduated Propositions Defending Good and Evil

Click here for details of the 2007 interview documentary made of Stephen's views on the responsibility of the intellectual.

 

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