The following remarks were delivered by Professor Sekyi-Otu at the 2003 Memorial Lecture.

We are here this evening to honour with the award of a Memorial Scholarship and a Memorial Lecture the life and work of our colleague and friend Professor Ioan Davies who died suddenly in Cuba on the 15th of February 2000.

Last Friday, at the end of the last preparatory meeting for this event held by members of the organizing committee, I blurted out to Jody Berland and James Porter something to this effect: "I can't believe Ioan is gone, really gone. It's been three years already!". And Jody's startling response, her joyful wisdom, "But he is not gone. He is here with us. See what we are doing". On my way home I thought of how deeply African that response was. I mean this idea of the world's ordering and human existence as an undying and irrevocable covenant between those dwelling in the land of the ancestors, ourselves here, and those yet unborn. Incidentally - a favourite word of Ioan's - it is an idea to which today's self-styled conservatives, be they Western or African enforcers of fundamentalist market commandments, give rather short shrift. Fetishists of the present, they practice a politics as destitute of memory as it is of remembrance of the future, care for posterity.

And it is fitting, isn't it, that we invoke the African world this evening, at this event of remembering the life and work of Professor Ioan Davies. For, if I may briefly rehearse the central facts of his life particularly for young students unfamiliar with his name, it is in Africa that his life began. Ioan Davies was born on the 28th of August 1936 in what was then Belgian Congo, the country that, after some rather interesting metamorphoses worthy of Ben Okri and Ovid, now bears the proud name of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was there that, the son of missionaries, he received his primary school education. He would continue his schooling in Wales and Scotland, and subsequently obtain his B.Sc. in Economics and Sociology from the University of London and his Ph.D. in Social History and Comparative Politics from the University of Essex. After teaching stints at the Universities of Cambridge and Essex as well as political activism in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the fledgling New Left Club in London, Ioan taught briefly at the University of Guyana in 1970 before moving to Queen's University in Kingston. It was from Queen's that he applied for and secured a position as Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at York in 1972. The story goes - and it is a story Ioan relished telling - that given his Congolese ancestry, his sojourn in Guyana, and his weird first name, the members of the hiring committee were expecting a black Caribbean woman, a woman called Joan. They found and got instead what Ioan himself would call "basically a Celtic white male".

It is with such auspicious confusion that Ioan Davies was welcomed into these hallowed halls in 1972. For the next twenty eight years, from his extended family of affiliations in the Department of Sociology, the Division of Social Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, Ioan taught a rich variety of courses. Some, though not all, of the titles sound conventional enough: CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY, AESTHETICS AND CRITICAL THEORY. But students and colleagues alike will forever remember the profusion of texts and cultural forms, the gloriously promiscuous exuberance, he brought to his teaching, his research and his writings. These writings, ranging in subject matter from African trade unions to British cultural studies, consists of five books and numerous papers and journalistic articles. From Toronto to Nairobi to Kyoto, Ioan went savouring the luxurious variety of the earth's smells and tastes and sounds, no less than the passions, dreams and throbbing imaginings of its peoples. Such blessedly wayward spirits are not known to be consummate keepers of the books and managers of institutions. But Ioan was also a very good administrator. Must have been the culture of the missionary school retained and transfigured by what Herbert Marcuse would have called non-repressive sublimation. Among his many contributions to the university was for me his mastership of Norman Bethune College from 1972-77. I do not believe that I impugn the significance of the contributions of his predecessor and successors if I say that, in those heady days when the glint of THE REVOLUTION was not entirely extinguished, Ioan played a pivotal role in shaping Bethune's image at the time as a progressive college. The graduate progarammes in Sociology and SPT also benefited inestimably from Ioan's contributions, to say nothing of the countless dissertations he supervised. Last but by no means the least, Ioan, as Beth Seaton has already said, was instrumental in the establishment of the Joint Graduate Programme in Comunication and Culture.

It is in fact that programme which inaugurated these lectures in honour of Prof. Davies. The first was given by Professor Larry Grosssberg in September 2000. The second by Professor Will Straw of McGill in October 2001. The current organizing committee wishes to thank Com/Cul for inventing this tradition and for being assiduous and unstinting in the planning of today's activities. It would not be inappropriate to say a special thank you to Professor Barbara Crow in particular for her tireless, leading role in the work of our committee and in organizing this event. Our challenge and mandate is to make this lecture and the award an annual event.

That brings us to the Ioan Davies Memorial Scholarship to be awarded annually to a graduate student in Communication and Culture. Students in that programme will be informed in the spring regarding the next competition. And now it is my pleasure and honour to ask Mrs. Diane Davies to present the Ioan Davies Scholarship. But I cannot do so without paying a little tribute to you, Dianne. From the depths of your nameless sorrow and that of your lovely children you summoned the courage to foster this tradition through which we bear witness to the dreams we share in common with Ioan.