Learning and Teaching (LATISS)

I am delighted and honoured to present this special issue of Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences (LATISS). Its purpose is one that is particularly meaningful to me not only professionally but also personally. As for so many others, throughout my graduate studies and especially while working on my thesis, Sue's work had a strong influence on me as a student. I was starstruck when I first met Sue some years later, and although I had my publisher's hat on, I was moved by the care and interest that Sue took in my studies once we delved into my student alter ego and I confessed how much her work had helped me formulate my own. An otherwise very intimidating encounter was softened by the warmth and generosity conveyed by Sue with her adviser hat on.

Belatedly, but with no less enthusiasm or joy, we invite you to celebrate with us the 70th birthday of Professor Susan Wright and her lifelong contribution to, and achievements in, the academic world as an internationally highly acclaimed researcher, scholar and teacher. Beyond her academic achievements, we also wish to celebrate Sue as a unique traveller and interconnector of worlds, cultures, ‘thoughtscapes’ and practices. We wish to celebrate Sue as an anthropologist of ‘the in-between-ness’ of (the) world(s), and her singular and deeply original skill in exploring hidden, unrecognised and unacknowledged connections, interrelations and potential for co-existence and collaborations.

Three authors reflect on their conversations and interactions with Sue with particular reference to her fieldwork in south-west Iran in the mid-1970s and how that influenced her subsequent research on community development, organisations and social change.

Four authors analyse Sue's impact on the discipline of anthropology and on the postgraduates she supervised. They highlight in particular her contributions as a teacher and her advocacy of what she terms ‘political reflexivity’.

Seven authors reflect on Sue's contribution to developing the ‘Anthropology of Policy’ and its growth as a new sub-field of political anthropology since the 1990s. They show how her focus on policy brought together her earlier concerns with organisations, power and processes of social transformation with critical and reflexive perspectives on language, higher education reform and regimes of audit and accountability.

In this section, participants in the Universities in the Knowledge Economy project (UNIKE 2013–2017) and European Universities – Critical Futures (2019–2023) write about the distinctive features of these projects, their contribution to contemporary debates about the reform of higher education, and how Sue's ideas and ways of working influenced their own research and practice.

In this section, five authors reflect on Sue Wright's academic trajectory, her work in creating disciplinary and interdisciplinary networks and her engagement – as both an activist and scholar – in institutional change-making. They also reflect on her research on university reform, neoliberalisation and higher education futures.

It was 1999 when I first encountered Sue. She was bidding to the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN), a body funded by the UK higher education funding councils, for a Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics. At the time, I was convenor of the Political Studies Association's Teaching and Learning group and I was delighted to support Sue's bid because it focussed on how academics and students could use their disciplinary expertise to undertake learning and teaching research on issues important to them.