Graduation address by Professor Nina Laurie

Tuesday 29 November 2022
Afternoon ceremony

Vice-Chancellor, colleagues, special guests, and graduates, it is my genuine pleasure to be giving this address today.

Graduates, this is your own ‘me, myself I’ moment – your name and major achievement have been read out to a packed Younger Hall. Many congratulations! Those gathered here in person and online are immensely proud of you, and their relief is palpable because, finally, normal conversation can be resumed. It will no longer take you less than three sentences in any conversation, no matter how inappropriate the timing, for you to talk about your thesis or dissertation: ‘the Diss’ as my students fondly call it – not short-hand for a really monumental put down but rather the beginning of one-sided conversations that may start well but usually end with ‘will you just read it one more time for typos… please’. All those moments are over.

So, what is left? What should you take away and build on? Some words from colleagues in my discipline, Geography, can help us here, I think. They say:

‘Geography today should be more than the sum of its many lively parts, but as a discipline cannot dance to one tune – be it ontologically, epistemologically, methodologically, or otherwise. We believe that the action lies in forging connections, in mutual learning, and in productive disagreement.’

Their message for the 21st century goes beyond Geography; it speaks to all disciplines at a time when the world needs us. Their plan for action is the essence of what we do here at St Andrews, especially in the Schools present in this graduation ceremony.

So, where does this action happen? Well, first and foremost, it happens in our classrooms. Some Masters students in Sustainable and International Development here today will recall a powerful moment of mutual learning back in March when a student in the class, joined my speaker from Germany, as they shared their different embodied experiences of health volunteering in the Gambia and Gaza.

But we do not only forge connections, experience mutual learning, and practise productive disagreement in the classroom. These occur in all sorts of spaces.

One such moment happened in the Irvine building a few years ago. It was a tricky time as our once large School was being re-configured into two new smaller ones. We were all re-learning how to share the same building in new ways. It was out of term time and some rooms were being refurbished. A coffee machine was placed in a lab downstairs and a box holding a 9000-piece jigsaw puzzle unwrapped – we all got hooked. A two-metre-wide coral reef started to emerge

through our collective labours. Respect for everyone’s approach and expertise was high – you certainly would not have put a piece of blue in a certain technician’s red or finished off my sea anemone; pre-sorting pieces by colour versus shape became a productive point of difference. Even those grabbing coffee quickly would try to spot an elusive piece as they passed through. Beyond the coral reef, the puzzle of each School forging its new identity was being worked out by our collective ‘doing’.

You will all have found your own special collective ‘doing’ spaces while at St Andrews – Fife Park encounters with different ideas about kitchen cleanliness and the importance, or not, of having a rota; watching our University Challenge team win their round last month, the physicists rooting for their colleague and my School for one of our number who is graduating here with us this afternoon. Maybe you are a gym person and met different people waiting your turn for the weights or you are musical and sang in one of our choirs. Perhaps for you it was the intercultural experience of reading a line in Scots during a Burns’ night supper or larger University spaces of coming together: the climate change line in the sand, the Holocaust memorial pier walk, vigils for Ukraine and Iran, or the May dip, where possibly you were served a warming coffee by our Chaplain while you were shivering on the East Sands.

And so, when, after today, you swipe through the many graduation images on your phone, pick out one with lots of different colours and not too much grass or sky and send it somewhere that will turn it into a jigsaw puzzle, who knows what new beginnings will open up when you invite someone to assemble it with you.

Thank you.

Professor Nina Laurie
School of Geography and Sustainable Development