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Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Technology Sydney

Andrew Jakubowicz is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. He has an Honours degree in Government from Sydney University and a PhD from UNSW.

Since the early 1970s he has been involved in action research and race relations, and has been centrally involved in the development of materialist theories of cultural diversity. He has taught at universities in the USA, Europe and Asia, and was the foundation director of the Centre for Multicultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. He has published widely on ethnic diversity issues, disability studies and media studies. More recently he has been co-director of the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Key Strength at UTS (2008-2015). He resigned from his full-time position at UTS in October 2017, and continues to supervise doctoral students and undertake research.

Andrew was appointed to the Advisory Board of MulticulturalNSW in 2015 and left in 2018..

In 1994 he led the research team that produced the book, Racism Ethnicity and the Media (Allen and Unwin), and has has been involved in multimedia documentaries such as Making Multicultural Australia (1999-2004) and The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu (2001-2002). He was historical adviser to the exhibitions on the Jewish communities of Shanghai, at the Sydney Jewish Museum (2001-2002), the National Maritime Museum (2001-2003) and the national travelling exhibition, Crossroads: Shanghai and the Jews of China (2002-2003). His latest book with colleagues is Cyber Racism and Community Resilience (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).

He was foundation chair of the Disability Studies and Research Institute. He chaired the Institute for Cultural Diversity, a national NGO (http://culturaldiversity.net.au) from 2009 to 2012.

He was historical advisor on the SBS series, "Immigration Nation" (2011), and is series advisor on "Once Upon a Time in...", a three season project for Northern Pictures and SBS, of which "Cabramatta" (2012) and "Punchbowl" (2014) have been released. He developed the concept for "The Great Australian Race Riot", a three episode series for SBS made by Essential Media broadcast in 2015.

Graduate research supervision areas include new media and social change, racism and ethnicity, public policy and marginalised minorities. He was lead Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage project "Cyber Racism and Community Resilience" with colleagues at Sydney, Western Sydney, Deakin and Monash universities, and in collaboration with the Australian Human Rights Commission, VicHealth and the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia.

"Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century", an educational website developed jointly with the Office of the Board of Studies NSW, won the 2005 Best Secondary Educational website category of the annual Excellence in Educational Publishing Awards.

He retired from the University of Technology Sydney in 2017 and was appointed Emeritus Professor of Sociology, He continues to work as a consultant sociologist, while also continuing to supervise selected graduate students and providing an advisory role to the University on Social Science research. He was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2021.

He was lead consultant on the Waverley Council's Cultural Diversity Plan (2021), senior advisor on cultural and linguistic diversity to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (2021-2), a member of the Advisory Committee on COVID and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity to the Commonwealth Department of Health (2020-2), and a Data Analyst in Health on social demography.

Experience

  • 2008–2011
    Professor of Sociology and head Social and Political Change Academic Group, University of Technology Sydney

Education

  •  
    University of Sydney, BA (Hons) in Government
  •  
    University of New South Wales, PhD

Research Areas

  • Applied Sociology, Program Evaluation And Social Impact Assessment (160801)
  • Sociology (1608)
  • Race And Ethnic Relations (160803)
  • Australian Government And Politics (160601)
  • Migration (160303)
  • Migrant Cultural Studies (200208)

Honours

Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW (FRSN), Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA)