As 2014 drew to close, this journal lost one of its most ardent and passionate supporters. Gregory James Dimitriadis passed away on 29 December 2014, at his home in Buffalo, New York, at the tender age of just 45. Greg supported Discourse in a number of ways – as an author, reviewer, and a close adviser to the editors. He regarded Discourse as his intellectual home and was already a star in the field of cultural politics of education when his association with the journal began. We have lost a most gentle of souls – an outstanding scholar, a wonderful friend, and a colleague whose sense of collegiality and commitment to justice were unparalleled.
Greg was born in 1969 in New York to a loving and supportive Greek-American family. A graduate of Fordham Prep, Greg was an undergraduate student at Boston College and completed two masters’ degrees from the University of Buffalo. As a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked with a number of distinguished scholars, including Norm Denzin, George Kamberelis, Cameron McCarthy, and Clifford Christians. For his doctoral research, he conducted an ethnographic study of the Boys Club of America, where he is still remembered as a valued mentor and a close friend to many families.
Greg understood better than most the experiences, aspirations, and anxieties of young people in the contemporary age – how they feel alienated from the world of neoliberal institutional practices and expectations, and how they nonetheless retain their sense of creativity and imagination. His was a life devoted to critical scholarship, not in any abstract sense but with a political commitment to correct some of the popular misconceptions about young people. His focus was on the political agency of urban youth, on the ways in which they negotiated the complexities of race, class, gender, and the broader politics of difference.
He was above all a brilliant and exemplary scholar, a complex and fluid thinker, and a creative methodologist and educational policy analyst and practitioner. In all this, he sought to elevate to a high plane a redemptive vision for modern disillusioned youthful subjects situated in the margins of social institutions such as education. He saw through the contradictions of contemporary social and educational arrangements to the emerging ground of possibility and change. And he stood before all who got to know him as a model of thoughtfulness, constantly questioning for the betterment of others and seeking in himself greater refinement in his understanding of the dilemmas of modern education and society.
Rightly regarded as one of the leading researchers of youth cultures in the world, one of Greg's most influential books, Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice, provided the first book-length ethnography of young people and their uses of hip-hop culture. The book remains an outstanding example of critical scholarship, which adeptly sutures together rich empirical data with historical work on hip-hop and an analysis of the epochal social, cultural, and economic shifts of the last two decades. His analysis shows how contemporary youth are fashioning notions of self and community outside of school in ways educators have largely ignored. His other books on youth culture included Friendship, Cliques, and Gangs, which described the life course of two African-American teens from the urban Midwest – best friends who followed very different paths; and Studying Urban Youth Culture Primer, which provided a concise introduction to the practical and theoretical complexities of studying urban youth.
Upon graduation with his doctorate, Greg went back to the University of Buffalo, where he was soon regarded as one of that university's most esteemed professors, always ready to help out and support his colleagues and students alike. He served on many doctoral committees and guided a countless number of students, not only at Buffalo but also at universities around the world. At Monash University in Australia where he was a visiting scholar in 2011, he is still remembered with a great deal of affection. In 2012, he became an Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Buffalo's Graduate School of Education, and in that capacity instituted a range of reforms to both its undergraduate and graduate programs.
Widely known for his serious, disciplined, and hardworking approach to academic work, Greg was also – like James Baldwin, whom he much admired – a shrewd and insightful essayist. His exemplary articles have appeared in numerous books, as well as journals. Greg was also a wonderful teacher, committed to making complex theoretical ideas accessible to students and novice researchers. For him, theory was important, but only if it helped us to make sense of our contemporary conditions and pointed to a way out of dilemmas of practice. With this end in mind, he wrote with George Kamberelis a most helpful book, Theory for Education, which has become a standard text around the world. Carefully calibrated, the book presented the key ideas of major thinkers whose work and ideas have shaped critical thinking in our time, illustrating their particular relevance for the field of education.
This book was not the only project on which Greg collaborated with others. With Nadine Dolby, he edited a volume, Learning to Labor in New Times, a book of critical essays marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor. With Cameron McCarthy, he wrote Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial, a book that explored the enormous potential which postcolonial art offers educators for rethinking the school curriculum. With Warren Crichlow, Nadine Dolby, and Cameron McCarthy, he edited the bestseller volume Race, Identity, and Representation in Education. The book sought to foreground an international conversation over racial antagonisms in society and the role that education played in exacerbating or assuaging racial inequality. With Dennis Carlson, he edited Promises to Keep, a volume which examined the erosion of democratic public life and public education and offered directions for re-imagining, re-designing, and re-inventing the current system. With Bob Lingard, he edited a major series of short books for Routledge dealing with key ideas and thinkers in education. Greg was an exemplary colleague to work with, always diligent, supportive, helpful, understanding, punctual, and well-organized.
As prolific as Greg was, he appreciated nonetheless that not everyone could be so single-minded in pursuing academic work, and that the demands of contemporary higher education are multiple and are often unhelpful to sustained academic effort. Universities now put all kinds of barriers to critical scholarship in particular. In one of his last books, Critical Dispositions, he referred to some of these dilemmas arising out of the emergence of managerial discourses and practices that aim to control and contain many aspects of critical scholarship. At the time of his death, he was planning another volume that looked at the lived realities of academic life under audit cultures, and how it was becoming increasingly difficult to escape their ideological clutches.
Greg's academic achievements alone do not, however, fully account for the sense of loss that his many friends, students, and admirers now feel. More profound is the loss of a loyal, loving, and a most decent human being, whose every action was guided by a commitment to the very best of ethical principles. In his personal life, with his partner Michelle Bae Dimitriadis, Greg appeared very happy and content in what he did and with the plans he had for the future. Sadly, we will never now be able to benefit from the enormous intellectual contribution that these plans represented.
Fazal Rizvi
The University of Melbourne, Parkville VIC, Australia
Cameron McCarthy
The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA