The late Mark Robert Dunmore Johnson (1948–2023) was my PhD second supervisor back at the University of Warwick from 1995 to 2000. An Oxford-trained geographer, he specialised in ethnic inequalities, with a particular focus on health. I remember my time with him with great joy and fondness because he was very eccentric and playful but also highly supportive, sometimes in the fashion of an Asian uncle.
He used to address emails to me even as late as a few months ago as a dear nephew, and I would call him dear uncle Mark. I learned many things from Mark that I still remember and have applied over the years. He was very good at pronging people to think outside the box, but he also showed praise and support when individuals were able to do precisely that.
I remember how he organised a Saturday all-day PhD training workshop that consisted of PhD students across the department at the time, and it was a very diverse school in the sense that the study of ethnic relations necessarily involved topics such as sociology, politics, geography, law, demography, statistics, international relations, and indeed history.
The students sitting around the table were from Portugal, Japan, Turkey, Greece, and of course the UK, and it was a wonderful way to understand ethnicity and politics as experienced, understood, and studied across the world at a time when, as a field of study, ethnic relations was relatively unfamiliar to many academic departments in Europe and certainly across the Middle East and Asia. It was at times incredibly disorienting and uncomfortable to be able to just about comprehend papers presented by PhD students at various stages of completion that were so beyond my immediate capacity to appreciate at the time, but it was also a baptism of fire in the complexity and heterogeneity of the topic of ethnic studies.
And while I didn’t realise it at the time, I took away a lot, and I am grateful for the very high standards that were set by Mark for all of us to be able to push the boundaries of what we know, knowing that our boundaries were still porous and evolving. But crucially, I took that formula of inviting PhD students to sit around the table while talking to each other, presenting their ideas, and sharing food three Saturdays every semester, so as to regularly bring people together and share our experiences, fears, hopes, and aspirations, as well as the intellectual shaping of our ideas through this mutual support system, which was supervised rather loosely but very carefully by Mark at the time.
And so I adopted the same approach when I was running the Centre of the Study of Ethnicity and Culture at the University of Birmingham in the early 2000s with our own doctoral students, and it worked just as well. Of course, over the years, Mark would write me references for chair-level appointments in the UK after many attempts at getting close but not getting any cigars.
These limitations at the final hurdle would undermine my confidence, but Mark would motivate me to keep going and to firmly believe in my abilities, even though would-be employers were hesitant to. In the end, Mark was also very helpful in helping me work through the process of preparing my professorial application at Leiden University, and even up until a few weeks ago, he was commenting on Twitter as to my analysis of the reasons for the recent general election results in the Netherlands, in which a far-right party won 37 seats out of a total of 150, as is now the leading contender in the formation of a coalition government that is still being formed.
He laughed a lot, he made terrible jokes and some particularly good ones, he was fascinated by faith and interfaith dialogue and cultural practice, and he was very supportive of junior scholars like myself and others who are of colour and need good mentors and people who believe in them and support them. He was a rare breed, one of the good ones in a world where there are so many awful and sometimes terrible ones, and I am going to miss him a great deal. I wish him safe travels in the afterlife. Rest in power!