Arcadia England

The Talk of the Town! lecture series has been incredibly popular since its inception, but the event last week was a particular success. So many students attended that we ended up with a standing room section. Not only did those students show up, but they all had questions to ask the speaker and they all hung around to speak with her when the event was over.

It was an incredible evening, and the topic at hand was clearly one that spoke to our students in attendance.

EVERYDAY SEXISM

Our guest speaker was Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a website that ‘exists to catalogue instances of sexism experienced by women on a day to day basis’. Created in 2012, by April 2015 the project had shared 100,000 stories and was a catalyst for a renewed interest in gender inequality in the UK; in 2013 Laura was named Cosmopolitan magazine’s ‘Ultimate New Feminist’ and received the ‘British Empire Medal’ for services to gender equality in 2015. Laura also writes for the Guardian newspaper and has a new book Girl Up due for release in April this year (a follow up to the incredibly successful Everyday Sexism book published in 2014).

Laura kicked off the event by telling us how the Project got started, and then began to describe how the Project has grown and developed since its humble beginnings.

One of the most poignant aspects of Laura’s talk was how shocking some of her anecdotes were. Many of us will have tales to tell about gender inequality, but Laura has hundreds of thousands. She has given people the confidence to speak up, and a platform through which to do so.

She also spoke eloquently about the intersectionality of feminism - touching upon issues faced by people of colour, people that are not able bodied, all sexualities and all genders.

When faced with brilliant questions from the audience, she had brilliant answers.

We would like to thank Laura once more for this eye opening event, and we hope she enjoyed it as much as we did.

WHAT’S NEXT?

We are delighted to invite you to the second Talk of the Town! instalment, featuring two excellent spoken-word artists. Paula Varjack and Keith Jarrett will be performing their work, which deals with themes and subjects such as race, sexuality, belonging, and nationhood. They were so popular in their last appearance for Talk of the Town! that we have invited them back for a rare encore. This informal slam poetry session will be provocative, hilarious, and spell-binding. 

You should each have received an email from Dr Scott about this event, with more information. We hope to see you there.