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On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the rules and making things better Kirsty Sedgman
Event details
We’re living in an age of division. From abortion rights to immigration, gun control to climate change, civil debate has gone out the window. Manners, order and respect are being eroded. Why can’t we all be reasonable?
The trouble is, what’s ‘reasonable’ to one person is outrageous to another. Is it okay to let children play in the garden while others are working from home? To do your makeup on a train, or recline your seat on an aeroplane? What’s the right way to breastfeed? To protect your neighbourhood? To protest against injustice and oppression? In a world where we all think we’re being reasonable, how can we figure out what’s right?
Looking back through history and around the world, cultural studies expert Kirsty Sedgman of the University of Bristol sets out to discover how unfairness and discrimination got baked into our social norms, dividing us along lines of gender, class, disability, sexuality, race, and more.
Join Kirsty for an insightful discussion and to find out why, sometimes, we need to act unreasonably to bring about positive change.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
Image credit: Kirsty Sedgman portrait © Gareth Iwan Jones
About the speaker
Kirsty Sedgman is Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Bristol and current British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She specialises in audience research and cultural value. Her work investigates how different people experience and find meaning in live performance. Kirsty has published on subjects ranging from exclusions in immersive and participatory theatre, to the ways online audiences talk about digital representations of live performance, to how Harry Potter fans felt about the Cursed Child stage play. She is currently working on a three-year British Academy-funded research project investigating community engagements with the Bristol Old Vic theatre through time.
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