Upcoming Events

Amy is a lecturer based in the Department of Experimental Psychology, where she researches how memories persist (and can be modified) in the brain. She is particularly interested as to whether debilitating psychiatric disorders based upon ‘maladaptive’ memories, such as posttraumatic stress disorder and drug addiction, could be treated by erasing these memories. By catching memories at their most vulnerable, it might be possible to rewrite our past. But should we do it? As well as the science, Amy will also consider the ethical issues that creating ‘spotless minds’ might create.

The emergence of gender variant people, practices and identities following the publication of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Transvestites (1909) and the inter-war invention of sex reassignment technologies posed considerable challenges to conservative, socialist, feminist and gay/lesbian politics: if ‘male’ and ‘female’ were no longer true, then what was? 

Consequently, transgender people became an object of fascination, and plenty was written about them – by the mainstream media, feminists and the medical establishment whose management of transsexualism has proved especially controversial – with transgender people themselves frequently excluded from the conversation, with their identities erased or discounted, or having their experiences framed by people or outlets with no lived experience of being transgender.

Juliet Jacques, author of the Guardian’s Transgender Journey series which documents the gender reassignment process from a first-person perspective, critically examines some of the ideas and myths that grew around transgender people, and the gulf between mainstream political and media discussions of transgender issues and the autonomous transgender theory and identities that developed in response.

Read Juliet's blog here: http://julietjacques.blogspot.com/ and her Guardian column here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/27/transgender-journey-public-spaces

 How can children brought up in religious families reconcile the different 'truths' they are told about the world? And to what extent should we discuss these issues in schools: what exactly should science teachers say when asked about the 'truth' of science by religious students?

In this talk, Alom Shaha will describe his personal experiences growing up in a Bangladeshi Muslim community in London, what role his science education played in his journey towards atheism and how, as a Physics teacher, he responds to the apparent conflict between science and religion in the classroom.