Thinking on Sunday was launched as a new series of events with different themes to the Sunday Lectures. These interesting and stimulating sessions have a talk or presentation followed by Q&A, debate and discussion. The speakers are experts in their field, and/or have a passion for subject. Especially popular with our ethical society members, Thinking on Sunday is open to the public and promises to motivate and nourish the mind!
1n 1948, the HMS Windrush docked in Essex carrying hundreds of British citizens from the Caribbean. 70 years later, it emerged that our government had started denying healthcare and housing to some of the families. Russell Hargrave asks, what were the roots of the Windrush crisis, and how did the government get things so badly wrong?
Using the latest research into the media, decision science, heuristics, and emotional reasoning, Bobby Duffy examines why the populations of some countries seem better informed than others, and how we can address our ignorance of key public data and trends.
Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan have been leading the campaign for Equal Civil Partnerships since 2014 when they were refused a civil partnership at their local registry office. They ask, should Civil Partnerships be open to both mixed-sex as well as same-sex couples, and what are the implications?
Nina Edwards, author of Darkness, a Cultural History, reveals how the idea of darkness pervades art, literature, religion and every aspect of our everyday language.
Depression in a Digital Age author Fiona Thomas traces her life dealing with anxiety and the subsequent depression, and how a digital life helped her find her community, find her voice, find herself.
Julia Ebner shows how far right and Islamist extremists have succeeded in penetrating each other’s echo chambers as a result of their mutually useful messages. Her book introduces readers to the world of reciprocal radicalisation and the hotbeds of extremism that have developed in the UK, Europe and the US, with potentially disastrous consequences for all.
The corporate world is watching us, but why does no one watch them? Peter Bloom reveals pervasive monitoring practices which mask how at its heart, the elite remains socially and ethically out of control.
Using data from twenty years of conversations including first dates, crisis negotiation, sales encounters and medical communication, social psychologist Elizabeth Stokoe will change the way you think about talk, and explain the big pay-offs to understanding conversation scientifically.
How does denialism work and why is post-denialism replacing it? And how can they be combatted? In this talk, Keith Kahn-Harris, author of Denial: The Unspeakable Truth, argues that a solution will only be possible when we come to terms with the truth of our darker desires.
Despite a widespread acceptance that we are living through a housing crisis, little seems to be being done to improve the living conditions of Londoners. George Turner discusses what is driving London’s housing market to dysfunction and reveals how the house building industry has managed to exploit the crisis in order to turn an enormous profit.
How do you rate your own intelligence? In these three short talks Dr Michael Collins, Dr Sara Lyons and Dr Natasha Periyan will discuss how novelists such as Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Mark Twain think about intelligence both in and out of the classroom.
In 1919 Nancy Astor was elected as the Member of Parliament for Plymouth Sutton, becoming the first woman MP to take her seat in the House of Commons. Rachel Reeves MP writes of the inspirational achievements of women in parliament over the course of the past 100 years.
