PANELS

The Cambridge Union is undeniably steeped in history. While this legacy attests to the longevity of the Union’s appeal as the oldest continuously running debate and free speech society in the world, it can also be alienating to those who have historically been excluded from these spaces. To me, ‘free speech’ is best ensured and achieved when those who have the privilege to speak provide a platform for marginalised voices to speak for themselves. Thankfully, times are fast changing and over the past few terms, momentous strides have been made in breaking the homogenic exclusivity of the Union. I am proud to announce this term’s panels and our progress in the Equalities committee.

As a female Equalities Officer and a person of colour, I realise that the Union still has a long way to go. We can never stop working towards ensuring representation. However, I do feel that the diversity of Committee in itself demonstrates that we are heading in the right direction. Progress has been achieved: I am very pleased to say that for every invite to a male speaker, we sent an invite to two female speakers. We have also achieved a term card that represents various communities, with 30% of our confirmed speakers being BME, representing and catering to the interests of these communities. Our collaboration with other societies that work to champion class equality such as The 93% Club Cambridge or cultural societies such as ACS and FLY also help us ensure that we are featuring real change-makers.

This term, we are also continuing to ensure that these under-represented groups are able to take advantage of opportunities that they previously weren’t able to access by introducing a new training stream: Introduction to Competitive Debating, alongside the bespoke Public Speaking Workshops for women and non-binary people. This suite of workshops (with no expectation of previous knowledge or experience) will aim to empower women and gender minorities with crucial rhetorical skills and argumentation techniques in a friendly and inclusive space. A special thanks goes out to the Equalities Subcommittee, who have dedicated their time to ensure that we have an inclusive term card. I have enjoyed working with Shibhangi, Georgia, Jasper, Ellenoor, Tom and Zak. I am really looking forward to seeing their speaker and panel event(s) come to light.

The driving premise behind our panel events is showcasing a variety of diverse perspectives on topical issues that aren’t suited to the debate format. The exciting events to look out for this term range from Love Islanders exploring mental health after the show, a historical and cultural reflection on the Arab Spring, an exploration of class at universities, the Sex Workers Panel, Windrush, Everyday Sexual Harassment and so many more! These panels not only promise to be intellectually stimulating but also ensure that the Union is open to those who are not always given a platform to speak.

I strongly believe that our work so far, as evidenced by our Term Card, is leading us towards our ultimate goal of inviting speakers who not only challenge our beliefs and educate us on pertinent themes, but also contribute towards maintaining inclusive discourse. We need a shared platform for all, especially those who had been left out of it before.

I shall look forward to welcoming you to the Union.

Warm regards,

Sharena Shiv Equalities Officer

This event will provide an opportunity to hear directly from refugees about their experiences through the medium of poetry. It is in collaboration with ‘the Poetry Project’, a literary dialogue forum founded in Berlin between Europeanborn citizens and young migrants who often travelled alone from war zones as minors.

The project tries to take advantage of the Eastern cultural traditions that describe personal and historical events through the folk art of verse. It has helped connect over 700 refugees with the new societies they are now living in.

Susanne is an award-winning journalist and has been a foreign correspondent with Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, since 1991. She has reported extensively from war zones and crisis regions in many parts of the world, including the Balkan countries, Georgia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf countries.

Rojin fled from Iraq with her uncle at the age of twelve. During her journey, she spent ten days in prison in Athens and forced to continue her journey alone. Now, she lives in a refugee home in Berlin and recently won the 2019 THEO Brandenburg Prize for Youth Literature in the category ‘linguistic space’.

Samiullah was born in Ghazni, Afghanistan, and came to Berlin with his cousin at the age of sixteen. After initially struggling in Germany with little knowledge of the language, as well as receiving a now overturned ruling to deport him. In 2018 he was awarded the Else Lasker-Schüler Poetry Prize.

Robina fled from Afghanistan in 2016 after facing persecution from Islamists there. In order to gain entry to Germany, she had to board a flight alone with a faked passport, which continues to cause her issues. She is currently attending school in Berlin and has plans to become a civil engineer.

Shahzamir was born in Mazar-eSharif in Afghanistan, which he fled at the age of fifteen. After meeting his family in Greece, they travelled to Berlin together, where he remains now, though his right to remain is not confirmed. In 2018, he was awarded the Else Lasker-Schüler Poetry Prize and in 2019 the Theo Prize in the poetry category.

Aarash is a human rights lawyer, literary translator and founding member of the Poetry Project. He was born in Afghanistan and raised in Germany after receiving asylum there when he was young. Throughout his career, both in and out of court he has worked extensively with refugees, especially minors separated from their families.

The sex work industry and all threads of discussion around it are always governed by either tropes of mischaracterising the collective of sex workers as ‘unfortunate victims of tragic circumstances’ or by tones of moral policing, patronisng those involved within the industry. Ironically even those who claim to be fighting for the rights of sex workers’, inadvertently end up pushing for policies that hurt sex workers the most.

This panel will aim to challenge these misconceptions, examine and discuss the nuances of the industry from different perspectives and ultimately educate on how we can be supportive allies for sex workers without speaking over them or harming their interests.

Sharmila Parmanand has a PhD in MultiDisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge on a Gates scholarship.

An active proponent of equality, she has written comprehensively on the misleading trope of victimising sex workers and how often main-stream feminist movements can actively harm those in the industry.

Miranda Kane is a comedian, and was a plussize sex-worker in London for seven years. She wrote and performed her first show in 2012 which went on to receive 5-starred reviews and has sold out in theatres across the UK and Australia. Since then, she has written and recorded the sitcom ‘Slaving Away’ for audible. com, based upon her ‘utterly mundane life as a dominatrix’.

She is currently a sex-blogger for The Metro and has also taken part in debates and public speaking events to promote the decriminalisation of sex-workers.

Camille was awarded the Sociological Review Fellowship (2017-2018). Engaging specifically with Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction, Camille’s research examines the specific ways that gender and race are implicated in processes of reproductive labour.

She is the editor of Women and the Subversion of the ‘Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader’ (PM Press, 2019) and author of ‘Mothers & Others: The Politics of Work in Neoliberal Britain’ (MUP, forthcoming).

When news of the Windrush Scandal broke - Caribbean Commonwealth citizens working and living in the UK wrongly detained, denied legal rights, and threatened with deportation - there was widespread disbelief as to the damage and injustice it has and continues to cause.

This interdisciplinary panel of those at the forefront of this issue seeks to discuss and raise awareness of the Windrush Generation, and the causes and consequences of the Scandal. By asking these questions this panel will interrogate what Windrush reveals about systemic racism and values in contemporary Britain, and what must be done in recompense to prevent the repetition of these institutional failures.

Amelia Gentleman is a reporter at the Guardian and author of ‘The Windrush Betrayal, Exposing the Hostile Environment.’ She won the Paul Foot award, Cudlipp award, an Amnesty award, journalist of the year British journalism awards and London press club print journalist of the year for Windrush investigations.

Dr Patrick Vernon OBE is a British social commentator and political activist of Jamaican heritage, who works in the voluntary and public sector. He is a former Labour councillor in the London Borough of Hackney.

Anthony Williams has experienced firsthand the injustices of the Windrush scandal and has become vocal about the detrimental consequences he has suffered due to Home Office actions. He arrived from Jamaica in 1971, as part of the Windrush generation he was wrongly classed an illegal immigrant in 2013 and threatened with deportation, depriving him of access to work or social security, leaving him destitute for 5 years.

His Excellency Seth George Ramocan is Jamaica’s 13th High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He served as the Consul General of Jamaica in Toronto from 2009 to 2014. During his tenure, Mr. Ramocan was appointed Dean of the Caribbean Consular Corps.

Just over a decade on from Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation ignited a wave of uprisings against repressive regimes across the region, many of these states are engulfed in civil war or perpetual instability with all of them facing an uncertain future.

While it is clear that the reverberations of the 2010-11 Arab Spring are not nearing their denouement, this panel will attempt to address the successes, failures and futures of the affected states as of 2021.

His Excellency Nabil Ben Khedher is the Tunisian Ambassador to London, after joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1994 he held a variety of positions ranging from deputy director for Latin America to specialising in European affairs at the Tunisian Embassy in Brussels. Most of all he Diplomatic Advisor to the President Beji Caid Essebsi from 2015-2017, during which he liaised between the Presidency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during an important period of establishing relations on behalf of a democratic Tunisia.

Dr Madawi Al-Rasheed: Dr Al-Rasheed is Visiting Professor at the LSE Middle East Centre, having previously been the Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College London. Her current research focuses on the reinterpretations of Islamic texts among a small minority of Saudi reformers and the activism in the pursuit of democratic governance and civil society.

Michael Stephens was the Research Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute, the world’s oldest thinktank. During 2017 Mr Stephens worked as the Senior Research Analyst for Syria and Lebanon for the FCO. Mr Stephens’ research has focused on Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Kurdish regions of Syria, their social composition and responses to the threat from the Islamic State.

Since November, thousands of farmers have been encamped in New Delhi and keeping vigil, exposing stark inequality across India. Is mass organizing more effective than the government? Are the protests causing religious divides? Are the reforms a step in the right direction or are they antithetical to India’s functioning? How can India move forward – and what lessons can the world learn from this mass uprising?

Nodeep Kaur is an Indian labour rights activist and member of the Mazdoor Adhikar Sangathan (MAS), one of the unions of industrial workers supporting the Indian farmers’ protest.

Professor Ravinder Kaur is a historian of contemporary India. She is Associate Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Despite the vast expansion of the United Kingdom’s higher education provision from the 1960’s onwards, concern remains about the under-representation of students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Compared to their middle and upper class peers, they are statistically much less likely to apply to and win a place at the most selective institutions in the UK.

How do we remedy this under-representation? How can universities make themselves more attractive to nontraditional applicants?

Ibrahim Mohammed, more commonly known as Ibz Mo, is an educational influencer and YouTuber, who read Human, Social and Political Sciences at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and graduated in 2019. He began his YouTube channel just over three years ago to document his time at Cambridge as an ethnic minority and working-class student, and today, has a total of over 125,000 subscribers, and over 11 million views.

Professor Lee Elliot-Major is Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter, and is Britain’s first in the field. Alongside being a former Chief Executive of the Sutton Trust and authoring multiple books, Lee is also an Honorary Professor at the UCL Institute of Education, an Associate Member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and an Associate of LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance.

Professor Kalwant Bhopal is Professor of Education and Social Justice and Director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education (CRRE) at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the achievements and experiences of minority ethnic groups in education, and she has conducted extensive research on exploring discourses of identity and intersectionality, examining the lives of BME groups as well as the marginal position of Traveller communities.

What happens when human decisions aren’t rational? What policy implications come from the “behavioural economics revolution”. With the advent of the Behavioral Insight Team and the Nudge Unit, behavioral economics is here to stay — but how can individual decisions give us insight into health, wealth, and happiness?

Iris Bohnet is the Academic Dean of Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral economist, combining insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective.

Kathleen Vohs is an American psychologist and behavioral economist. She is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Land O’Lakes Chair in Marketing in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Her research has been embraced by leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama.

Nava Ashraf is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also Director of Research of the Marshall Institute, Co-Director of the Psychology and Economics program at STICERD, and co-Lead Academic of the International Growth Centre, Zambia.

Should museums return their colonial artifacts? Is African heritage currently the prisoner of European museums?

This panel event will address the issues regarding negotiated agreements, institutional policies in countries in the North Atlantic and Africa, issues around the law and the responsibilities that need to be put in place.

Dr Monica Hanna is an archaeologist and Egytptologist.. Her research focuses on space, knowledge and identity of archaeological sites, with particular interest on different meanings and reflections of heritage on identity of space and communities. She is the acting Dean of the College of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) in Aswan, Egypt .

Chika Okeke-Andulu is an Igbo-Nigerian artist, art historian, art curator, and blogger specializing in African and African Diaspora art history and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.

Dan Hicks is a British archaeologist and anthropologist. He is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

Felwine Sarr is a humanist, philosopher, economist, and musician and the AnneMarie Bryan Chair in French and Francophone Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Afrotopia.

For over two centuries, American political life has been shaped for better or for worse by the Constitution. To study its inception and evolution is therefore to study American political culture itself. Our expert panel will discuss the ways in which the Constitution, ratified in 1788, continues to shape American political discourse today, and how an understanding of its fraught history might offer answers in America’s contested political climate.

Adam Lebovitz is an historian of constitutional ideas, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Having published widely on constitutional design in the ancient and the modern worlds, his first book, ‘Colossus: Constitutional theory in America and France, 1776-1799’, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2022.

Danielle Allen (Chair) is James Bryant Conant University Professor, and Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. A political theorist who has written extensively on democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought, she is the author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014).

Alison LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and an Associate Member of the Department of History. Specializing in US legal history, her forthcoming book, ‘The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery From the Long Founding Moment to the Civil War’, in under contract with Yale University Press.

Bio here

Do reality television shows need to do more to address mental health? The focus on celebrities to be “perfect” as well as the publicization of mental health demonstrate competing societal pressures. The impact of social media on body standards is crucial for young people.

The panel will detail the panelists’ experience on love island, changes in the industry, and advice to young people on dealing with societal pressures and body standards.

Yewande Biala was an Islander in 2019. Since leaving the show, she has been an advocate of bringing microaggressions to the public’s attention and a campaigner of vaccine uptake among young people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Rosie Williams is a social media influencer and businesswoman who was an Islander in 2019. She has been outspoken for the role of aftercare in the reality TV world.

Amy Hart was an Islander in 2019, as an air hostess and cabin crew manager from Sussex. She has spoken about the mental health support the show has given as part of the Where’s Your Head at Campaign.

How does the objectification of women in all types of media, from film and television to the porn industry, contribute to how women’s sexuality is perceived in the real world? During this moment of unrest, it is more crucial than ever to explore how society contributes to the dehumanization of women, and the media is a key place to start.

Media’s role as storyteller to the masses means that it has incredible power to shape our collective perceptions of the world and the people in it, and male control over media industries has resulted in not only a vastly skewed and harmful representation of women, sexuality and sex. This panel will confront the male gaze that penetrates all forms of media, its impact and what steps we can all take so that women can take back ownership of their sexuality.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a renowned film scholar and filmmaker who is director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Her work focuses on race and sexuality at the site of representation in global popular culture; she has released five books and publishes widely in several of the top academic journals. She has also released two feature films and her expertise on the racial stereotyping of Asian-American women has been drawn upon in the articles of many famous news outlets such as The Washington Post, Vox and CBC.

Lisa Pecot-Hébert is an experienced criticalcultural trained scholar and associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California who specialises in gender and body image, race and identity, women and beauty, cosmetic surgery, and body image. Her unprecedented research into makeover programs in the media such as ‘Extreme Makeover’ and ‘The Swan’ as well as the history of cosmetic surgery provides valuable insight into TV and media’s role in shaping women’s identities.

Naomi McDougall Jones is an award-winning actress, filmmaker, author, and activist for women in film. She has written and produced two-award winning indie feature films ‘Imagine I’m Beautiful’ (2014) and ‘Bite Me’ (2019); she has also a written a book named The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood, which confronts the rampant sexism of both the representation and casting process of the film industry, and the impact it has on social perceptions of women.

What are the everyday occurrences of women experiencing sexual harassment in education and on the streets? At such a crucial moment, how can and should we address them?

We hope this panel will explore this issue and the wider threats modern women face, from the perspectives of activists who are working on this both on- and offline.

Soma is a campaigner around the patterns of sexist abuse that take place within education, particularly in certain ‘sanitised’ spaces like elite private schools. Through the power of publishing testimony online from hundreds of survivors, she has held institutions accountable for the effects of sexual harassment on their students and forced change around recognising and acting on these issues.

Fay Maxted is the CEO of Survivor’s Trust, having worked with victims of sexual violence for over 20 years. During her time there, she has set up five new rape support centres across the country. She is also an accredited counceller, specialising in sexual violence support. In 2015, Fay was awarded an OBE in recognition of her dedicated work in promoting survivor’s trust.

Maya Tutton is a student and activist, who co-founded the political organisation ‘Our Streets Now’ with her sister Gemma in 2019. ‘Our Streets Now’ is dedicated to ending the normalisation of public sexual harassment and making it a criminal offence. Their petition has had over 400,000 signatures, with the movement helping to start many vital conversations around the experiences of street harassment in Britain and beyond.

Do the police help or harm feminist movements? Can the police, or the political, be a site of feminist organizing? Can the police protect women?

The recent tragedy of Sarah Everard’s death and the breaking up of the vigil demonstrate fissures and important questions in the relationship of feminism, civil liberties, the state, and the police.

Shami Chakrabarti is a Labour Party politician, barrister, and human rights activist. Between 2016 and 2020, she served as Shadow Attorney General for England to Wales. Prior to that, she was the director of Liberty, an advocacy group promoting civil liberties and human rights, and held the post between 2003 and 2016. She has written and broadcast widely, and has authored two books: ‘On Liberty ‘(2014) and ‘On Women’ (2017).

Bell Ribeiro-Addy is the Labour MP for Streatham and the Shadow Minister of State for Immigration. She has been vovalen a vocal opponent of the Police and Crime Bill.

Ngozi Fulani is the CEO and founder of Sistah Space, a domestic violence charity for AfricanCarribean women. She is trained as an independent domestic violence advocate and is a campaigner for hearing the voices of British Africna heritage women.

Djanomi Headley is the senior independent domestic violence advisor and operations manager of Sistah Space.

What are the long-term consequences of Covid for individuals and our society at large? Join us as Professor Sir Simon Wessely asks the experts at the front line of care delivery for the past year as the pandemic raged in the UK.

He will explore the aftermath of the virus and how it might affect us in the long-term and how best we can optimise our wellbeing moving forwards.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely, FMedSci is a Professor of Psychological Medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, former President of both The Royal College of Psychiatrists and The Royal Society Medicine. He was knighted in 2013 for services to Military Healthcare and Health Research.

Dame Jane Dacre is a British Rheumatologist at The Whittington Hospital and medical scholar . She is Professor of Medical Education at UCL and Director of the UCL Medical School. She was past President of Royal College of Physicians She has been involved in the care of patients throughout the Covid pandemic.

Dr Paul Glynne is a general physician at UCLH. He went to medical school at UCL. He is a former clinical director at UCLH of Emergency Services and Medical Director of The Medicines Board. He is founder of The Physicians clinic a multidisciplinary group of physicians in London. He specialises in complex diagnostic cases. He has led the acute care response to the pandemic at UCLH for the past year.