Friday 19th of April 2024- Do singles get a raw deal?
About the talk:
Do Single People Get a Raw Deal?
Recent decades have seen huge changes in how we live our close relationships. As the extended family has receded from daily life, and the nuclear family has loosened its hold, people have been more free to make the sort of intimate choices that suit them. Women’s greater economic and social independence, and the reshaping of cultural expectations and personal desires by feminist and LGBTQ+ movements, have spread ideals of equality, freedom and self-actualisation throughout the population. Divorce has become easier, and equality legislation has enabled more women to live autonomously. Sex between men has been decriminalised and same-sex marriage legalised. This has contributed to the rising number of people who live and parent alone, and who never marry, divorce, or live apart from their partners and openly form same-sex partnerships. In 2020, it is no longer legally or culturally obligatory for women or men to marry or to stay married – to be or to act heterosexual. Yet against the backdrop of these radical upheavals in personal life, one unchanging aspect of the cultural ordering of intimacy becomes ever clearer: our lives remain profoundly shaped by the couple norm. This is the powerful and ubiquitous force – at once both social and psychological – which maintains that being in a couple is the natural and best way of living.
What does this mean for single people? Do they get a raw deal in a couple-centric society? Have things improved for single people in recent year?
About the speaker:
Professor Sasha Roseneil is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex. Sasha began her term as the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex in August 2022. She is Sussex’s ninth Vice Chancellor and our first female VC. Previously, Sasha was UCL’s first Pro-Provost for Equity and Inclusion and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Before that, Professor Roseneil was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex, and held leadership positions at Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Leeds. Over more than 30 years as an academic, Professor Roseneil has developed an international reputation for her pioneering research on intimate relationships, citizenship, and social movements. Originally trained as a sociologist, and later as a group analyst and psychotherapist, she has played a leading role in establishing the interdisciplinary fields of Gender Studies and Psychosocial Studies. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a member of the Institute of Group Analysis and a Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
The venue:
The Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ
Tickets:
They are £5 and you can purchase them on the door or about a week before at the venue. Please note that the capacity of the venue is limited, we recommend buying the ticket in advance to avoid disappointment.