Stacked Odds: present/future inequalities

Please check ticket info for this event below, incl. information about access.

Inequality is ever on the rise - but who is affected the most, and how much can we change the trajectory?

For the final panel of 2024’s fair we invite you to join an expansive conversation about inequality and hope - past, present and future. Danny Dorling’s new book zooms in on the lives and opportunities of seven ‘average’ children in the UK, created from statistics, all born in 2018. Through her work as disability and minoritised groups activists, Twimukye Macline Mushaka sees and works with the effects of inequality in all its complex reality.

Join our speakers as they trace the histories that brought us here, what’s on the horizon, and the alternative pathways being forged.

This event will be chaired by Professor Nasar Meer.

Our speakers:

Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles.

Twimukye Macline Mushaka works with Shelter Scotland as a Lived Experience Lead, with responsibility for coordinating how Shelter Scotland works with people with lived experience of the housing emergency to get their voices heard by people in power to influence positive change. Previously, Twimukye worked with the Poverty Alliance for 15 years, as a Senior Communities and Networks Officer, with key responsibilities for community engagement on poverty and social exclusion including facilitating people with lived experience of poverty to participate in the work of the Poverty Alliance. As a disability and minoritised groups activists, Twimukye is passionate about issues of social justice including highlighting how the intersections of race, religion, gender, disability compound experiences of disadvantage. She is passionate about how we can harness the power of the seldom heard voices to be agents of change and reduce inequality. In her voluntary role, Twimukye sits on the Consumer Scotland Committee for Consumers in Vulnerable Circumstances and has been on boards of a number of charitable organisations in Scotland.

Our chair:

Nasar Meer is Professor of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow.​He was previously Professor of Sociology and Director of RACE.ED at the University of Edinburgh, and Professor of Comparative Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde. Nasar’s research is interdisciplinary and spans a number of topics that orbit around the study of citizenship.  Namely, in what ways societies organise membership and how this corresponds with experiences of inequality and appeals to justice. He is Academic Chair of The Stuart Hall Foundation (SHF)  and his publications include The Cruel Optimism of Racial Justice (2022) and The Impact Agenda: Controversies, Consequences and Challenges (2020).

*Please note that masks will be required at this event (as with all Lighthouse events).

*Accessibility: All events will be professionally filmed & livestreamed. The Roxy is wheelchair accessible (including toilets) and we'll have provisions for neurodivergent guests including stims, quiet space and colour-coded lanyards.

*Events are £6 or free -we completely understand paying for one or two events and then getting free spots for others. The Radical Book Fair is entirely bookshop run and ticket sales are vital to keeping the fair sustainable and paying all our speakers so all support is heartily welcome!

*Featured books: The book & ticket option will select the most recently published book at any given event, if you’re not sure which book you want or don’t want that featured book, then buy a £6 voucher ticket that can be used for any of the books below.

*If you'd like to help make the book fair accessible to more folks, please consider adding to our pay-it-forward fund HERE.