LANS Distinguished Lecture with Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Part of the LANS Culture Programme - “RUPTURES – how to make change?”

Abstract: 

Covid-19 has impacted our everyday life, and perhaps made us pause and question our views on priorities and values. The pandemic itself represents a massive rupture, it also sharpened perceptions and dynamics of a world in flux. Pressing questions of social justice and sustainability are coming to the fore. If there is a momentum for positive change, how can we take action and create positive change?

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown will be talking about female disrupters through the ages and share her experiences of activism over several decades and her thoughts about the period we are in when the ‘disrupters’ admired and enabled are often reactionaries on the right.

About the Speaker: 

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown came to the UK in 1972 from Uganda after completing her undergraduate degree at Makerere University where she passed with an exceptional first class degree in English. She was awarded a scholarship to pursue post-graduate studies at Oxford where she obtained an M.Phil degree in literature in1975.

Now a journalist, she has written for The Guardian, Observer, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Evening Standard, The Mail and other newspapers and was a weekly columnist on The Independent for eighteen years. She was the first regular columnist of colour on a national newspaper in the UK, the first female Muslim too. For someone of this background, politically on the left and a committed anti-racist, to find a voice and space in the mainstream media has been challenging and rewarding. She is also a respected pundit, radio and television broadcaster and appears on key political and cultural programmes. She writes a weekly column for I newspaper and for other newspapers including the Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday.

Her new book is Ladies Who Punch - Fifty trailblazing women whose stories you should know.