Birmingham Salon
A public forum for debate where ideas are vigorously scrutinised and no topic is off limits.
Tuesday 9 March, 2010
The election is an opportunity for us as the public to discuss and debate our own interests and priorities, and to begin to formulate a meaningful agenda for ourselves. By challenging prospective candidates to state their positions on the questions that matter to us, we can at least ensure that the election is not monopolised by issues dreamt up in focus groups with a view to tipping the electoral balance one way or the other in a few key marginal constituencies. Instead, we should gatecrash the party and insist on a serious public debate about the questions that are sidelined or obscured by the mainstream parties.
Introduced by Dolan Cummings
Dolan Cummings is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Ideas, having been research and editorial director from 2001 to 2010. He continues to edit the IoI's online review, Culture Wars. He developed the Round Table Rumbles theatre debates at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001-2004 and at the National Theatre in London in 2005, and he continues to organise regular arts discussions through the Culture Wars Forum.
He is also a member of the radical humanist Manifesto Club.
Tuesday 9 February, 2010
We are told that children are under threat from strangers and paedophiles; obesity; becoming passive and apathetic or violent from playing video games and; stressed from being constantly tested at school. Meanwhile out-of-school activities are disappearing because adult volunteers would rather resign than undergo demeaning criminal records checks in order to prove they're not paedophiles.
Are over-protective paranoid adults unintentionally restricting children’s social and psychological development, and creating a nation of cotton-wool kids? Is risk aversion damaging children?
Introduced by Dr Helene Guldberg
Co-founder and Director of Spiked, she teaches developmental psychology at the Open University, CAPA and IES, and is the author of Reclaiming Childhood, Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear. Routledge (2009)