Description
Manners, order and respect – these are all ideals we subscribe to. In opposed positions, we ought to be able to ‘agree to disagree’. Today’s world is built from structures of standards and reason, but it is imperative to ask who constructed these norms, and why. We are more divided than ever before – along lines of race, gender, class, disability – and it’s time to question who benefits the most. What if our propensity to measure human behaviour against rules and reason is actually more problematic than it might seem? Kirsty Sedgman shows how power dynamics and the social biases involved have resulted in a wide acceptance of what people should and shouldn’t do, but they create discriminatory realities and amount to a societal façade that is dangerous for genuine social progress.
