College of Social Sciences

*RECORDING AVAILABLE SOON ON REQUEST*

The Addressing Inequalities IRT invite you to join them for a seminar featuring global research tackling issues in Chile, Colombia, India and Brazil, as well as closer to home in N.Ireland.

The talks come from Kings College London and from colleagues at Glasgow:

• Dr Sanchari Roy (KCL) – Sex workers, Stigma and Self-Image: Evidence from Kolkata Brothels
• Alice Aldinucci (UofG) – Understanding aspirations: Why secondary TVET students aim so high in Chile?
• Dr Kristinn Hermannsson (UofG) - Does affirmative action promote relative social mobility? Subject-choice, expected earnings and academic match of students at a Brazilian federal university
• Dr Oscar Odena (UofG) - Studying social arts programmes for other-than-artistic purposes in conflict settings

Download a full abstracts for each of the talks as well as a biography of each speaker > 26 March 2021

Request the recording of this event >

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aims to provide blueprint for global peace and prosperity for all people. Its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations requires strategies to improve health and education, spur economic growth, address climate change and preserve the natural environment.

This symposium, which is part of the College of Social Sciences Addressing Inequalities Month, seeks to critique the sustainable development goals in relation to addressing inequalities. Given that March 8 is International Women’s day, the symposium will offer an opportunity to also reflect on gender-specific concerns in relation to SDGs.  The 2½ hour symposium will take a highly interactive format and present 4-5 15min short talks by leading CoSS academics followed by discussion/Q&A.

Event Details

1. Women’s Rights and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Feminist Critique by Professor Nicole Busby

In the context of women’s rights, the Sustainable Development Goals signal a marked improvement in the UN’s goal-setting agenda. Not only do they include a stand-alone goal addressing gender equality and women’s rights (SDG5), but gender is also specifically referred to in several of the other goals, notably SDG4 and SDG8 which provide for quality education and decent work and economic growth respectively.  This indicates an attempt to mainstream gender in a way that was missing from their predecessors the Millennium Development Goals. However, critics have noted that the SDGs fail to take account of the structural causes of gendered inequality including social and economic factors which are themselves caused and reproduced by inequalities of power. These factors have been brought into sharp focus through the disproportionate gendered impacts of the current pandemic. Furthermore, the measurements and targets underpinning the goals are based on traditional economic modelling which prioritises growth over other potential measures which might be more conducive to the attainment of sustainable social justice for women and girls. Without greater attention to the structural, systemic and institutional root causes of gendered injustice, the SDGs risk reproducing existing inequalities and re-entrenching barriers to the full realisation of women’s rights.  In this presentation, I will explore this feminist critique of the SDGs and offer some reflections on the alternative or supplementary measures required to ‘achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls’ as envisioned by SDG5. 

Nicole Busby is Professor in Human Rights, Equality and Justice in the School of Law. Her main areas of interest include sex discrimination, the reconciliation of paid work and unpaid care, the protection of social and economic rights and access to justice. She is currently the Chair of the Academic Advisory Panel of the National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership and provides guidance to policymakers, including the Scottish Government, on Scotland's human rights and equality law framework.

2. The sustainable development goals, ethnicity and health inequalities by Professoe Vittal Katikireddi

The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the importance of addressing racial and ethnic inequalities in the UK and internationally. Such inequalities are likely to continue to be pressing, given the threats posed by the climate emergency and likely large migration flows that will result. The sustainable development goals include ethnicity, race and migration within them. Ensuring they are met will be important for ensuring health inequalities by ethnicity/race internationally are addressed.

S. Vittal Katikireddi is Professor of Public Health & Health Inequalities at the MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit, Institute of Health and Wellbeing. His research aims to improve knowledge about the social determinants of health, with a view to identifying the best approaches to improve population health and reduce health inequalities. He has served as a member of the ‘Health of the Public in 2040’ working group for the Academy of Medical Sciences.

3. How One Health approaches can help address inequalities by Professor Daniel Haydon

Drawing on SDG3 (Ensuring healthy lives), this talk will focus on how One Health approaches can address inequalities in communities dependent on animals, what the barriers are to doing so, and how by framing actions around addressing the predictable burdens of endemic diseases we can sustainably prepare ourselves for the unpredictable (such as the global COVID-19 pandemic).

Dan Haydon is Professor of Population Ecology and Epidemiology at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine in the College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences of the University of Glasgow. His research interests include quantitative modelling of ecological and epidemiological processes. He is the member of the Wellcome Centre for Molecular Parasitology, British Ecological Society, and the British Lichen Society. Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

4. Quality Education: discourses and indicators and the implications for equality by Professor Michele Schweisfurth

The Millennium Development Goals focused primarily on access to education; the Sustainable Development Goals put quality education at the forefront.  This talk will explore this shift and the reasons behind it, focusing on compulsory schooling. It will critically examine how quality education is conceptualised and monitored, and whether this is likely to improve equality of access, experience, outcomes and benefits for all learners. 

Michele Schweisfurth is Professor of Comparative and International Education at the School of Education in the University of Glasgow. She is a comparative educationist interested in the tensions between global frameworks (such as children’s rights, and notions of ‘best practice’ in teaching and learning) and local and cultural imperatives. She is the University of Glasgow College of Social Sciences Champion for the Early-Career Development Programme and currently seconded to the UK Department for International Development as a Senior Research Fellow on the Education Research and Education Policy Teams.