29/04 4pm-6pm: FeGS Research Cluster Event: "Knowledge and Power and a Few Other Things … Akane Kanai and Cath Lambert in Conversation"

Amy Clarke — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:29:07 GMT

When: 4pm - 6pm, Wed, 29 Apr '26

Where: S0.09

The Feminism, Gender and Sexuality (FeGS) Research Cluster invites you to join an in-conversation (hybrid) event where Dr Akane Kanai and Dr Cath Lambert will discuss their newly-published books; respectively The New Politics of Online Feminism and Troubling Adoption: Heartbreak and Hope.

The Event takes place on Wednesday 29th April, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm:

In person, Room S0.09 (Main Campus, University of ��TV)
On Teams, please click HERE

This event is free and open to all but we request that you register in advance. You can register HERE

About the speakers

Dr Cath Lambert is a Reader in the Department of Sociology, at ��TV. Cath's teaching and research activities reflect her longstanding interest in education, and include the development of critical methods for researching, writing and teaching. Her work includes exciting projects and adventures in research, teaching, art, writing, performance, serious play and collaborations of different kinds. Cath also works in the areas of gender and sexuality and is an active member of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender. She has published in the areas of school leadership and masculinity, gender and sexuality, higher education, research based learning, critical and participatory pedagogies, queer theory and live sociology and art. Her current research is in the area of family intervention.

Dr Akane Kanai is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, at ��TV. She is a feminist cultural studies scholar and she researches the relational politics of identity, and how this is shaped by the emotional life and spatio-temporalities of online culture and popular culture. Akane is especially interested in how claims to knowledge, authority and legitimacy are made and negotiated in everyday spaces. Her work is principally informed by feminist and critical race theory, and discursive and empirical approaches from cultural studies, sociology and media studies.

About the books

Cath Lambert's Troubling Adoption: Heartbreak and Hope challenges readers to engage with alternative narratives, shifting away from dominant portrayals of adoption as an overwhelmingly positive experience to consider the complexities, contradictions and profound griefs that are often involved. Drawing on original collaborative research with creative and social work professionals, as well as parents whose children have been taken from them for adoption, Cath reveals how trauma-informed and creative approaches can articulate emotional and embodied knowledges that are often left unspoken or unheard. Blending critique with fresh empirical insight, the book makes a powerful case for change in adoption policy and practice, offering ways forward for more compassionate, inclusive and reflective child welfare practices.

Akane Kanai's The New Politics of Online Feminism, argues that for young feminists online culture often poses more dilemmas than it solves. Moving beyond a narrow characterization of online feminism as a site of activism and resistance, Akane considers the feminist quandaries of being politically conscientious as life online becomes inseparable from the offline world. She suggests that for online feminists, avoiding complicity with patriarchy, racism, and other oppressions has never been more important, yet the self has remained the central site of agency and transformation—casting politics in terms of individual scrupulousness, diligence, and improvement. Under these circumstances, a feminist lens becomes about benchmarking, comparing, and anxiously avoiding the public mistakes that others make in online life. Akane foregrounds the importance of moving beyond the polarities of correct and incorrect feeling to enable the everyday practices of listening to and learning about experience and difference.

05/05 12:30pm-2pm: DEAR Centre & CSWG Co-Hosted Event: LGBTQ+ Staff in the Cishetmononormative University

Amy Clarke — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:29:26 GMT

When: 12:30pm - 2pm, Tue, 05 May '26

Where: ��TV University Main Campus

The DEAR Centre and CSWG invite you to a co-hosted event on "LGBTQ+ Staff in the Cisheteronormative University", featuring Professor Simon J. Lock (UCL) and Dr Emma Jones (UCL)

The event takes place on 5th May, from 11:30am to 1:30pm, ��TV University Main Campus. Venue details will be shared with registered attendees.

The event schedule is:

DEAR/CSWG doctoral group session with the invited speakers 11:30am-12:30pm
Convivial refreshments 12:30-1:00pm
Speaker talk & discussion: 1:00-2:00pm

The event is in two parts. The first part, from 11:30am to 12:30pm, is open to DEAR Centre and CSWG PGR students only. The second part, from 12:30pm to 2:00pm is free and open to all but prior registration is required. To Register, please click HERE

About the talk

This talk draws on a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Gender and Education. We present findings from semi‑structured interviews with 81 LGBTQ+ staff at a Russell Group university in London, highlighting how cisnormativity and mononormativity emerge as distinct yet interconnected dimensions of heteronormativity in their accounts. To capture the entanglement of sexuality, gender, and relationship norms that shape these experiences, we propose the term ‘cishetmononormativity’. We will explore how this concept helps illuminate the structural and everyday mechanisms through which inequalities are (re)produced in higher education, and we invite seminar participants to consider its potential for understanding, and transforming, the working lives of the most marginalised LGBTQ+ staff.

About the speakers

Professor Simon J Lock (he/they)

Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL

Co-director, qUCL Research Centre and Network on gender and sexual diversity

Co-Chair, UCL LGBTQ+ Equality Steering Group (LESG)

Simon Lock is Professor of Science, Politics and Culture in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. Their current research and teaching is focused in the field of Queer STS which aims to unpick the heteronormative, gendered, racialised and ableist architectures within and around cultures of science and knowledge production. More broadly they focus on science and knowledge in public and research cultures, with a particular focus on social justice in science communication, higher education and policy.

Dr Emma Jones (she/her)

Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment, UCL

Emma Jones is a Lecturer in Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education. Her research, teaching, and institutional citizenship advance gender and LGBTQ+ equity and justice, grounded in a reflexive commitment to how marginalised knowledges are produced, valued, and excluded within educational spaces. A central thread in her scholarship is the development and teaching of critical feminist and decolonial research methodologies, through which she works to challenge dominant epistemologies and expand possibilities for more inclusive and transformative forms of knowledge-making.

Sociology » Events

29/04 4pm-6pm: FeGS Research Cluster Event: "Knowledge and Power and a Few Other Things … Akane Kanai and Cath Lambert in Conversation"

05/05 12:30pm-2pm: DEAR Centre & CSWG Co-Hosted Event: LGBTQ+ Staff in the Cishetmononormative University