Current Contentions in Gender and Social Change. End of term event. 7th April.

Zoë Playdon is the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London. Educated at the universities of Newcastle on Tyne, Leicester, Warwick, and at Henley Management College, she holds five degrees, including two doctorates. Trained as a historian and an archaeologist, Zoë chose her third subject – English literature – as the starting point for her career as a classroom teacher at an inner-city comprehensive school. Subsequently, she became a senior civil servant at the Department of Education and Science, before moving to the University of Warwick as Chief Executive of its business consortium and head of Continuing Vocational Education.

In 1993, Zoë transferred to the University of London, as Professor of Postgraduate Medical Education and Head of Education at NHS Kent, Surrey and Sussex Regional Postgraduate Medical Deanery. She is a former co-Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists [GLADD] and, with Dr Lynne Jones MP, co-founded the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity in 1994, which continues to meet.

Zoë has thirty years’ experience of front-line work in LGBTI human rights, including legal cases, where she has worked with Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, Dame Laura Cox, Ben Emmerson QC, Stephanie Harrison QC, and Lord David Pannick QC.

Zoë has written extensively in academic and legal circles. The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes is be her debut mass-market book.

Dr. Katherine Jenkins in her own words

I am a philosopher at the University of Glasgow, specializing in social philosophy. I joined the department as a Lecturer in July 2020. Before that, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham and a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge.I hold a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield, and a BA and MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge.

My research is primarily in social philosophy, especially the ontology of social categories. I’m interested in how social categories such as races and genders exist, and how these categories are bound up with systematic injustices. I’m also interested in feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race more broadly, in the philosophy of sex and sexuality, and in social epistemology. Topics I have written about include rape myths, pornography, and gender identity.

I am currently writing a monograph, Ontology and Oppression: Race, Gender, and Social Construction which examines the nature of social categories that are bound up with oppression, such as gender and race, and the ways in which emancipatory social movements can best respond to such categories in view of the important role they play in many people’s identities. In it, I argue that the very fact of being socially constructed as a member of a certain social group, such as the group women, can be wrongful, and, indeed, oppressive. However, I also show that identities based on these social group memberships can still be valuable.