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Announcing... School Daze panel

Published 6 September 2023 at 10:23
A stack of school books with an apple perched on top

Well into the digital age, social media seems more inescapable than ever. A wealth of data is at our fingertips, but it’s littered with fake news, misinformation, and extremism. How do we protect vulnerable schoolchildren from the avalanche of nonsense on social media, and raise a generation of scientifically informed critical thinkers? Or should we even try?

Andrew Tate and similar ‘personalities’ have jumped straight from the YouTube sidebar to schoolyards across the country. Teenage boys challenge their teachers, insisting that they are now ‘the alpha’. When the government insists that education which does not directly lead to employment is a waste of time, how can parents and teachers cooperate to inoculate our kids against those who peddle easy answers to difficult problems?

Diving into the issues facing parents of school-aged children, and their teachers will be:

  • Professor Pragya Agarwal - a geospatial and behavioural data scientist, Visiting Professor of Social Inequities at Loughborough University, and founder of research think-tank The 50 Percent Project. Pragya was awarded a Crucible fellowship by NESTA for ‘innovative interdisciplinary research’, and a Transmission Prize in 2022 for ‘making big complex scientific ideas accessible’. She has also been nominated as one of 50 people creating change in the ‘India-UK’ corridor, and one of 100 leading women in social enterprise in the UK. Her first book for children, ‘Standing up to Racism’, was shortlisted for the Progressive Preschool award.
  • Dr Debbie Ging - Associate Professor of Digital Media and Gender in the School of Communications. She teaches and researches on gender, sexuality and digital media, with a focus on digital hate, online anti-feminist men's rights politics, incel subculture and the radicalisation of boys and men into male supremacist ideologies. Her research also addresses youth experiences of gender-based and sexual abuse online and educational interventions to tackle this issue.
  • Andrew Brennand spent ten years corrupting the minds of the nation's youth working in the video games business and then resolved to repair the damage done by retraining to be a secondary school teacher. He's now been teaching in Cumbria for fifteen years and is hoping for time off for good behaviour. Sadly there's very little of that in his classroom. He teaches Politics, Psychology and Philosophy at A-level and Lifeskills to KS3 and KS4.
  • Lana Donaghy is a software developer, Twitch streamer, mother to a teenage boy, and long-time friend of both the Merseyside Skeptics Society and QED. She has guested on the podcast Skeptics with a K and can usually be found on Twitch talking about video games, parenting, and skepticism.

Entrance to this panel is included with each in-person QED ticket, along with all of the sessions in the panel room, the live podcast recordings, interactive workshops, main stage talks, Saturday evening comedy night, and more. The last few tickets are still available - pick up yours today.