The Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender invites you to join us for an online presentation and discussion  with Tina Sikka. Dr Sikka is currently a Lecturer in Media, Culture and Heritage at the University of Newcastle in the UK. Her current research interests include the ways in which gender, race, and culture intersects with science and technology using food and environmental technologies as case studies. She also has expertise in sexuality studies in the areas of consent, gender-based violence, and restorative justice and as well as in EDI and decolonial research practices.  She has written two books, numerous articles and previously taught Communication and other Social Science courses at Fraser International College, Simon Fraser University and other institutions across the Lower Mainland in British Columbia. Dr Sikka completed a 2 year SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Simon Fraser University in 2012 after completing a PhD. in Communication and Culture from York University in Toronto, Canada.

This event is free and open to all. It is online, via Zoom. Meeting details will be sent after registration. To register, please email  sexgencentre@brighton.ac.uk  or  via eventbrite

Dr Sikka’s recent work: Sex, Consent and Justice: A New Feminist Framework reflects research around increasingly fraught debates about sex, consent, feminism, justice, abolition, and gender relations that have taken centre stage in academic, journalistic and social media circles in recent years. This has resulted in a myriad of new theories, debates and mediated movements including #MeToo and #TimesUp. In it Dr Sikka examines many of the contradictions and tensions that make up these debates and movements – particularly those that draw together contemporary understandings of justice, violence, consent, pleasure and desire. Drawing on the cases of Avital Ronell, Aziz Ansari, Jian Ghomeshi, Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK, she applies historical, explanatory, diagnostic and solutions-based tools to unpack two debates in particular – namely, contemporary sexual norms vis-à-vis what is permissible and desirable sexual behaviour and what constitutes justice in relation to gender based sexual violence.

The book proposes concrete legislative and policy recommendations (specific to abolition and drawing on public pedagogy and collaborative methodologies) and examines the necessary cultural changes needed in order to retain a progressive conception of sexual relations and consent.