In mid-April I will be travelling to Sweden to speak at the University of Gothenburg. I will provide a keynote address at a symposium titled Academic Freedom and Collegial Solidarity in Times of Pressure, hosted by the academic journal lambda nordica. I am really looking forward to again meeting Swedish colleagues, and learning with them, after an extremely productive visit to Karlstad, Uppsala, and Linköping last year.

My talk, “From Birth Parents to Backlash”, takes the Trans Pregnancy Project as a starting point for thinking through how and why academics are facing specific types of social and political backlash, what this looks like in practice, and what we can do about this.

It will build on material I have previously delivered at events such as the BSA Medsoc annual conference, and last year’s Standards of Evidence workshop at the University of Lausanne. I will be linking long-term trends to more recent events, thinking through how recent attacks on academic freedom build on phenomena such as the international trans panic and debates over the teaching of critical race and gender theory within universities.

The public portion of the event will take place on Thursday 16 April, and details can be found here.