We’re living in an age of division. From abortion rights to immigration, gun control to climate change, civil debate has gone out the window. Manners, order, and respect are being eroded. Why can’t we all be reasonable?

The trouble is, what’s ‘reasonable’ to one person is outrageous to another. Is it okay to let children play in the garden while others are working from home? To do your makeup on a train, or recline your seat on an aeroplane? What’s the right way to breastfeed? To protect your neighbourhood? To protest against injustice and oppression? In a world where we all think we’re being reasonable, how can we figure out what’s right?

Looking back through history and around the world, Kirsty Sedgman set out to discover how unfairness and discrimination got baked into our social norms, dividing us along lines of gender, class, disability, sexuality, race… Instead of measuring human behaviour against outdated standards of rules and reason, Sedgman argues that sometimes we need to act unreasonably to bring about positive change.

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An award-winning cultural studies scholar based at the University of Bristol (UK), Dr Kirsty Sedgman has spent her career studying how we construct and maintain our competing value systems, working out how people can live side by side in the same world yet come to understand it in such different ways. The author of numerous publications on audiences, culture, communication, and human behaviour, Kirsty speaks about her research around the world and has appeared in media outlets from BBC Woman's Hour to the Guardian to the front page of the New York Times. Her new book On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better is out now with Faber & Faber.

GOOD READS

On Being Unreasonable: Breaking the Rules and Making Things Better (Faber & Faber, 2023)

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