Stacked Odds: Present/Future Inequalities w/ Danny Dorling & Twimukye Macline Mushaka
2 Roxburgh Place
Edinburgh
EH8 9SU
Inequality is ever on the rise – but who is affected the most, and how much can we change the trajectory?
For the final panel of Edinburgh’s Radical Book Fair, you are invited to join an expansive conversation about inequality and hope – past, present and future. Danny Dorling’s new book zooms in on the lives and opportunities of seven ‘average’ children in the UK, created from statistics, all born in 2018. Through her work as disability and minoritised groups activists, Twimukye Macline Mushaka sees and works with the effects of inequality in all its complex reality.
Join Danny and Twimukye as they trace the histories that brought us here, what’s on the horison, and the alternative pathways being forged.
About Seven Children
If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, who would they be? What would their stories reveal?
Seven Children is about injustice and hope. Danny Dorling’s highly original book constructs seven ‘average’ children from millions of statistics—each child symbolising the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest. Dorling’s seven were born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation. They turned 5 in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis. Their country has Europe’s fastest-rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged. Yet aspirations endure.
Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking, Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues. What do we miss when we focus only on the superrich and the most deprived? What kinds of lives are British children living between the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?
About the speakers
Danny Dorling is a social scientist whose books include Inequality and the 1% and All That Is Solid. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, and a patron of RoadPeace, Comprehensive Future and Heeley City Farm. In his spare time, he makes sandcastles.
Twimukye Macline Mushaka works with Shelter Scotland as a Lived Experience Lead, with responsibility for coordinating how Shelter Scotland works with people with lived experience of the housing emergency to get their voices heard by people in power to influence positive change. Previously, Twimukye worked with the Poverty Alliance for 15 years, as a Senior Communities and Networks Officer, with key responsibilities for community engagement on poverty and social exclusion including facilitating people with lived experience of poverty to participate in the work of the Poverty Alliance. As a disability and minoritised groups activists, Twimukye is passionate about issues of social justice including highlighting how the intersections of race, religion, gender, disability compound experiences of disadvantage. She is passionate about how we can harness the power of the seldom heard voices to be agents of change and reduce inequality. In her voluntary role, Twimukye sits on the Consumer Scotland Committee for Consumers in Vulnerable Circumstances and has been on boards of a number of charitable organisations in Scotland.