Sign up to our taster day to discover what it would be like to study your chosen subject at degree level, meet current staff and students, as well as explore campus and the benefits of studying at Reading.
Sign up to our taster day to discover what it would be like to study your chosen subject at degree level, meet current staff and students, as well as explore campus and the benefits of studying at Reading.
As an attendee you will participate in two hands-on sessions providing you with an understanding of the course content and what it's like to actually study these subjects at university-level.
Find more information about these sessions below:
Politics - Hate Speech and Free Speech
Contemporary democracies are rife with hate speech. This phenomenon is particularly visible on social media, where hate speech proliferates at increasing speeds and on an unprecedented scale. But what exactly is hate speech? How might hate speech harm its targets? What, relatedly, should the state do in response to hate speech? Should it implement laws banning hate speech? Or would doing so violate people’s right to free speech? Moreover, are hate speech bans a better response than simply using ‘more speech,’ or ‘counterspeech’?
Philosophy - Knowledge, Gender, and Race: Introducing Epistemic Injustice
Thinking about what knowledge is can often seem like an abstract project, detached from the real world. But in recent times, so-called "social epistemology" has explored how social factors play a role in what we can know. In this talk, we will explore epistemic injustice: the idea that there are ways in which you can be harmed in social settings that relate to what you can know and say.
Economics - David Ricardo and the Crisis of Rent
What can the classical economists teach us about modern-day issues like the high cost of housing? Though primarily concerned with the cost of food in post-Napoleonic Britain, David Ricardo developed an explanation whose abstraction may be intimidating, but general enough to transpose to structurally similar problems we see today. We will read from his "Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation" to understand the UK economy of 200 years ago and then discuss its implications for housing policy right now.
Sign up here: https://emailer.reading.ac.uk/p/4R68-HDF/ppe-taster-2025