A look into the recently founded \u2018Banned Book Society\u2019 as they seek to foster discussions on campus about free speech, censorship and banned books.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing more sexy than reading a book you\u2019ve been told you can\u2019t read,\u201d says Jennie Gardner, President of Glasgow Uni\u2019s new \u2018Banned Book Society\u2019. The society was born from Jennie\u2019s time abroad in Vancouver, where she experienced an incredibly welcoming community of students whilst also reading her favourite banned book, Maus by Art Spiegelman. \u201cIt was almost like I had been given this gift and I had to do something with it.\u201d The society\u2019s core idea is to create a strong and welcoming community interested in \u201chaving open conversations as an act of political rebellion\u201d to promote discussions on free speech and the threat of losing our intellectual freedoms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The society itself plans to be multi-faceted, consisting of three core concepts. The first component will be a monthly newsletter where students can express themselves freely through submissions of poetry, graphic design, articles, among many other things. This newsletter acts as a resistance against notions of censorship and the constriction of ideas. Jennie addresses how a society on free speech: \u201ccan very quickly become a race to the bottom of hate\u201d and discusses that submissions will not be accepted \u201cbased on the ideas but rather the values behind it. We do not stand for hate or for oppression\u201d. The second element of the society will be the book club. This, Jennie asserts, is going to be a very simple concept, and the conversations to be had will speak for themselves. The point is to chat as a community, discuss why any given book has been banned, and to drink some coffee in the process. The book club meetings will be held in caf\u00e9s around the West End. Voting will be held to choose each book, and at the beginning of each month, a rundown of the book will be posted to give time for members to read the book. Jennie also prefaces that having read the book is not mandatory to attend meetings and that discussions will be open to everyone. Lastly, the third aspect will be socials, both intellectually-oriented with a series of guest speakers as well as event-oriented with pub-crawls and social events. \u201cReally, our primary focus will be [fighting] censorship and [promoting] individualism\u201d Jennie says, as well as fostering community, and fighting the idea that you should \u201conly ever [be] yourself to the point that you can be like someone else\u201d. The society\u2019s goal is to be a breeding ground for having open conversations with different people who possess different opinions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jennie comments on the well-known idea that the best publicity a book can get is if it gets banned by saying, \u201cWhen you deem ideas dangerous, they become seductive to people\u201d. She then adds, \u201cIt\u2019s so interesting because it\u2019s this duality from my perspective that there is this fighting of intellectualism through banning books and you think ideas can break society, which I think they can, but the ideas being banned are normally ones that are inclusive\u201d. The Banned Book Society seeks to discuss why books are getting banned and why the themes in these books are being promoted as dangerous. Jennie also observes how the freedom of speech has changed with the emergence of \u2018social media\u2019 language, in that she believes \u201cYou\u2019re not saying what you think because you don\u2019t know how to articulate it\u201d and notes that \u201creading is kind of like empathy and what the media is really good at doing is dehumanising other people and creating a process of conceptual othering that you learn from a really young age\u201d. Additionally, throughout this inability to express ourselves is \u201cthe development of artificial intelligence, further censoring us in ways we are not even fully conscious of\u201d. It is important now more than ever that we as students foster discourse on censorship in society and just how normalised it has become to be censored or subconsciously trained to avoid certain topics of discussion. The Guardian<\/a> newspaper writes that the UK is swiftly following American trends of increasingly banning more books and that the main themes that cause books to become banned are those related to \u201cempire, race and LGBTQ+ themes<\/a>\u201d. Treasurer of the Banned Book Society, Juanita Haynes wrote: \u201cI would like [the society] to amplify the voices of marginalized communities affected by censorship. We should be aware of global censorship because these things do not exist in isolation.\u201d With an increasing amount of topics being deemed dangerous, it is necessary that we employ literature as a tool to dismantle social and political barriers that have been built by the rise of authoritarianism.\u00a0<\/p>\n By promoting shared spaces like that of the Banned Book Society, more open discussions can be had with people who have different opinions and perspectives to offer. Only then can the notion of free speech truly be achieved and employed as acts of productive political rebellion. \u201cIt\u2019s rare to come into contact with someone you disagree with and say, \u2018I will hear you out, and we can disagree, and we can still be friends\u2019. I think one of the reasons for polarisation is this inability to sit in discomfort and to allow the discomfort of one of us is objectively wrong, but that\u2019s okay; we can still have this kind of mutual respect and nuance that we don\u2019t have anymore, that now has led to extremism\u201d Jennie says.\u00a0<\/p>\n The society hosted its launch event on 26 February at Glasgow\u2019s West End Kaffeteria, as well as hosting its first pub crawl social event on 12 March. The society will be holding its Annual General Meeting on 30 March, where a host of board member positions will be open for students to run for. Additionally, the monthly newsletter has begun taking submissions, and more information on future events and book club meetings will be posted on the society\u2019s website and social media. As she promotes Banned Books\u2019 recent launch, Jennie says, \u201cI have big ambitions for society, and I want it to set a precedent about how we should discuss free speech as a community\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Image credits: Jennie Gardner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A look into the recently founded \u2018Banned Book Society\u2019 as they seek to foster discussions on campus about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":872226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7826],"tags":[3444,748,18319,2766,918,4884,5778,285,712,247532,247533,16,15,5178,50844],"class_list":["post-872225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-glasgow","tag-books","tag-britain","tag-censorship","tag-culture","tag-glasgow","tag-great-britain","tag-literature","tag-politics","tag-scotland","tag-societies","tag-src","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-university","tag-uofg"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116348222670385365","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=872225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/872226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=872225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=872225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=872225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}