How Disgust Shapes Politics: Purity, Contamination and Exclusion
About this Event
Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.
This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.
Event Schedule:
6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open
7pm Lecuture Starts
7.45pm Q&A
8pm Talk Concludes
8.30pm Event Closes.
*Please arrive close to 6.30pm
A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.
Your Topic:
“Disgust" is an intense emotional and physical feeling of revulsion and aversion, and a crucial evolutionary survival mechanism we developed to avoid pathogens and danger. In this talk, researcher and policy analyst Tanisha Lamichhane traces how disgust permeates our social and political relations, particularly in how we label certain communities as aversive, forge divisions, and ostracize others.
From scientific studies demonstrating how the use of hand sanitizers reduces anti-immigration anxiety in individuals, to psychosocial theories showing why disgust “sticks” to certain bodies, to political propaganda that generates disgust within communities, we explore how such a private feeling spills into the social and political dimensions of our lives.
Tanisha urges the audience to ask, why and how a behaviour, a body, and a community come to be declared as "disgusting" and how we can challenge our tendency to reduce others as subhuman by incorporating critical thinking and empathy.
Your Speaker:
Tanisha is a researcher, policy analyst, and freelance writer with a Master of International Relations from the University of Melbourne. Her research expertise includes the role of emotions in shaping narratives, socio-political relations, and belonging and exclusion within communities.
As a researcher and policy analyst, she has contributed to reforms in Nepal's national juvenile justice frameworks, submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review on human rights violations in Australia, and amplifying student voicesas a Policy and Advocacy Support Officer at the University of Melbourne's Graduate Student Association. Her writing has appeared in the peer-reviewed journal The Criterion, Australian Outlook, and Young Diplomats Society. She has been invited as a presenter and delegate at academic and policy conferences, including at the Development Studies Association of Australia and the Australian Gender Equality Council.Currently, as a Research Fellow at Nationality for All, she researches nationality law, human rights, and statelessness across the Asia-Pacific for the region's leading knowledge resource on the issue.
She is passionate about centring care, empathy, and emotions in designing political and social systems that are attuned with deeper human needs, and making social science knowledge more accessible to the public. You can connect with her on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/tanisha-lamichhane-aa1128229, and on Instagram at @ttaniishaa
Agenda
🕑: 06:30 PM
Doors open and arrival
🕑: 07:00 PM
Speaker starts
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
AUD 27.78
