The Trouble With Freedom: Melissa Butcher

America today is being torn apart by the struggle over a single concept, deeply rooted in the country's sense of self: freedom. Battered by wave after wave of crises, ordinary people of all political persuasions have come to feel that their freedom is under threat - and with it, nothing less than the soul of the nation.

In The Trouble with Freedom, journalist and researcher Melissa Butcher takes a trip into the ferociously polarised world of American politics, hoping to find out what's going on beneath the surface. 

Criss-crossing the country, she talks to a wide range of people: Democrat and Republican, gay and straight, urban and rural, immigrants, First Nations, Black, white, the incarcerated.

Melissa Butcher is Education Programme Director at the social enterprise Cumberland Lodge and Professor Emeritus of Social and Cultural Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. A former journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, she is the author of two books, five edited collections and numerous pieces of journalism and travelogues.

In this fireside chat-style event, Melissa will be interviewed by Belfast based freelance journalist Amanda Ferguson and will welcome questions from the audience.

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Host or Publisher Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics