A Festival of Dangerous Ideas roars into week 4 with a thrilling lineup of talks about queer identities throughout history and a special performance from a theatre maker.

Since the team at Gay Project launched their explosive Festival, it’s provided audience members with an unmissable experience each week to learn and understand diverse ideas surrounding the LGBTQ+ community from past to present to future. Every session has shown immense growth in terms of engagement and subject matter, so this will be the perfect time to join in.

In last week’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Dr Emma Hurley took a look at the history of psychology and how that impacted on LGBTQ+ people.

It was the last session with Dr Cormac O’Brien, Cormac will join the festival again for a special seminar in the new year to discuss his new book, when it’s published, ‘Masculinities in Theatre and Drama in Ireland’, or ‘Acting the Man’.

Emma Hurley will be back again this week to talk about the impact of the negative pathologisation of LGBTQ+ people through psychology, and how that now impacts on LGBTQ+ individuals and our communities.

They will talk about ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups and exclusions and prejudices within our own communities leading beautifully into the second scholar of the evening, Dr Páuric Kerrigan.

Páuric is a teaching fellow in the School of Information Communication Studies at UCD. He has a particular interest in queer media and communications, especially the intersection of queer identities and media technologies.

Páuric will lead a discussion on social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and how they shape us, and how we shape them.

The Break for Art in the middle of all that is with the hugely entertaining Stephen Quinn. Based in Dublin, Stephen makes theatre performance and is one of the founders of the queer performance event Spicebag.

Stephen will be chatting with arts correspondent Kate Brennan Harding, leading into a performance piece, that he made for a show earlier this year.

The team have launched a brand new website this week, festivalofdangerousideas.ie, to hold the recordings and the materials from each session. So people can catch up with all the episodes there.

So if you want to join in on week 4 of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, tickets can be found at this link. All 12 sessions are free. 

If you would like to check out week 1-3 of the Festival, you can rewatch them at this link.