Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural and data scientist, visiting professor of social inequities and injustice at Loughborough University and a Visiting Fellow at University of Oxford. In 2024 she will be a Fulbright Professor at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of four widely acclaimed books including (M)otherhood; On the choices of being a woman published in 2021. Following a PhD from the University of Nottingham in the UK, she held the prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship and has held senior academic positions and visiting fellowships around the globe. Her research and writing have been funded by the British Academy, Royal Society, European Commission, and Society of Authors. She was awarded a Crucible fellowship by NESTA for ‘innovative interdisciplinary research’, and a Transmission Prize in 2022 for ‘making big complex scientific ideas accessible’. Her writing has also appeared in Guardian, Prospect, BBC Science Focus, Scientific American, WIRED and New Scientist amongst others, and her creative non-fiction writing also appears in several literary magazines such as Literary Hub, Hinterland and AEON. Pragya teaches writing courses for Arvon and Irish Writers Centre.
Pragya has delivered keynotes around the world, most recently at the Museum of Science in Boston, and at The King Center for Non-violent Social Change in Atlanta. She is a two-time TEDx speaker, a TEDx Woman organiser, and has made expert appearances on many shows such as NPR Short Wave, ABC Q&A, and BBC Women’s Hour. She has been invited to speak at many international literary festivals including the Hay Festival, Cheltenham Book Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Northern Ireland Science Festival, Dublin International Literary Festival, and Emirates Literature Festival. In 2023, she was invited to headline the M/OTHER festival at The Wheeler Centre (Melbourne) and speak at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House.
TITLE OF THE TALK: The Otherhood in Motherhood: From the Margins of Motherhood
In this talk, Dr Pragya Agarwal, author of (M)otherhood, will explore ambivalence and choices in motherhood from an intersectional perspective, about the marginalisation and otherhood in motherhood, how we compress some of these conversations in a very polarised binary view.
