Save the date! Happy Ever After? How marriage impacts our health and happiness
October 25, 2019, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm
Join four UBC researchers from the Faculty of Arts for an evening of conversation about the marital revolution. Have all the choices around marriage today, and the types of marriages we want, made us happier and healthier?
Featuring:
Marina Adshade, Faculty Member, Vancouver School of Economics
Talk Summary: Don’t believe anyone who tells you that there is a straightforward to answer the question: Who is happier and healthier, married or single people? Economist Dr. Marina Adshade will start this conversation with a look at the evidence that supports or discredits the claim that marriage is the path to a happy and healthy life.
Bio: Dr. Marina Adshade is an experienced writer, commentator, and keynote speaker. Her book, Dollars and Sex: How economics influences sex and love, has been published in ten different languages and is available in bookstores around the globe. Her latest published work, a chapter in Robot Sex: The ethical and social implications, was debated in the international media and has been adapted for publication in Slate Magazine.
Mandy Len Catron, Adjunct Professor, Creative Writing Program
Talk Summary: Many people think that marriage is a social good—that our lives and our communities are better when people get and stay married. But we don’t often talk about the social costs of the institution. This talk considers what is lost when we make marriage the most central relationship in our culture.
Bio: Mandy Len Catron is the author of How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays. The book was listed for the 2018 RCB Taylor Prize and the Kobo Emerging Writer Award. Mandy’s article “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This” was one of the most popular articles published by the New York Times in 2015. Her writing can be found in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Rumpus, and The Walrus as well as other newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies.
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, Professor, Philosophy
Talk Summary: Growing awareness around ethical non-monogamy, together with a better understanding of how relationships are impacted by (lack of) social recognition, raises a fraught question: is marriage an unfair privilege for monogamous couples only? Carrie Jenkins draws on feminist philosophy and inter-disciplinary empirical research to find some answers.
Bio: Carrie Jenkins is the author of What Love Is and What It Could Be (Basic Books, 2017) and recently won the New Philosopher Writers’ Award for her short story “The Woman At Home.” Her forthcoming books include a co-authored collection of philosophical poetry with McGill-Queen’s University Press, and a novel with Penguin Random House Canada.
Yue Qian, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Talk Summary: Young people increasingly delay or even forgo marriage. Does this mean marriage has lost its significance in our culture? Dr. Yue Qian will talk about the changing landscape of marriage and discuss how our lives are affected by the changing rules of intimacy.
Bio: Dr. Yue Qian’s research focuses on marriage, family, and gender in North American and East Asian contexts. As a gender scholar, Dr. Qian is passionate about translating gender research into the empowerment of women and advocacy for gender equality around the world.
Presented by the UBC Women’s Health Research Cluster and the Faculty of Arts.