Tag Archives: Culture

Futurology: how a group of visionaries looked beyond the possible a century ago and predicted today’s world

Max Saunders is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London, where he teaches modern literature. From September 2019 he will be Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham.
He was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2008-10 to research the To-Day and To-Morrow book series. His resulting book on the series and futurology, ‘Imagined Futures’, is published by Oxford University Press (2019).

Sci-fi author William Gibson: how ‘future fatigue’ is putting people off the 22nd century

Andre Spicer is Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Cass Business School, City, University of London. His main expertise is in the area of organizational behaviour. In particular he has done work on organizational power and politics, identity, the creation of new organizational forms, space and architecture plays at work and more recently leadership.

In Posse: Making female sperm

Charlotte Jarvis is an artist and lecturer working at the intersection of art and science. Her practice often utilises living cells and DNA: “I have recorded music onto DNA, seen my heart beat outside of my body and am currently making the world’s first female sperm. My work explores the body as a liminal space – a site for transformation, hybridisation and magic”. In Posse is a work In progress: “A mission to make ‘female’ sperm from my own stem cells”.

Human-Virus relationships

Pei-Ying Lin is an artist / designer from Taiwan and currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Her main focus is on the combination of science and human society through artistic methods and is particularly interested in building a common discussion ground for different cultural perspectives regarding elements that construct our individual perception of the world.

Future Blueprint

Jasmine Pradissitto is an international artist, innovator, and speaker with a background in physics based in London. Inspired by nature, the human condition, the mythopoetic and a more sustainable future, her forms create a commentary on an unsustainable, increasingly Anthropocene world slowly being reshaped by the things we consume and then disregard. She creates work that builds awareness about diminishing air quality and biodiversity extinction.

Handspan, handspun: navigational lines in the work of artists Inge Thomson and Deirdre Nelson

This essay considers projects by two multimedia artists working in Scotland to propose that culture and local ecology are inseparable and mutually-determining aspects of our understanding of and care for place. The work of Inge Thomson and Deirdre Nelson encompasses material cultures and oral traditions, with an emphasis on marine environments, creating new narratives of passage as works of advocacy for ‘vernacular, community-based ecology’.

Coronavirus has changed our sense of place, so together we must re-imagine our cities

Dr Tony Matthews is an award-winning Urban and Environmental Planner, with portfolios in academia, practice and the media. He is a faculty member at Griffith University, where he is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Environment & Science and the Cities Research Institute.

His research and practice interests include adapting cities to climate change impacts; the role and function of green infrastructure; sustainable and low carbon design; the interplay between built environments and human health; and achieving high quality urban design outcomes. He is also an active public writer and commentator with hundreds of national and international print, radio and television media appearances. He founded the Urban Broadcast Collective (@urbanpodcasts), a curated network of podcasts dedicated to cities and urban life. Tony also co-developed and co-presented ‘The Urban Squeeze’ radio program on ABC Radio, which ran for two seasons and won three Awards for Excellence from the Planning Institute of Australia.

The medieval senses were transmitters as much as receivers

Chris Woolgar is Professor of History and Archival Studies at the University of Southampton.

“I have a long-standing interest in the history of the everyday, especially in the medieval period, in patterns of documentation and in editorial work. Publications on medieval social and economic history include two volumes of household accounts edited for the British Academy’s Records of Social and Economic History series, an edition of the testamentary records of the bishops of England and Wales for the Canterbury and York Society, and three books with Yale University Press: The Great Household in Late Medieval England, The Senses in Late Medieval England, and The Culture of Food in England, 1200‒1500.”