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.
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”.
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.
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.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project ‘Stranger Visions’ in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.
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’.
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.
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.”
Since the early 1990s, Paul Vanouse’s artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as a medium. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These “Operational Fictions” are hybrid entities–simultaneously real things and fanciful representations–intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.
Chunjie Zhang is Associate Professor of German, University of California, Davis. She works in the areas of eighteenth-century studies, postcolonial studies, global modernisms, and cosmopolitanisms. She is the author of ‘Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism’ (Northwestern University Press, 2017), which delineates a transcultural discourse from the 1750s to the 1830s and highlights non-European impact on German travel writings, dramas, Robinsonades, philosophy of history, and theory of geography. Zhang has published on Goethe, Herder, Kant, George Forster, radical Enlightenment, and the representations of China in Europe. She is also coeditor of “Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures,” a special issue of ‘Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies’ (2018).