Strange Culture at the Designing Safe Living conference

Next month during the Designing Safe Living conference in Lancaster, director Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s film about the artist Steve Kurtz called ‘Strange Culture’ will be screened on Friday, July 11th. Lynn will then be giving an interview live on Second Life after the screening.
Strange Culture examines the case of artist and professor Steve [...]

Top 9 political risk hot spots of 2008

In a series of nine reports, Eurasia Group identifies the key regions around the world where political risk will be especially acute in the coming year. Locations include the usual suspects including the US, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan/Afghanista, Russia, South Africa + Turkey. They also flag up some red herrings in the risk survey!  In addition, [...]

Workshop 5: Truth and justice in the wake of dictatorship and armed conflict by Jose Zelaquett

photos:Will Pollard
The Irdell Lecture is run by the Department of history and law at Lancaster University and is 15 year old lecture series for interdisciplinary scholars of history, society and law. As part of the fifth Designing Safe Living workshop dealing with Presentation, Documentation and Mediation, Jose Zalaquett was invited to speak with the [...]

Workshop 4: Protocols, Procedures & Institutions

Read more about the Protocols, Procedures and Institutions workshop here>

The Tower Hamlets Unregulated Zone

A CONFIDENTIAL MEMO discussing the IF-POLITICS membership and duties of the Lancaster University Expert Assessors of Tower Hamlets Unregulated Zone from the UK Government Regulation Office, Division 3496723. Source: ANON

Community cohesion as safe living: delimiting the obligations to and dangers of proximity

Anne-Marie Fortier - Sociology, Lancaster University

In this paper I discuss how ‘cohesion’ figures in government policy strategies targeted at local communities and neighbourhoods. By going to the ‘ways of seeing’ that policy documents open up, I consider how policy discourses ‘figure social life in certain imaginary ways’ (Butler 2002). I argue that community cohesion is [...]

Buried But Not Forgotten?: The Secret of Yucca Mountain

Brian P. Bloomfield & Theo Vurdubakis - Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University
ABSTRACT: Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nevada (USA), is the site of a very ambitious project to construct an underground repository for high-level nuclear waste. The object of [...]

US Army Muslim Chaplain James Yee talk

Photo credit: Rob Miller
US Army Muslim Chaplain James Yee gave his first ever talk in the UK at Lancaster University on Wednesday, November 28, 2007. Addressing a crowd of nearly 200 people, Chaplain Yee addressed one of the programme themes of ‘designing safe citizens’ by reflecting on his experiences as a US Armny Muslim [...]

Obese man fails BMI & gets rejected by New Zealand Immigration

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Read more here>

Design: Introductory workshop - 4-5 Oct 2007 - Day 2

Response from Brian Bloomfield (Department of Organisation, Work and Technology, Lancaster University)
One thing that could be picked from all the discussion is the question of politics.
Fiona mentioned how designers are accidentally political, and she also raised the question about how decisions are made about what is dangerous or not. You could say that design is [...]

Introductory workshop - 4-5 Oct 2007 - Day 1

There are 45 people at the workshop from nearly all faculties at Lancaster University, as well as participants from Manchester and London. The annual research program was introduced by Corinne May-Chahal (FASS) and Ruth Wodak (Chair, Academic Board, IAS).
Professor Cindy Weber introduced the key questions for the program: how is safe living conceived today? However [...]