futures

8-9 May 2008

Venue and times

Meeting Room 2-3 Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster
2pm 8 May - 4pm 9 May 2008

Overview

In this workshop we will explore ways in which the contemporary obsession with insecurity is generating new forms of technical promise, offering control and protection in the wars against terror and environmental apocalypse.  What are the ethico-political issues of societies saturated with images of insecure futures?  How can contemporary attempts to design safe futures learn from previous modern desires for control and perfection in design?  Are the latest obsessions with control and protection moving us into a new ethico-political terrain or are they simply the latest manifestations of modernity’s desire for safe life?

Confirmed Speakers

Thursday, 8 May 2008
14.00–15.00	Keynote address: David Crowley (Royal College of Art)
15.00–15.30	Tea/coffee
15.30–17.00	Samuel Randalls (Geography, University College London) and Marieke de Goede (European Studies, Amsterdam University) ‘Preemption: Arts and Technologies of the Actionable Future’ Nigel Clark (Geography, Open University) ‘Living dangerously: climate change, ethics and experimentation’ Vladimir Jankovic (Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester)
Friday, 9 May 2008
9.30–10.30	Keynote address: Barbara Adam (Social Sciences, Cardiff University)
10.30–11.00	Tea/coffee
11.00–12.30	David Martin Jones (Film Studies, University of St. Andrews) ‘Disaster first, safety second: designing safe living in recent South Korean cinema’ Kathryn Yusoff (Geography, University of Exeter) ‘The political aesthetics of climate change’ Sergio Fava (Sociology, Lancaster University) ‘Worldmachine (blueprint v0.9.1): the mathematical certainty of global environmental catastrophe’
12.30-13.30	Lunch
13.30–3.00	John Urry (Lancaster University) ‘Complexity and climate change’ Peter Adey (Keele University) ‘Face-to-Face with Airport Security: affect and the monitoring of intent’ James King (artist)  ‘Design and Futures Thinking’
15.00–15.15	Tea/coffee
15.15–16.15	Keynote address: William Bogard (Whitman College) (author of The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies and The Bhopal Tragedy: Language, Logic, and the Production of a Hazard).
16.15	Close

Registration

Registration is free by emailing Anne-Marie Mumford.

Contact

Mark Lacy – Co-Organiser, IAS Annual Research Programme 2007-08, Lancaster University

Bron Szerszynski - Co-Organiser, IAS Annual Research Programme 2007-08, Lancaster University

Yoke-Sum Wong - Co-Organiser, IAS Annual Research Programme 2007-08, Lancaster University