The editorial team at Issues in Science and Technology invited me to submit a response to Ed Finn’s excellent recent article on using science fiction to stage conversations about science and technology policy.
You can read my letter, “Looking Beyond the Ghost Scenario”, at the Issues website.
I’m pleased to be delivering two sessions as part of the University of Oxford’s contribution to the Right Here Right Now Global Youth Climate Summit, a 24-hour virtual event presented by UN Human Rights and the Saïd Business School.
The online gathering brings together students and educators from across the world to share ideas about embedding climate action at the heart of education systems.
Find out more at the Saïd Business School website or register for the 24-hour livestream here.
This Friday, the Foresight Club of the European Parliamentary Research Service hosts a presentation from Sophie Mitchell, Chief Communications Officer of Australia’s domain name regulator auDA.
Do check them out and, if you’re free, join Sophie and the European foresight community this Friday, 11th April, 9.30-10.30am Central European Time, via Webex.
It feels somehow timely that “The Ghosts We See From the Mountains“, a chapter co-written with the University of Galway’s Marie Mahon for the Routledge volume Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Production, is now live online and open access.
The chapter explores the useful intersection of Oxford-style scenario planning with issues of spatial justice and Verónica Gago’s concept of the “body-territory”.
Thanks to volume editors Charlotte Spear and Maddie Sinclair for bringing everything together.
I’m pleased to have been appointed to the Futures Council of the National Security College (NSC) at Australian National University.
The Council is an international group of individuals with expertise relating to the mission of the NSC’s Futures Hub, a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation resource for futures analysis in Australia.
My 2023 conference paper “The ghosts we see from the mountains: Scenario planning and the territorial body in time” will be published next year in Routledge’s edited volume Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production, as a co-authored chapter with Marie Mahon of the University of Galway.
Marie and I collaborated on the foresight elements of the IMAJINE project, a Horizon Europe-funded programme exploring spatial justice and regional inequality across Europe.
We look at how scenario-based thinking can inform strategic conversations and policy decisions around territorial inequality: Do citizens have equal rights and opportunities regardless of wherever they live? Are different places treated fairly? Is your ability to realise your rights compromised by where you live? How will the answers to these questions vary as contemporary uncertainties unfold?
How is the nature of soft power changing?
What part are critical and emerging technologies playing in these changes?
What is the role of soft power in 21st century geopolitical dynamics?
What threats and opportunities might be emerging?
Do we see ways in which changes in the soft power environment affect the changing character of armed conflict?
I recently joined the Information Security Forum’s Mark Ward and auDA’s Sophie Mitchell for a short podcast discussion exploring foresight, uncertainty, cybersecurity, and Internet governance.
We looked at these issues through the prism of auDA’s recent scenarios for the future of the Internet and ISF’s own Threat Horizon foresight product.
“They say that time heals. But in my experience, grief slows down time. It interrupts the directional, linear way we perceive time.”
What special relationship does the comics medium have to time? How do comics-making and comics-reading affect our own experience of time? And what might the future hold for comics?
On 27th October, I’ll be joining researcher and comics creator Kay Sohini for “Time, Space, and Unbelonging”, a one-hour conversation which forms part of the 2024 Thinking Through Drawing event.
This year, the theme of Thinking Through Drawing is “Marking Time”: find out more about my session with Kay, and the wider event, which includes online and in-person gatherings, here: https://www.thinkingthroughdrawing.org/ttd-24-marking-time.html
In an uncertain world, scenario planning equips you with skills and tools to deal effectively with potential opportunities, threats and challenges.
This new video from the team at Oxford’s Saïd Business School showcases the latest cohort from the award-winning Oxford Scenarios Programme, which helps participants learn how to develop robust strategies in the face of numerous plausible futures.
As one graduate of the programme puts it, “I always come to Oxford expecting to have my mind really stretched…the thing that surprised me most this time was that I’ve come away with a feeling of confidence that I can take what I’ve learned and really apply it in my day job.”
(It’s also a tremendous amount of fun).
Enrolment is now open for April and October 2024. Find out more here: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/programmes/executive-education/person-programmes/oxford-scenarios-programme
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
