Tag: scenarios

Peat Hub Ireland Report including Peatlands 2050 scenarios

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“What I liked most about the workshop was getting to experience a framework for discourse between different stakeholders where everyone was approaching challenging ideas with an amount of vulnerability and openness. Things like the icebreaker question and being pushed outside of our cognitive comfort zones led to a kind of shared sense of uncertainty and unease that made it much easier for conversation and creativity to happen.”

Words from a participant at the scenarios workshop I led as part of the Peat Hub Ireland initiative, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and delivered by UCD colleagues under the leadership of Florence Renou-Wilson, including David Wilson, Kate Flood, and Elena Aitova.

You can see the full report, including an appendix on the scenarios, at the EPA website. Thanks to all the colleagues and to the host of our scenario session at Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath – it’s a rare delight to run a scenario workshop with a ninety minute bog walk in the middle of it…

Ministry of Time Book Review for Vector

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“In times of uncertainty, what we can imagine ahead of us matters.”

I write on Kaliane Bradley’s wonderful novel The Ministry of Time for the British Science Fiction Association’s journal Vector, and consider the book’s wider implications for public imagination in a turbulent era.

“Time travel in science fiction has, itself, a history and prehistory, a present, and presumably a future. It has the potential for new and emergent ideas of temporality – scientific, poetic, popular, expert – to succeed those currently held by researchers, philosophers, artists, authors, critics, and the general public of the day…Perhaps Bradley’s novel will also, in times to come, show itself to be one of the works that opened the door onto a new era of popular time travel fiction. This new era is one which, however fraught, creates new opportunities for us to face up to the uncertainties around us.”

Read “Eternally Displaced Persons? Territorial Bodies and The Ministry of Time” in Vector online, here.

Are we even talking about tomorrow? at UCL Languages of the Future

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I’m speaking at the UCL Languages of the Future conference on 6th June, presenting a paper titled “Are we even talking about tomorrow? Uncertainty, agency, and the encounter with the sublime”.

The event brings together contributors from across academia and broader society to think through the complex relationships between languages and times to come. We’ve been given a few big questions to chew on, like: How can “languages of the future” encapsulate specific individual disciplines, embrace diverse knowledge systems, convey the urgency of problems that are yet to arise, and honour the voices of the more-than-human world?

I’ll be standing on the shoulders of thinkers like UCL’s Richard Sandford to explore uncertainty, agency, and the “thick present”: an understanding of the here-and-now encompassing remembrance and anticipation. As Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson have it,

The future is always an aspect of the present. The future has not “taken place,” but the present always “holds” the future, and holds it as potential. Indeed, the future is never “later,” is it always (experienced, imagined) “now.”

Droplets hanging from a leaf in close up. The image is titled WHAT MIGHT TRANSPIRE? and includes a quotation from Sandford 2023: 'It is precisely action that makes the present thick. Pursuing the ends that we have demands that we weave together pasts, presents, and futures, producing the thick present through the exercise of our agency.'

Oxford Human-Algorithm Interaction Workshop 2025

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I’m pleased to be presenting at the University of Oxford’s Human-Algorithm Interaction Workshop 2025, on “Governing the futures you didn’t see coming: artificial intelligence scenarios“.

Do join us in Oxford, 5-8 July, for an interdisciplinary event delving into the complex and evolving relationship between humans and algorithms.

The annual workshop is a gathering of industry leaders, AI pioneers, and leading researchers who will explore the evolving role of AI in business, governance, and society. This year’s theme is “Shaping the future of AI: innovation, ethics and impact.”

Find out more and register here.

“Looking Beyond the Ghost Scenario” in Issues in Science and Technology

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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.

Right Here, Right Now Global Youth Climate Summit

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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.

'Dreaming Spires', by Flickr User JJBullock - Copyright JJ Bullock 2010
‘Dreaming Spires’, by Flickr User JJBullock – Copyright JJ Bullock 2010

auDA Scenarios @ European Parliamentary Research Service

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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.

Sophie will talk about the 2024 auDA scenarios, looking at the future of Internet governance, which are just coming up on the first anniversary of their publication, and can be found here.

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.

The Ghosts We See From The Mountains: New book chapter available

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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.

Title of the Routledge edited volume Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty First Century Cultural Production

New chapter: Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty-First Century Cultural Production

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Title of the Routledge edited volume Crisis and Body Politics in Twenty First Century Cultural Production

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?

See more at the Routledge website.

ISF Podcast: Threat Horizon and the auDA scenarios

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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.

Check out our episode of the ISF podcast here.