Professor Matthew Paterson gave a seminar on "the Cultural Politics" of Climate Change at the University of Manchester. See also this interview conducted via email before the event. This was part of the Sustainable Consumption Institute's external seminar series. Here is the video (which was static, while the speaker was not!) And here is the... Continue Reading →
“Green Transformations,” Leonard Cohen and the Elephant
A lively debate about the near and long-term future of western civilisation took place yesterday in central London, at the launch of the book “The Politics of Green Transformations”. The edited volume based on work of the STEPS centre, was the centrepiece of an event at the National Liberal Club, and provoked a conversation about... Continue Reading →
Academic (self)-branding and Andon Boards, or “The Panspectron as Tetris”
Was at an event only advertised on Twitter (how 21C is that?) I met some interesting people. One of them was the chief twitterer himself, Mark Carrigan (see post "coping with acceleration.") In a discussion about the ‘need’ for branding and the intensification of academic (if not intellectual) life, Carrigan approvingly cited the work of Will Davies,... Continue Reading →
More fun in the multiplex (maths) than the multiplex (cinema)
"Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way, and here, in partial explanation perhaps, is the story of the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky a blog post! You have to stretch yourself, swim out of your depth on occasion. The seminar I... Continue Reading →
“Cistern failure” or “Waste is a terrible thing to mind…”
What does the ‘waste’ go when you flush? The citizens of Baltimore found out the ‘hard way’ in 1989, and again in 2014. Johns Hopkins Assistant Professor Graham Mooney (separated at birth from his identical twin) gave a thoroughly enjoyable seminar about something we don’t like to think about – “biosolids” (or, to you and... Continue Reading →
What is innovative, and social, about Social Innovation?
I don't know. And I don't really address that in this blog post. Apologies if you feel click-baited or rick-rolled. I went to a seminar on Wednesday about “Social Innovation Futures: beyond policy panacea and conceptual ambiguity” It was good – clear presentation of relevant work, good questions (except perhaps the first one, which was... Continue Reading →
Geo-engineering – last throes of the dice/species
So there is a new National Academy of Sciences report on the idea of 'geo-engineering.' That's a soothing sounding term for "doing technical stuff at a global scale to escape/lessen the consequences of having ignored the climate scientists' generation of warnings to cut back on the carbs". For instance there's - mirrors in space to reduce... Continue Reading →
From smugosphere to inkosphere
The inkosphere is "that place where people dive into words, concepts, theories and splash about, the size and sound of the splashes becoming the measure of all things." It kinda overlaps with the smugosphere - I'll do a Venn diagram some day. The smugosphere? - "is not a place you’ll find on a map. It’s... Continue Reading →
Reading between the li(n)es: Policy Document Analysis
Fresh from a session on “Social innovation” (with a useful PhD writing interlude) I went to “What is… Policy Document Analysis?” These “what is…” events are put on by the methods@manchester folks.Sometimes ‘sage on the stage followed by q and a’ is okay. This was one of those occasions. Imma bullet point it, (#wearealldeadalongtime) Documents... Continue Reading →
On the Stepper: #ImStickingwithTony (not). Tech history, Field -Configuring Events, normative utopia
Was on the stepper on Thursday, reading about the global coal trade (Thank you IEA Coal Information 2014 and World Energy Council survey.) And yesterday, reading about the Australian Coal Export industry (more on that soon). Today was broader, and perhaps more fun (!?) I started with a speech by the soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Tony... Continue Reading →
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