I’ve been busy over the past few months doing a series of interviews, events and written pieces ahead of the publication of my new book Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, co-authored with Claire Craig. The book was published in mid-November and we launched it online at an event kindly hosted by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge. A recording of the launch, together with links to all the other things to watch, read or hear around the book, can be found on the book’s webpage. All of my Storylistening-related activities will be posted there, rather than here, so do check it out.
In this last episode of the first series of the University of Cambridge’s new podcast – Mind Over Chatter – I joined Richard Staley (Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science department) and Martin Rees (cosmologist, astrophysicist, and Astronomer Royal), to explore how stories relate to climate change. It was fun to do some audio work again after a break from radio for a while. It was also good to have an opportunity to try out some of the ideas from the new book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, to which we’re currently putting the finishing touches, in particular work in the book on understanding narratives as models.
Richard is one of my collaborators on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar – Histories of AI: A Geneaology of Power – which we’ve been running since Spring 2020, and which has been one of the most phenomenal experience of my professional career. But Richard is also leading another important research project – Making Climate History – so it was good to have an opportunity to talk with him about climate change, rather than AI, although the two are of course intimately connected, as Richard has discussed elsewhere.
This episode was produced by Nick Saffell, James Dolan, and Naomi Clements-Brod.
Little did I know when I was in Paris at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Forum in December last year, that it was likely to be my last trip abroad for some time. As all of us contend with the onset of the pandemic, and as many parents and carers are trying to figure out how to juggle home schooling and their jobs, it feels almost nostalgic to see this video published of an interview I gave at the Paris event. In it I talk about how storylistening can enable creative imagining about the future, and how it is needed to inform decision making and create futures that exist, and that ‘we’ want to live in. What I said then resonates differently now, of course, as we contend with a pandemic and even at its outset start to think about what the world might look like, what it needs to look like, afterwards.
As we contend with the uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to our lives, BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking asked me to take part in a programme dedicated to thinking about the future, both under our specific coronavirus conditions, and in general. The programme was one of their first recorded with participants all contributing remotely, huddled in the smallest spaces we have in our homes – although the sound is best if you’re under a duvet, or have at least tried to pad the walls with one, I find that that’s not necessarily always most conducive to clear thinking! But we all tried our best and, despite everything, ended up on a surprisingly hopeful note about what the future might hold…
I’ve just returned from a brilliant experience at the UNESCO Global Futures Literacy Design Forum in Paris. Two days of mind-opening workshops and discussions showcasing the diversity of activities globally that engage with human anticipatory systems and practices. I was involved in delivering two ‘labs’, along with my wonderful postdoctoral research assistant, Olivia Belton, pictured here alongside me. Olivia curated and led a lab developed out of our research project using a collaborative storytelling game to determine anticipatory assumptions about autonomous flight. Olivia led participants through the game she developed on the project, facilitating them to imagine near-future implementations of artificial intelligence. I curated a lab derived from the research for my work-in-progress book with Claire Craig on Storylistening. Whereas futures literacy activities often generate futures, and thereby reveal anticipatory assumptions, through collective storytelling (or other forms of collective imagining), the storylistening lab demonstrated the value to be gained from collective storylistening – that is the activity of listening to and analysing a pre-existing story. Participants worked with Ursula Le Guin’s rich short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ to think together about the questions the story raises around forms of governance, the morality of economic models, justifications of utilitarianism and the imaginative (in)ability to countenance alternatives to the status quo. I wrapped up the final day with an evening walk across Paris from the UNESCO site to Gare du Nord, along streets bedecked with Christmas lights and decorations, listening to Christmas music and enjoying the vibrancy of a city which has long been a favourite of mine.
