UN-Predicting the future

Just like in every futuristic movie ever made, engineers wonder how to decide who a self driving car might kill in an accident, robots are automating our industries, we are experiencing the climate crisis first hand and there is a potential global health crisis looming.  As policy makers, industries and governments scramble to solve these real-world problems from the top down, we want to challenge the very mechanisms used for predicting the future.

This panel of academic futures thinkers will hold a conversation focussed on disrupting predictable contemporary thinking in the policy, government and industry and innovation sectors for a future that is more ethical, equitable and inclusive. Following the round table discussion we will launch the book  ‘Why Muslim Women and Smartphones’ by visiting academic Assistant Professor Karen Waltorp.

Speakers

  • Professor Sarah Pink - Director of Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University will chair  the panel, and reflect on her futures anthropology research into self-driving cars, future intelligent mobilities, and energy futures.
  • Professor Noortje Marres, Director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, (Warwick University). Noortje is a digital sociologist, and will speak about the tests and experiments that engineers use today to create the future: living labs, online personality tests, and smart traffic systems do not just predict what is to come, but change the present, and this makes it more urgent to figure out how art, design and social research can make possible different kinds of experiments with the future.
  • Associate Professor Dr Nerea Calvillo, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, (Warwick University). An architect by training, Nerea will present In the Air,   a visualization project currently on display in the Royal Academy (London), which makes visible the microscopic agents of Madrid´s air. This and other projects by Nerea create embodied, material, and affective ways of sensing our environmental futures.
  • Professor Juan F Salazar, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Juan will speak about creative practices, poetics of tomorrowing and speculative approaches to futuring Antarctica and Outer Space.

Discussants 

Date: Wednesday 18 March

Time: 6 - 8pm

Venue: The Commons, 3 Albert Coates Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000

Booking essential : https://unpredictingthefuture.eventbrite.com.au

Refreshments provided, this venue has disabled access

Join us after our futures round table discussion to launch new book ‘Why Muslim Women and Smartphones’ by visiting academic Assistant Professor Karen Waltorp from Aarhus University, Denmark. Karen’s book will be launched by Professor Sarah Pink and include a talk from Karen Waltorp about her work.

About the book

Using an assemblage approach to study how Muslim women in Norrebro, Denmark use their phones, Karen Waltorp examines how social media complicates the divide between public and private in relation to a group of people who find this distinction of utmost significance. Building on years of ethnographic fieldwork, Waltorp's ethnography reflects the trust and creativity of her relationships with these women which in turn open up nuanced discussions about both the subject at hand and best practice in conducting anthropological research.

Combining rich ethnography with theoretical contextualization, Waltorp's book alternates between ethnography and analysis to illuminate a thoroughly modern community, and reveals the capacity of image-making technology to function as an infrastructure for seeing, thinking and engaging in fieldwork as an anthropologists. Waltorp identifies a series of important issues around anthropological approaches to new media, contributing to new debates around the anthropology of automation, data and self-tracking.

This event has been made possible by the Warwick- Monash Alliance, a partnership between the Monash Emerging Technologies Research Lab and the Warwick Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies to work on ‘Creating the possible: interdisciplinary methodologies for futures research, experimentation and impact’.