Centre co-director Professor Jen Ross and Professor Richard Sandford (UCL's Institute for Sustainable Heritage) are organising the webinar "Latent futures", which will be held online on the 5th June 2025 at 13:00-17:00 BST (UTC+1).
Event description
This webinar explores how understanding the future as unfolding around us might offer alternatives to the instrumental, projective futures that underpin unsustainable practices. Speakers will develop a range of approaches towards recognising and working with latent futures, through ideas and examples drawn from fields like heritage studies, education, anthropology, history, futures studies, the environmental humanities, and other domains with the means to help us notice the possibilities and potentials in the present through which futures unfold. Across a range of scales, from landscapes to the everyday, their work demonstrates the different ways in which the notion of ‘latent futures’ can be put to work in building new understandings of how futures come to be.
Speakers
Dr. Alison Oldfield (University of Bristol), Preparing for possible futures outside the classroom
Dr. Anna Wilson (University of Glasgow), Threads and knots: reading the conditions of latent place-futures from place-pasts
Prof. Deborah Sutton (University of Lancaster), Latent Futures in the Desert: Rethinking the Futures Past of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India
Dr. Lina Rahm (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Cranking Toward Collapse: Hand-Cranked Radios and Gas Masks as Material Embodiments of Latent Futures
Prof. Esther Priyadharshini (University of East Anglia), Reviving latent futures
Dr. Justin Pickard, Latency at the interface: constraint, possibility, and perception
Prof Helen Manchester, Dr Laurène Cheilan, Dr Marisela Gutierrez-Lopez, (University of Bristol), Where are the latent sociodigital futures that emerge in participatory futuring with communities living in the margins?
Visit the event website for further information: Latent futures.
Click here to register: Webinar Registration - Zoom.