Event Details

Future Places: Pop-up Common Rooms on Morecambe Bay Research Third event: 10th June between 11-11.45

The Future Places Centre (FPC) invites you to a series of ‘Pop-up common rooms’ over 2021 with the aim of bringing together researchers on Morecambe Bay and its surrounding landscape, towns and people. The purpose of these is to offer a space for people from whatever discipline to meet and learn about each other and their research in an informal setting.

Lancaster University has a rich and evolving relationship with Morecambe Bay and its environs. This relationship includes research on the moving sands and riverbeds of the Bay itself through to the human landscape of the towns nearby, and everything in between. Over the years, research awards have ebbed and flowed like the tides of the Bay, and alterations in the factors outside the university and the funding agencies have affected what is being undertaken. Co-vid is perhaps the most dramatic of these, but changes in the political and economic context are also important, as are those driven by the local communities themselves. The Morecambe Bay Partnership provides a good example of how third sector organisations are altering what is topical in terms of research, as do imminent projects like Eden North.



Keeping on top of this constantly evolving relationship is not easy. While the university monitors activities, the intellectual consequences and possibilities that research enables need different and more informal mechanisms to express themselves. We hope that these ‘Pop-up common rooms’ will be a space not just for sharing knowledge and awareness of the Bay but also for fabricating the human connections that make LU such a special place to work.

These events will be open to everyone. In the first instance they will be conducted in Teams. Eventually, of course, we hope they will be hosted in real rooms with real coffee, tea (and, perhaps, even biscuits).

The FPC is planning to host a Pop-Up every two or three months, with the possibility that the topics of these might vary as new research awards are made or proposals are prepared.

Click here to join the meeting