Leadership Team
Our People
ISF’s Leadership Team contains expertise from across the Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Emily Spiers
Co-Director & Theme Lead for Cultural & Creative Futures
Emily Spiers is Lecturer in Creative Futures. Their work focuses on future-oriented, innovative trends in communicative and literary practices. They explore how futures are being envisaged, anticipated and made through art and literature -- and how creative narratives can help articulate multiple futures in fields as diverse as defence, education and climate change.
They have worked with multiple government agencies and creative partners to articulate the importance of critically engaging with the world-building techniques that form the foundation of futures thinking and futures literacy.
Visit their page on Academia.edu or onTwitter.
Dr Carlos Lopez-Galviz
Associate Director & Institute Lead on Engagement
My work looks at futures thinking and future forming through the lens of cities, ruins and infrastructure. I have studied cities like London, Paris and Shanghai, using history as a means of thinking about what theories and which methods are relevant to understanding their future today and in the past. I am interested in research that is comparative and collaborations that combine disciplinary rigour with cross-disciplinary openness.
Dr. Paul Young
Co-Theme Lead for Environmental Social Futures
We must get better at engaging more voices to shape our future environment and our relationship with it. As an atmospheric and climate scientist, I’ve led and been part of fantastic teams to understand the natural science around air pollution, the ozone layer and climate change, and how these all might change in the future. Yet this work is often done without questioning the socioeconomic assumptions and values that underpin these future projections, and seldom does it engage with the communities that are on the receiving end of change. Through the ISF’s Environment Theme, we will build inclusive projects to confront future environmental change, uniting expertise from local communities, commerce and government together with academic knowledge and methods from the social and natural sciences, humanities, and art and design.
Dr Robert Gutsche Jr.
Co-Theme Lead for Environmental Social Futures
Robert (Ted) Gutsche, Jr. is a leading scholar in the field of Journalism Studies where he applies critical cultural theory to investigate issues of power in journalism. He is Senior Lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice in Lancaster’s Department of Sociology and is a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Informatics at Vytautas Magnus University in Lithuania. His range of research interests include those related to climate change communication. He is co-editor of the book Climate Change, Media & Culture: Critical Issues in Global Environmental Communication and led or leads several engagement projects surrounding climate change, digital media, and the arts, including www.eyesontherise.org and www.ukunderwater.com. As Associate Editor of Journalism Practice, Gutsche hosts and produces “The J Word: A Podcast by Journalism Practice.”
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Dr Kirsti Ashworth
Theme Lead - Health & Wellbeing Futures
My research focuses on the interactions between the land surface, the atmosphere and society. Originally trained as a Chemical Engineer, I gained a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences with a specific interest in how highly reactive gases released from vegetation affect and are affected by climate and air quality. However, I have become increasingly interested in exploring how scientific knowledge can be used as an agent of societal change. We “know” why air quality is poor, so why can’t we “solve” it? Through working on the use of urban green space to mitigate climate and air pollution, I became more aware of environmental (in)justice, air (ine)quality and health inequities across the population, and the need for agency, hope and futures thinking. I am currently involved in the Phoenix 2020 Project, with local artists Green Close Studios, using creative arts to support mental health recovery post-COVID and see a bright future for ISF and Lancaster in the field of Mental Health and Wellbeing Futures!
Institute's Administrator
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