Research
Environmental Social Futures
From the challenge of motivating people to engage with the economics of climate change to re-casting how our planet exists in the cosmos, this theme is home to projects that put the smallest of details into the biggest of pictures. If we want a better world, we need to change both thought and action in radically new ways.
-
Everyday Futures
Future everyday life is certain to be different from today. But how is it shaped in the present? How can such processes and their implications be captured and analysed? Why might we want to intervene in and shape futures differently? and what new theories, methods and kinds of data would we need to achieve it?
-
Mobile Utopias
Invites reflection on the necessity of envisioning alternative futures from a place enabled by hope rather than risk, crisis and fear.
-
DecarboN8
A Network of Northern Universities finding new ways to rapidly decarbonise UK transport
.png)
-1.png)
-
G.R.E.A.T
UKRI-GCRF Gridding Equitable Urban Futures in Areas of Transition (GREAT) in Cali, Colombia and Havana, Cuba
Material & Digital Futures
The material and the social are related. How we live, the societies we make, the tools and technologies we use, are all a reflection of their complex and fundamental interconnection. Yet research tends to treat these two as distinct spheres. Making links between and across these divides, in the material, social and computational, is part of the agenda of the ISF.
-
Material Social Futures
We address the urgent and growing need to provide PhD training in which material science, social science and arts and humanities researchers come to look beyond their disciplinary boundaries and undertake research that combines material and social considerations. Only in this way can better futures be made.
-
Understanding the ‘iGen’ (post-millennials)
Understanding the ‘iGen’ (post-millennials), their identities, beliefs and values – a Knight-funded collaboration with Stanford University
-
The Future Places Centre
A Digital Economy Centre on understanding places through everyday computing.
-2.png)
.png)
Cultural and Creative Futures
We all live in the present, all the time, but this present only exists thanks to our past behaviour and our projections into the future. Embracing the deep roots of cultural practices and the transformative power of creative processes, projects in this theme show how we can find and re-make the future all around us as part of a path towards empowering both individuals and society.
Dr Emily Spiers, Theme Lead-
The Knotted Project
The Knotted Project use the power of theatre to start conversations, inspire audiences and engage young people.
-
Authors and the World
‘Authors and the World’ is a collaboration between researchers in the departments of Languages & Cultures, English & Creative Writing, Linguistics, and Contemporary Arts (LICA) at Lancaster University.
-
ReOPeN
It is time to ReOPeN graphic novels and comics (GNC)!
.png)
Mental Health & Wellbeing Futures
Do we want to live longer, or better, and who are ‘we’ anyway? Projects in this theme explore both practical and ethical questions around how different groups of people relate to their environments, living out their biological lives at the intersections of social, material and physical circumstances.
-
Everyday Futures
Future everyday life is certain to be different from today. But how is it shaped in the present? How can such processes and their implications be captured and analysed? Why might we want to intervene in and shape futures differently? and what new theories, methods and kinds of data would we need to achieve it?
-
Virus Diaries
Blogs following a life in COVID-19 lockdown
-1.png)