On November 21, a group of distinguished scholars, artists, activists and leaders will come together to discuss how human and humanistic knowledge can help inform action and make the world a better place. The two-hour conversation will take place in the Senate Room, the Senate House, London, and include David Theo Goldberg, Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute, Natalie Jeremijenko , world-renowned artist, engineer and scholar and founder of the Environmental Health Clinic at New York University, Barry Smith, head of the Institute of Philosophy, in the School of Advanced Study in University of London and the founder of the Centre for the Study of the Senses, Gargi Bhattacharyya, Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, and Gary Dirks, Director of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and former president of BP China and BP Pacific-Asia. The conversation is curated and moderated by Patrik Svensson, UCLA. Can and should the humanities take a lead? What does an active and interventionist humanities look like? Much of the conversation will be concerned with specific issues relating to nature, race, politics and, of course, Brexit and the US election.
Patrik Svensson is Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at UCLA with the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities Program. He is also Professor of Humanities and Information Technology at Umeå University in Sweden, where he was the Director of HUMlab, a digital humanities center, for more than a decade. His most recent publications include the book Big Digital Humanities (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and “‘One Damn Slide After Another’: PowerPoint at every Occasion for Speech” (article in Computational Culture with Erica Robles-Anderson. 2016).
Interview with Professor Svensson by Science in Culture about the November 21 conversation: http://www.sciculture.ac.uk/2016/11/10/3867/.
Photo of Patrick Svensson, Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at UCLA with the Department of Information Studies and the Digital Humanities Program.