“If you liked what you heard at NSL, then follow these accounts to get involved.” Prof @andymiah
I’m really pleased to have published an article in the print and online version of the Times Higher Education, inquiring into the relevance of the STEM acronym, 30 years after it was coined. I’ve worked across many subjects and taught in science and art schools.
What I’ve learned is that the divisions between subjects leave us absent of the kind of holistic world view we need to take us to a future we can really embrace as being the best of humanity. This article discusses the loss that has ensued from a STEMinist mentality in our knowledge systems, while also considering that the underlying vision has led to an impoverished appreciation for what it could have been and meant. Even within the natural sciences, divisions between subjects are rigid in the main part, as researchers are pushed into ever greater competition for resources and this works to our detriment.
Here’s the LINK to the article.
Last month, I was delighted to speak at the cyborg conference, led by Profs Monika Michałowska, Steve Fuller and Veronika Lipinska. The proceedings are now published and free to download and it’s a wonderful insight into what’s been happening in cyborg theory over the last 20 years. Take a look and update your ideas about what the cyborg is in our present times
Download the full proceedings HERE.
And here is MY CHAPTER
The Beijing 2022 Games take place this month and you can catch all of my content over at Culture @ the Olympics with summaries on this dedicated page .
Over the COP26 fortnight, I hosted A LOT of online live sessions for the University of Salford. We brought expertise from around the university
I was absolutely honoured to host a series of conversations during the world’s first Climate Exp0, an event orgnanized through the COP26 Universities Network. I was even more proud to co-host it with Anna-Maria White, a student in Salford University’s Wildlife and Practical Conservation programme.
We’ve been working on a few more COP26 related projects, which I’ll post about soon, but here’s a glimpse into what happened. find out more at this dedicated page.
Delighted to be interviewed by Fortune magazine writer Jonathan Vanian on what Clubhouse means for our future in social media. Audio communities are doing incredibly well at the moment, signalling a desire for retreating from video into the less intense, more intimate space of sound. The full article is behind a pay wall, but here’s the link.
Unfortunately, I was not able to go to Tokyo, due to covid, but this didn’t stop me making a heap of content about what took place. Find all of it over at my Tokyo 2020 page.
Well this was an absolutely phenomenal event! Over 1500 households registered for the event and you can watch back my presentation on the TEDx platform here.
I've really fallen behind on updating my website, so I'm going to blitz through the last 3 months!
Way back in March, I gave a talk for the doctoral school of the University of Lausanne about ethics and xr sports. It was a great way to think through some new ideas and you can find the entire session here.
A talk for the Global Alliance for Responsible AI
As part of the Scottish Parliament evidence session, my contribution focused on how we evaluate government communications during the pandemic. It’s a notoriously difficult subject, as there are so many moving pieces. However, there really ought to be some way to reflect on the effectiveness of the communications strategies and to establish comparators across nations.
The final report from the Scottish Parliament session covers a lot of levers for Scotland’s recovery and you can read the full scope of these here
A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for an article in the Washington Post, written by Nick Busca, who does fantastic work writing about new technology. You can access the article here (hopefully!)
Global Sports Week took place last week, led out of Paris, France. I gave a Masterclass on Esports and, while so much was online, a huge amount of activity tool place. Here’s a bit about how it felt.
I was really honoured to be part of a session organized by the Scottish Parliament to advise the Scottish Government on their public communication strategy. The session was a really good opportunity to think about how we evaluate government communications, especially in times of urgent need for clear messaging and quick public reactions. I hope this may develop into some further research on the subject and may well need some international collaborators to get it done.
I was really honoured to take part in the inaugural esports education programme hosted by LDNUTD, a fantastic esports team in London. Reaching out to young esports players in London, the sessions covered all aspects of becoming an esports professional. I was really pleased to speak to school kids and beyond about how to think through developing a public speaking presence in the esports world. Here’s a bit of what we covered.
I was delighted to speak about Extraterrestrial Ethics this month for #BNW2020, a fantastic event, which brought together artists, philosophers, scientists, and engineers to think through some of the biggest problems we face.
My talk on ET Ethics gets into an expanded definition of alien life forms that takes into account the new biology we are creating through synthetic biology and the likelihood that our evolution may take place outside of planet Earth!
More on that later!
Earlier this month, the British Esports Association produced the Esports Education Summit, in partnership with Pearson Education. I was delighted to speak in a session with Dr Maria Stukoff, as host.
We covered career paths in esports, from how STEM subjects are really benefitting from the esports pathway to the creative work involved in designing increasingly immersive experiences in esports.
These are remarkable times and I was very pleased to have the chance to speak with people from the STFC and UKRI community about the importance of science communication. Here’s the re-run.
I’m really excited to announce my involvement with a remarkable new tv series titled “Man 2.0” Across a number of episodes, I talk about how the human condition is being transformed by technology and what this means for our future. It’s currently being distributed worldwide, so may not yet be in your country, but you can see a trailer here.