On 20 May Prof. Mark Turner from Case Western Reserve University will be the speaker.
Human beings are exceptional at imagining distant, large, complicated futures. They do this jointly, in distributed fashion, relying on the full range of multimodal communicative tools, especially, in our era, on global media networks of many kinds. Worldwide, we wrangle over the compelling products: the Belt and Road initiative, climate change, space exploration, block-chain systems, Starlink, Chimerica, a Disease X Pandemic. When we think about these futures, we think about people, actions, and landscapes that stretch across vast ranges of time, space, causation, and agency (CATS). What will happen to the British Pound? Geopolitics in Southeast Asia? Our grandchildren? Higher education? Artificial Intelligence? Automation? Movement of goods and people? Population? The Global South? Air travel? Space travel? Health care? This seminar will review mental operations we use to imagine our futures, and aspects of multimodal communication that support our vast, distributed, joint interaction as we create and develop them.
