Previous Events

Archiving a Disappearing Planet: On the Finitude of Images and Worlds

Dr Tiago de Luca, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Television, University of Warwick.

This talk explores the promises and uses of the indexical image in recording and archiving the planet. My focus will be on two media projects: Albert Kahn’s Les Archives de la Planète (Archives of the Planet, 1909-1931) and Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2013).

Building Habitable Worlds: Clues From the Meteorite Record

Dr Ashley King, Researcher Co-Investigator, STFC, Natural History Museum

The solar system was created from the collapse of an interstellar cloud of gas and dust ~4.6 billion years ago. But how did that gas and dust coalesce into the Sun and planets that we see today? And what processes and events led to formation of habitable planets like the Earth? Meteorites are rocky time capsules that probe the earliest stages of solar system formation and the evolution of planets.

The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture

Dr Mark Bould, Reader in Film & Literature, Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education, UWE Bristol.

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh suggests – from the viewpoint of an imaginary future – that ‘ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’. However – as with all denialisms – contemporary literary and pulp fiction, comics, and arthouse, blockbuster and trash cinema reveal every bit as much as they conceal. This presentation outlined the three premises underpinning the opening chapters of forthcoming The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture: that the stories we tell about the world matter, but it is not always easy to know where to start them or what to call them; that the stories we tell about the world matter, but it is never easy to keep control of them; and, that the stories we tell about the world matter, and sometimes they contain sharknados.

This seminar was hosted by the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts and the Habitability GRP

Islam and the Imagination of Life beyond Earth

Dr Jörg Matthias Determann, Associate Professor, Department of Liberal Arts & Sciences, Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar.

Despite the futuristic architecture of cities like Dubai and the fantastical tales of the Arabian Nights, the Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion, repression, and rote learning have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. Nevertheless, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe.

A Pathway to the Confirmation and Characterisation of Habitable Alien Worlds

Dr Heather Cegla, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Physics, University of Warwick.

Are we alone in the Universe? Since the confirmation of the first planets outside our solar system in the 1990s, we have made tremendous progress towards answering this question.