Lecture

Keynote Lecture: New Infrastructures of Knowledge: A Manifesto

Interdisciplinarity, Challenge-led Research and the Future University

Universities have for the most part not changed the way they organize themselves in a very long time. Most universities have the same basic architecture of departments, schools, colleges and faculties, structured around disciplinary identity and cognate disciplinary groupings. These structures are part of the natural landscape of academic life, and so pervasive and familiar that we tend not to question them let alone recognize them as historically contingent.

This talk will call for a new approach and present a 7-point program for evolving our infrastructures of knowledge to enable universities to better respond to the challenges of the current age.

Agenda

• Lecture: 45 minutes
• Q&A session: 15 minutes

Keynote Speakers

Professor of Culture and Technology

Marion Thain

Marion Thain is Professor of Culture and Technology and Director of Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. She began her career as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge, and later moved to New York University (NYU) as a professor in the school of the interdisciplinary global liberal arts, and as Director of Digital Humanities for NYU. She returned to the UK in 2018 as Professor of Culture and Technology and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London. At King’s she founded and led the Digital Futures Institute.

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