A selection of projects from the researchers in the Centre for Critical Global Change.
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Ripping up the Rulebook
Exploring the changes and innovations in UK substance use treatment and support following the Covid-19 pandemic and what this means for doing treatment differently in the future. It is a study led by Dr Fay Dennis and funded by the Wellcome Trust.
If we take death as the ultimate harm, the UK has never been a more harmful place for people who use substances. Death rates from both drug– and alcohol-specific reasons are at their highest ever level. Moreover, some areas are experiencing their worst HIV outbreaks among injecting drug users in 30 years, and alcohol-related liver disease is rising steeply.
As Covid-19 works to ‘expose and amplify’ existing inequalities, the fear is that these deaths and other harms will increase yet further. However, Covid-regulations have also brought changes to the sector, including long-sought flexibilities in treatment options and regimes, and stimulated new care networks and modes of connecting.
This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.
Led by Dr Mariam Motamedi-Fraser, the Animal Scales series a collaboration between the Goldsmiths’ Centre for Critical Global Change and UCL Anthropocene.
From Aristotle's scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds or scales and their positions on them.
Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating.
How do animal scales come into existence? Are animas themselves 'scale-makers'? If so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it?
What would it take to make lives worth living after progress? This transdisciplinary project led by CGC Director Dr Martin Savransky, and Dr Craig Lundy (London Met) brought together scholars and artists to critically examine the planetary consequences of the modern ideal of progress and to imagine alternative futures.
The project was generously funded by the Sociological Review Foundation.
The notion of "progress" is arguably the defining idea of modernity: a civilisational imagery of a boundless, linear, and upwards trajectory towards a future that, guided by reason and technology, will be "better" than the present.
It was this notion that placed techno-science at the heart of modern political culture, it was in its name that modernity ploughed the Earth, and it was the uneven geography of "progress" that imagined European imperialism as a civilising mission inflicted upon "backward" others for their own sake.
In the wake its devastating social, political and ecological histories, this bold and innovative collection argues that the imperative of progress is now one we cannot live with but do not know how to live without. What might it take to learn to think and live after progress?
Thinking of progress not as one modern value among others but as the very mode of evaluation from which modern values are derived, this project brought together interdisciplinary scholars and artists to experiment with the radical revaluation of our values.
By exploring the complex connections between progress and knowledge, ecology, politics, science, culture, and justice, the project created a symposium series, an edited book/special issue, and a digital exhibition of collaborative storytelling all offering critical and speculative perspectives on the making of social life after progress.
The Evidence-Making Interventions in Health program of research investigates how to optimise the translation and implementation of complex health interventions by advancing more emergent and adaptive approaches to evidence-making.
We do this by reflecting critically on practices of evidence-making in implementation science and public health.
Under the leadership of Professor Kari Lancaster and Professor Tim Rhodes (LSHTM), in collaboration with Professor Marsha Rosengarten and others, this program of research brings ideas from science and technology studies (STS) into conversation with public health and implementation science to develop critical approaches to the study of evidence, including how evidence is made, used, and translated in the health and policy field.
The program fosters collaborations across disciplines (social science, public health, epidemiology, modelling) and works in dialogue with community organisations, clinicians and policy makers. It also connects researchers across University of New South Wales, Goldsmiths, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.