Computing Utopia

[The following is a draft excerpt from an article written with Jo Lindsay Walton called 'Computing Utopia: The Horizons of Computational Economies in History and Science Fiction', which appeared in this month's issue of Science Fiction Studies]

In speculative and science fiction, computation is often represented as morally ambiguous, at odds with human concerns or not entirely explicable within human frames of reason. One notable example can be found in the trope of the supercomputer, wherein anxieties about artificial intelligence and automation combine to produce an entity capable of superseding or displacing humankind. For example, Kendell Foster Crossen’s Year of Consent (1954) features the totalitarian supercomputer SOCIAC, who manipulates the “consenting” population via forms of social control. Likewise, Isaac Asimov’s short story ‘The Last Question’ (1956) centres on the human-created supercomputer Multivac (and its successors) and their obsession with the question of how to reverse entropy. They work on the answer over a hundred billion years, long after the end of humankind and the universe itself. 

The imaginary of the supercomputer, then, is entangled with both positive and negative impulses. These impulses crystallize in the tension between computational utopia’s promise of superior knowledge and reason, and the threat of an oppressive and dystopian calculative order. The history of cybernetics is laden with comparable tensions. In popular culture, cybernetics has frequently been conflated with robotics or computer science, an association that was formed through early media reactions to it. The 1948 publication of Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, gained enormous press attention and led to response articles such as ‘Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?’ (American Monthly 1953) and ‘Man Viewed as a Machine’ (Scientific American 1955). 

In fact, cybernetics refers to a far broader set of concerns, which can be glossed as the study of systems governance, including organic, machinic, and socio-economic systems. It also includes the study of self-governance: how systems constitute and stabilize themselves, how they adapt to changes in their environments and how they survive or fail to survive damage or the introduction of new elements. It is the study of communication, feedback and control that came to define cybernetics as a field of inquiry. 

This interest in feedback, and the maintenance of equilibrium through feedback mechanisms is also the thing that most clearly connects cybernetics with economics. In particular, there are links between cybernetics and neoclassical models of markets and economies as self-governing systems, entities which accomplish an optimum distribution of resources through the self-stabilizing interactions of supply and demand. These principles were at the heart of what came to be known as the “Chicago school” of economics through figures such as George Stigler and Milton Friedman. Both worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG), funded by the US National Defense Research Committee during World War II, and links have been traced between cybernetic experiments in defense systems carried out in the SRG and Friedman’s later work (Mirowski, 205-206). Mike Featherstone foregrounds this link in his study of the underpinnings of contemporary capitalist thought: 

Friedman’s free market economics presented a computational vision of freedom and social relations, which transformed economy into an apolitical closed space defined by machinic interactions, cold strategic decision making, militarised risk assessment and management, and a complete lack of empathy for the other who was similarly imagined through the lens of cybernetics. (94) 

The characterization of “machinic interactions” is central to Featherstone’s argument that “it is possible to understand the development of late capitalism through its embrace of techno-science and specifically cybernetic theory over the course of the 20th century” (82). This view, while valid, rests on a partial interpretation of the cybernetic field. Historian Ronald R. Kline has argued for the disunity of cybernetics, not only in its multiple meanings, but also with regard to “the different paths cybernetics took in different countries” (7). To some extent, these histories have been obscured by dominant narratives, which inform ideas – in both science fiction and contemporary politics – about the inseparability of cybernetic theory from capitalism. Yet the uptake of cybernetics in countries with distinct social and political trajectories presents a challenge to such ideas. 

An important, if unrealized, project that marks a chapter in the diverse history of cybernetics is Project Cybersyn (or Proyecto Synco in Spanish), a Chilean initiative funded under the socialist government of Salvador Allende between 1971 and 1973. Cybersyn was directed towards the development of a cybernetic system to manage the economy and communicate with factories that had come under government control as part of Allende’s nationalization efforts. The project was a collaboration between Chilean technical experts and Stafford Beer, a British research scientist in management cybernetics. Beer was interested in cybernetics as “the science of effective organization” and how it could be applied to the field of industrial management (Beer, Decision and Control, 425). 

Project Cybersyn was intended to manage economic production using the feedback of data from the factories. Statistical software programs were designed to model factory performance scenarios, based on analysis of the data, enabling the Chilean government to regulate production and pre-empt crises with effective action (Medina, 6). Despite limited technological resources, consisting of one central computer and a network of telex machines, the project went some way towards developing this system (Pickering, 250). The main objectives of Cybersyn were to maximize economic production while also facilitating self-regulation of the factories. It thus represented an attempt to incorporate devolved decision-making and worker autonomy into a cybernetic management system. For Beer, the design constituted “a weapon against state bureaucracy” (see Medina, 170). 

Cybersyn control room

A comprehensive history of Project Cybersyn is the subject of a 2011 book by Eden Medina. Her study focuses on the relationship between computer technology and politics, and the difficulty of embedding political values in systems design. In the case of Cybersyn, she argues that this can be seen in the frequent mischaracterization of the project as a tool for centralized government control of the economy, despite its outwardly decentralized approach. Indeed, in January 1973, when The Observer broke the news of Cybersyn to the English-speaking public, the headline simply ran “Chile run by computer.” In an allusion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Cybersyn, the “first computer system designed to control an entire economy” had allegedly been “assembled in some secrecy so as to avoid opposition charges of ‘Big Brother’ tactics.” Later that year, Allende’s government was overthrown by a military coup and Project Cybersyn was never completed. Under the subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, economic policy was remodelled by a group of Chilean neoliberal economists called the Chicago Boys, some of whom trained under Friedman. In the decades that followed, information technology became increasingly integrated into global finance and financial markets were rapidly expanded, deregulated, and diversified. 

In his novel Synco (2008), the Chilean SF writer Jorge Baradit offers an alternative history of Project Cybersyn. It opens six years after the coup of 1973 which, in a parallel version of events, is dismantled with the assistance of Pinochet. The completion of Synco – “the hidden leviathan [...] the mechanical eye of socialist Chile” (Baradit, 29-30) – has transformed Chile into a fully-fledged cybernetic state. The country’s capital of Santiago provides the backdrop for the main action of the story and it is here that the protagonist Martina returns after some years in Venezuela. She is startled at the changes wrought by Synco but she soon becomes disquieted after witnessing the full extent of its political influence and surveillance. While the circumstances that lead to this totalitarian regime are never fully explained, it is implied that a cybernetic model of government is inextricable from centralized state control, and the collaboration between Pinochet and Allende serves to bolster the system. Synco’s power grows and by the end of the novel its network begins to effect changes in the language and geography of Chile. In the final scenes, as Martina is flown out of the country, she sees military jets heading the other way for a final showdown with this “god made of wires” (230). 

The novel’s bleak view assumes the inevitability of Cybersyn’s techno-totalitarian trajectory. The actual project, by contrast, was fragile and fledgling. Its computing resources were minimal. Devoted to a broadly “decentralizing, worker-participative and anti-bureaucratic” form of economic management (Beer, Brain of the Firm, 257), it was tantalizingly poised between a model and the thing itself. Along these lines, Medina maintains that “there is historical value in studying innovative technological systems, even if they are never fully realized” (Medina, 10). The recognition that systems like Cybersyn cannot be measured only by the logic of ‘what happened’ is an important one and highlights the question of making visible alternatives to dystopian economic computation.

References

Asimov, Isaac. “The Last Question.” Science Fiction Quarterly (November 1956): 6-15. 

Baradit, Jorge. Synco. Madrid and Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008.

Beer, Stafford. Decision and Control. London: Wiley, 1966. 

---. The Brain of the Firm. London: Allen Lane, 1972. 

Crossen, Kendall Foster. Year of Consent. New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1954. 

Featherstone, Mike. Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, and Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2017. 

Fliegers, Serge. “Will Machines Replace the Human Brain?” American Monthly. 76 (1953): 53-61. 

Hawkes, Nigel. “Chile Run by Computer.” The Observer, 7 Jan 1973. 

Kemeny, John G. “Man Viewed as a Machine.” Scientific American. 192 (April 1955): 58-67. 

Kline, Ronald R. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 

Medina, Eden. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. 

Mirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Computer Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949. 

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches Of Another Future. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: The Raving 90s

The rise of rave culture from the late 1980s to the early 1990s was a worldwide phenomenon which had a particular impact in the UK. Like many other youth subcultures, the emphasis on drugs and loud music, other worlds and altered states, brought notoriety to the rave scene. Rave was rife with science fiction imagery, from promotional flyers to the stylings of the music’s practitioners. Operating at the intersection of chill-out/eco/new age/techno and dance subcultures, rave reached the zenith of its popularity at the huge Castlemorton Common Festival of 1992, in Worcestershire’s Malvern Hills. This event, to borrow the terminology of the 60s, represented a ‘gathering of the tribes’ and saw rave as a unifying force among disparate groups; it was also the precursor to state intervention.

The connections with 60s/70s ‘alternative’ lifestyles (even the term ‘rave’) were inescapable, apparent in the tendencies toward escapism and hedonism and the trajectory from the underground to the mainstream. Antonio Melechi was among the commentators to note that “Not until the expansion of rave culture... has the counterculture so explicitly harked back to the sixties.” It was a ‘grass roots’ movement, building on the UK’s tradition of nationwide free festivals established in the wake of the huge gatherings at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight which marked the commercialisation of 60s rock. An anonymous pamphlet published at the end of the 1970s summarised the free festival ethos:

“Free festivals are practical demonstrations of what society could be like all the time; miniature Utopias of joy and communal awareness rising for a few days from grey morass of mundane, inhibited, paranoid and repressive everyday existence.”

George McKay, writing in Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, recognised the tendency toward transformation; “One of the spaces of the dance scene side of rave – the club – is presented as libertarian utopian space, packed with transformative possibility.” As in the 60s, through the festivals, the subculture came to span both rural and urban environments, encompassing illicit rave parties in warehouses and the countryside, embracing both a ‘back to nature’ impulse and the modern technology of the music itself. Though rave styled itself as a movement without ‘stars’, stressing anonymity as central to the communality of the experience, artists such as Altern8, Orbital and the Prodigy became popular, together with the Orb and Steve Hillage on the ambient fringe, while Hawkwind, veterans of the counterculture and free festival circuit, incorporated dance elements and demonstrated the affinities with an earlier generation.

Undeniably central to rave’s appeal was Ecstasy, functioning like LSD decades earlier as both a catalyst and symbol of the movement, defining and enhancing the musical experience. This parallel was identified by Nicholas Saunders, one of the individuals to span both eras. Saunders was behind the 1970 publication of Alternative London, described as “a key text of the counterculture packed with information about subjects from health foods to communes to drugs.” As a rave enthusiast and the author of E is for Ecstasy (1993), Saunders described the affinities between the two eras, both culturally and in their respective choices of recreational chemicals: “I felt symptoms familiar from taking LSD in the sixties... A kind of uplifting religious experience of unity that I have only felt once before”.

With growing popularity came increasing attention from the press and public authorities; at this point, parallels with the free and easy 60s and 70s began to evaporate. While some debate took place around the medical effects of Ecstasy, the high-profile deaths of Leah Betts and Clare Layton fuelled media sensationalism and moral panic. The veteran investigative reporter Roger Cook used his Cook Report, broadcast nationally, for an episode entitled ‘Ecstasy Kills’ in 1992, which served as a prolonged broadside against the evils of drugs. The popular press followed suit. Criminalisation was in the offing, with the Castlemorton event, a week-long free festival, serving as the basis for the legislation which was enacted in the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. There was strong public opposition, with critics describing the provisions of the Act as “explicitly aimed at suppressing the activities of certain strands of alternative culture”, but it was duly passed. The widespread sceptical sentiments were echoed by author Jon Savage, who stated that the legislation was “about politicians making laws on the basis of judging people’s lifestyles, and that’s no way to make laws.” The Prodigy registered their disapproval with the themes and artwork of their 1994 album Music for the Jilted Generation.

Music for the Jilted Generation. Inner sleeve artwork by Les Edwards.

Previous governments had imposed certain restrictions on large-scale gatherings, notably The Isle of Wight County Council Act 1971, which contains provisions aimed at the control of overnight assemblies in the open, and gives the local authority powers to set conditions and to veto unsuitable sites. Whilst regulating, the authorities of that era remained open to the utopian possibilities of such free festivals, recognised by the government commission established in the wake of the Isle of Wight chaos of 1970. The Stevenson Committee’s 1973 Report to the Department of Environment states: “These young people have been expressing a need to get away from their immediate environment and the inhibitions and limitations of everyday life – particularly in our towns – to a situation in which they can experiment socially, come face to face with new ideals and concepts of life and decide for themselves what they wish to accept or reject.” The liberal attitude extended to ministerial level, with the Secretary of State for the Environment at the time, Geoffrey Rippon, commenting “The last thing the Government wants to do is to intervene in people’s reasonable pleasures”, in sharp contrast to the draconian provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, a bill passed in Parliament twenty years later aimed at doing exactly that.

Police Review, June 1992, in the wake of the Castlemorton Festival

While rave as a mass movement never recovered from the effects of the 1994 legislation, it reverted to an underground sub-culture, evolved into different forms, and enjoyed a surprisingly durable afterlife. For an experience predicated on transitory chemical pleasures and instant thrills, rave culture has left an extensive legacy of archive, ephemera and memorabilia – blogs, compilations, flyers, literature, some of it even collectable. As one of the last widespread pre-Internet phenomena, nostalgic ravers and inquisitive researchers can read reminiscences, browse galleries of retro-flyers and glimpse ecstatic states in their vivid other-worldly imagery, without popping a pill and setting out for warehouse or field.

Australian SF Fan Fiction and Conventions

The other day I was thinking about the SF encounters I had while visiting Australia last year, including a trip to the exhibition ‘'Synthesizers: Sound of the Future’, which I wrote about back in October.

The reason I went to Aus was to research digital heritage collections, but this project turned up some intriguing SF connections of its own. HuNI, a digital research and discovery platform developed in partnership with Deakin University, was one of several interesting efforts I learned of to foster new approaches to researching cultural collections.

It works by drawing together records from across different research, museum and archive collections and lets people make their own connections between them, based on their field of interest. If you go on the ‘Collections’ part of the site you can see a list of public collections created by researchers. This consists of a range of topics, from railways, to skateboarding, to Australian literary journals. While browsing through, two collections in particular caught my eye; one called ‘Australian Speculative Fiction Fan Groups and Conventions’, the other ‘Australian Speculative Fiction Small Presses and Publishing Houses’, created by Gene Melzack.

Here was an insight into a whole world of SF fandom and writing previously unknown to me; prolific fan editors such as Susan Smith-Clarke, or small fanzine clubs like the Futurian Society of Sydney, contemporary with the Leeds-based fanzines Futurian and New Futurian, which were featured on the blog previously. Or Australian SF publishers including Chimaera, Orb and Ticonderoga Publications that have been going since the 1990s, alongside more recent efforts like Twelfth Planet Press, established in 2006. What’s more, HuNI allows the connections between groups, fan conventions and publishing houses to be mapped visually (see image). In this way, I was able to learn that the fanzine editor Bruce Gillespie helped to found the small press Norstrilia (1975-1985), which published Greg Egan’s first novel.

To learn more about HuNI, you can read this Medium article by Deb Verhoeven and Toby Burrows.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: The Ambient 90s

Electronic music, developed from the synthesiser experiments of the earlier twentieth century and refined by German band Kraftwerk in the 1970s, was at the peak of its popularity on the cusp of the 1990s, both in the pop mainstream and underground variants. Combined with the prevalence of mind-altering chemicals, different strands of 90s electronic music drew heavily on science fiction themes. In the UK, the ‘ambient’ instrumental soundscapes of Brian Eno and others were modified for club-goers ‘coming down’ from chemical highs as the basis of ‘ambient house’. The Orb, a partnership of Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty, a member of the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu (or JAMs), were influential in refining the genre. Cauty eventually re-worked their collaboration Space into a solo recording, released in 1990; with nods to 1970s ambient pioneers Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd, it was envisaged as “a voyage through the solar system from Mercury outwards”, with each piece named after a planet.

Space, 1990

The Orb evolved into Paterson and a shifting cast of associates; their 1991 debut album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld set the template for sci-fi-influenced themes and imagery. The album’s centrepiece, the side-long ‘A huge ever-growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the Ultraworld’ was directly inspired by an episode of Blake’s Seven, ‘Ultraworld’, written by Trevor Hoyle. Their live performances were accompanied by “a constant stream of psychedelic images… projected onto the screens about the stage” (another echo of Pink Floyd), typically featuring aliens, astronauts and futuristic cityscapes. Their next album, U.F. Orb, continued the sci-fi links with samples from NASA transmissions, science fiction references and ambient explorations of space travel, notably on the 40-minute 1992 single, ‘Blue Room’. The track is believed to reference a secret location at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, containing UFO evidence. An edited version was aired on Top of the Pops. 

The Orb’s affinity with the progressive rock of an earlier era was illustrated by their connection to guitarist Steve Hillage, member of 1970s cosmic rockers Khan and Gong. He played on several sessions, was credited as a co-writer on ‘Blue Room’ and his 1979 solo proto-ambient album Rainbow Dome Musick was sometimes aired before Orb performances. Hillage, who was originally part of the influential Canterbury Scene and later worked with Hawkwind’s Nik Turner, pursued his own early 90s ambient/dance project as System 7 with partner Miquette Giraudy. Hillage’s burgeoning interest in electronica led to him programming the acts for the first Dance Tent at the Glastonbury Festival of 1995, at which System 7 themselves performed.

Paterson’s contemporaries, Cauty and Bill Drummond, had first recorded as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, a name taken from a secret society in the counter-cultural 1975 Illuminatus! Trilogy of novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. The duo’s first commercial success was as the Timelords, whose single ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, incorporating the Dr Who theme tune, was a ‘novelty’ number one in the UK in 1988. They released an ambient house album in 1990, Chill Out, a term derived from an area called ‘The White Room’ (the title of their next album) at London’s Heaven nightclub, where Cauty and Paterson were DJs in the late 1980s. Later applied to various forms of “music of a trance-like nature”, chill-out was defined by slowed-down dance beats. Cauty and Drummond rose to international fame with a series of classic chart-topping singles as the KLF, whilst earning notoriety for their post-modern pranks. Upon their retirement from music in 1992, they deleted their back catalogue and pursued situationist ‘actions’, art projects and media campaigns as the K Foundation. When they returned on 23 August 2017, it was with a novel, 2023: A Trilogy, a “self-referential dystopian tale” credited to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, drawing both on the Illuminatus! Trilogy and their own self-created ‘mythology’. 

Many of the original creative forces behind ambient house moved beyond its confines; Cornish electronic artist Richard James went by the name Aphex Twin, and explored the hinterlands of acid house, ambient, jungle and techno music in a bewildering series of releases with an other-worldly flavour. He enjoyed chart success in the late 90s, before promptly reverting back to more experimental forms. Another band rising from obscurity to mainstream success in the 90s were the Shamen, initially a psychedelic guitar band who embraced new technology and sampling. An interest in mind-expansion and dance culture saw them emerge as pioneers of multi-media performance whose ‘Synergy’ concept was intended to dissolve “the boundaries between rock gigs and warehouse parties”. Their 1990 LP En-Tact was described by one breathless reviewer as “the KLF remixed by William Gibson in a massive multi-coloured warehouse inside your head”.

 

After the untimely death of key member Will Sin, the Shamen subsequently enjoyed their biggest hit with ‘Ebenezer Goode’ in 1992, a straightforward celebration of drug/rave culture which also erased much of their underground credibility. A spoken-word collaboration with the celebrated author, ethno-botanist and psychedelic enthusiast Terence McKenna (“the intellectual voice of rave culture”) on ‘Re-Evolution’ was more in the spirit of their early work. With another contribution by Steve Hillage on the same album, the past was acknowledged as they simultaneously embraced the future. With a long-standing interest in cyberspace, the Shamen were among the first bands to explore Internet releases on their interactive site Nemeton, launched in 1995. The group’s mainstay, founder member Colin Angus, commented that “We’ve always seen ourselves as an ‘information band’, so it was a natural step to connect to the internet.” 

'An A-Z of Ambient', The Wire, Issue 113, July 1993

Hillage and McKenna’s involvement, like that of Timothy Leary with the contemporary Cyberpunk trend, reinforced the connections between the cultural explorations of the late 60s/early 70s and the dawn of the 90s, not least a shared interest in altered states of consciousness. It also linked to ‘new age’ overtones, a label with which ambient house was becoming associated, together with ‘chill out’, or ‘trance’, as the terms became interchangeable – certainly for the record labels who capitalised on its popularity with vast numbers of compilations over the following years. Once the impetus of its innovators was removed, the music was as bland and formulaic as the artwork; uninspiring and depressingly earth-bound.

The Transcultural Fantastic at Leeds

The Transcultural Fantastic seminar series – hosted at the University of Leeds in 2018-19 – aims to opens up the rich traditions of the Fantastic from a transcultural and interdisciplinary perspective, investigating utopian and dystopian thought in art, fiction and film, as well as science fiction, folktales and fantasy literature.

The series seeks to conceptualise and problematise the Transcultural Fantastic and discuss the following questions:

• What are the local and global contexts for the Transcultural Fantastic? 
• What is the critical and political potential of the Transcultural Fantastic? 
• What drives multi-media and artistic expressions of the Transcultural Fantastic? 
• What is the role of translation and publishing in the creation and consumption of the Transcultural Fantastic? 

This inquiry into the transcultural is grounded in the local, highlighting the regional and the provincial as part of the wider transcultural imagination. Leeds and the University’s Special Collections strengths in the Fantastic are important in this space, as is the city’s own history of the Fantastic, being JRR Tolkien’s inspiration for Middle Earth and the site of the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1937. The series also explores the importance of ‘the North’ in recent publishing ventures such as the Northern Fiction Alliance, which has a strong focus on translation and the intercultural, as well as being firmly rooted in the local.

Questions around place and origin feed into the broader international dimensions of the Fantastic, informed by the research specialisms of the organisers. The Transcultural Fantastic depends on, and benefits from, a global and multilingual exchange of ideas, cultures, traditions and media. Events in the series are listed below.

Semester 1 – Local Contexts for the Transcultural Fantastic 

‘Fantastic Leeds’ – seminar exploring the history of the Fantastic in Leeds, coupled with an exploration of selected items from Special Collections.

‘The Old Gods Return’ - Professor Tom Shippey discusses Norse Mythology in contemporary novels.

‘Realms both Real and Unreal’ – Simon Armitage reads from and discusses his revised translation of the medieval epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Semester 2 – Global Contexts for the Transcultural Fantastic 

‘Beyond Tomorrow. German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Century’ – Ingo Cornils examines humanity and technological progress in German film and literature.

‘Works in Progress‘ – research presentations from the series organisers and other colleagues working on the Transcultural Fantastic.

‘Publishing and Translating the Transcultural Fantastic’ – workshop to explore publishing opportunities and potential anthologies.

‘From Cyberpunk to Biopunk: On Posthuman Technologies’ – Lars Schmeink traces the shift from cybernetic and prosthetic transhumanist fantasies of 1980s cyberpunk to critical posthumanist interventions in contemporary SF, or biopunk dystopias.

The series organisers are Ingo Cornils (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies), Sarah Dodd (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) and Liz Stainforth (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies).

The series is funded as part of the Sadler seminar series at Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute.