The Cities Partnerships Programme Stockholm, comprising UCL and the Stockholm Trio of Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology & Stockholm University, invite you to express interest in a two-day workshop.
The workshop will be held in person, in London, from 09h30 on Tuesday 8 April. It will conclude after lunch the following day. It will consist of concurrent sessions focussing on two or more of the following topics, as well as information and presentation sessions for the whole group.
These topic titles are deliberately broad, as we wish to gather colleagues from across disciplines, eg. people from humanities in a problem that’s often considered to be the domain of physical sciences, scholars from brain sciences to an issue that tends to be expressed as a public policy issue, and so on.
The workshop itself will quickly find narrow areas of focus where the assembled researchers, teachers and practitioners can apply themselves; the collaborating universities can support them in developing their project after the workshop.
Space: a laboratory, a provocation. This topic could be fruitful for colleagues in engineering, technology, medical and behavioural sciences, as well as in social sciences including anthropology, and the arts and humanities. Colleagues might come together to focus on sustainability, ageing, anxiety, or another area in which the Stockholm Trio and UCL have strengths.
Planetary Health & Food Security. This topic might be of interest to colleagues in health sciences, social, natural and physical sciences: scholars might convene around any urgent area of focus, or something more systemic.
Young People & Mental Health. This topic could be tackled by population health people, colleagues across the health sciences, scholars interested in the built environment, technology or the stories we tell about the life course, among others. It might focus on intergenerational inequality, jobs and AI, education, and so on.
City Living in the Climate Crisis. As a group of urban universities, the Stockholm Trio and UCL evolve their consideration of black holes and medieval literature near mass transit hubs, complex waste management systems, cultural institutions, shifting diaspora and so on. We are all linked to the city in some way or other. This topic might engage with pandemic preparedness, communicative disease and healthcare access; it could consider the notion of trees providing shade and respite in a busy, hot urban space. Collaborators could develop work around overcrowding in homes and infrastructure, or the increasingly prominent scientific and policy discussions around digital health or the role of big data. They might work on tensions between a metropolis’ voracious consumption, and the land and people outside who feed it. And so on.
IN SUMMARY:
These are broad gathering points: Space; Planetary Health & Food Security; Young People & Mental Health; City Living in the Climate Crisis.
We seek colleagues from Arts, Humanities, Laws, Social sciences, Physical and Medical sciences, Education, Engineering, the Built Environment and other disciplines with an interest in locating and developing a vital topic where the application of multiple bodies of knowledge and approaches will be the most fruitful.
The Stockholm Trio and UCL are home to specialists of world renown: this initiative seeks to bring them together in new work for the benefit of humanity