Derek Gatherer is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Health & Medicine at Lancaster University, UK. Previously at the UK Medical Research Council Virology Unit, in 2013, Derek left the government’s employ for academia, where first Ebola, and now Zika, have rudely swept away his original plans to study influenza.
Derek is interested in how the future of humanity is shaped by biological events that are both beyond our control, such as emerging pandemic diseases, or which arise from our own activity, such as our capacity to predict future health using genetic testing, or modify the biota using genetic manipulation. He hopes to bring a biologist’s sense of the fragility of human existence, both personal and societal, to discussions of where we are headed. On a slightly less panoramic level, he is also interested in how current issues will affect the shape of health care provision in the medium term.
Lizzie Harrison is currently working as a Research Assistant on Fashion Ecologies which explores the relationship between people, garments and place at University of Arts London, UK. Lizzie also runs a Sustainable Fashion Design and Manufacturing Lab ‘Antiform’ in Bristol which engages with the public to develop sustainable fashion narratives. Lizzie regularly teaches in the field of sustainable fashion at SustainRCA, Royal College of Art and MA Fashion Futures, London College of Fashion.
In her research and practice Lizzie has engaged with the everyday in clothing as seen through the lens of sustainability futures. She works within fashion design, service design and community development engaging with the practices of using clothes. Such everyday actions while commonplace are largely overlooked within conventional views of fashion. Approaches to understand the everyday practices of clothing have included trialing local repair and reuse services, creating experiential events, testing design interventions, running skills and resource sharing workshops, mapping local clothing journeys and auditing clothing within the home. She is currently co-editing a book of methods within the wardrobe and joining the workshop in Lancaster would be a unique opportunity to share methodologies that explore the everyday in order to address sustainability futures.
Margit Keller is a senior researcher of communication and sociology of consumption at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Tartu, Estonia. She has a PhD in Media and Communications. She is also the coordinator of the Research Network of Sociology of Consumption at the European Sociological Association.
Her research relates to interventions into everyday practices by institutional programmes seeking to fast-track movement towards more sustainable, healthy etc. futures. The main inspiration comes from social practice theory with an interest in internal organisation of everyday practices and in what sorts of relationships can emerge between (institutional) change agents and coordinating agents of everyday practices. In the network she also hopes to work more with issues related to communication and social practices, e.g. how interveners and consumers position themselves as practitioners in relation to “intervening” (social) media content and what is the potential of such change oriented communication to accelerate transformation into envisaged futures.