Colin Pooley is an Emeritus Professor of Social and Historical Geography in the Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. He has published widely on aspects of migration, mobility, transport, housing and ethnicity in Britain and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
His current research is using life writing produced in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain to examine everyday mobility in both urban and rural areas. Previously he has collected oral histories of the everyday travel of children and adults in twentieth century Britain. In his research he tries to link historical analysis to present day policies and he has recently co-edited a book that links transport history to current transport policy. He believes that policies designed to shape the future of society can benefit from being informed by past experience, and that examination of past mobilities has relevance for current and future transport policy and planning.
Nicola Spurling is a Lecturer in the Institute for Social Futures and the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. She previously worked in the DEMAND Centre, Lancaster University and the Sustainable Practices Research Group, Manchester University.
Her interest in everyday futures stems from previous work on changes in working and everyday lives and mobility in the twentieth century. She has undertaken oral histories, archive work and policy analysis to explore the relations between institutions, infrastructures, policy and social change. Her recent work explores how parking space was made and how it might be unmade. In current projects she is bringing together futures methods with studies of social practice. This includes an interest in ‘utopia as method’ (Levitas), in the anticipations of future daily life in transport/ urban planning, and in disruptions as opportunities to prepare for and imagine futures.
As of July the first 2014, Tjerk Timan works as a Postdoc researcher on surveillance and privacy in the VICI project of prof. Bert-Jaap Koops, Tillburg University. He defended his PhD thesis at the University of Twente in 2013, in the field of Science-and Technology Studies.
Everyday futures play a role in his research in the form of CTA – and value-sensitive design methods, in which different stakeholders together develop possible value-driven paths for a technology to develop into. In his works, he is drawing on experience in co-design and CTA methods. From the workshop, he hopes to gain insights into what everyday futures consist of and which methods other scholars apply to grasp them. He wants to learn about how to draw from everyday experiences and how to trigger new ones, especially in relation to privacy and surveillance questions in novel ICTs.