London Interdisciplinary School ©2019
Social media is a huge topic. There are infinite articles, videos, and other discussion on the subject – and it can be difficult to know where to start. We’ve rounded up some great introductory reading to help you get acquainted with such a broad and fast moving conversation.
A few months ago, I was reading Avner De-Shalit’s Why Posterity Matters: Environmental Policies and Future Generations.As the title suggests, it’s about intergenerational justice – the moral obligations we have, as people living today, to future generations. The specific question he tackles is: do we have a moral obligation to preserve the environment for future people?
Through June and July this year, I participated in the online learning experience ‘Explore ID: COVID-19, Complex Problems, and Interdisciplinarity’. This course delivered by LIS brought together 53 students from around the world, applying an interdisciplinary approach to learn about and respond to some of the challenges the world faces due to the pandemic.
Traditional education at all levels is being threatened by COVID-19. Both in the short- and long-term, it will need to be reinvented . This is a crucial complex problem for society, one that will require an interdisciplinary approach to understand and address.
One of my favourite pieces of quasi-lockdown viewing was the BBC’s Mrs America, a nine-part series co-produced with HBO and charting the fate of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. The Equal Rights Amendment – known as the ERA – was an attempt to change the U.S. constitution to explicitly render illegal discrimination on the basis of sex. In other words, to give women equal rights in laws including those on divorce, working hours, and the military.
From Black Lives Matter to the Hong Kong Protests, 2020 will go down in history as a banner year for social movements. But the practice of activism, described as “the use of direct and noticeable action to achieve results of a political or social nature”, has been a fundamental component of the history of humanity.
We have a listed 3 interesting listens around activism and social movements. Including student rights, free speech and Gandhi.
More than ever we have become aware of our most simple spontaneous gestures and our physical relation to the world, what we touch and how we breathe. The visual ecosystem around us has changed in the real and in the virtual. We are now used to grids of talking heads on screens, faces covered with masks, images of respiratory devices in the news, images of the world “healing”, and depictions of the virus, amongst others. That change of visuality underlines the impact of the virus on our everyday lives.
For five weeks over June and July, we ran an intensive short course exploring the relationship between COVID-19 and interdisciplinarity. Participants were invited to write a blog post relating to the work they’d done during Explore ID, and, in what follows we present one such blog.
For five weeks over June and July, we ran an intensive short course exploring the relationship between COVID-19 and interdisciplinarity. Participants were invited to write a blog post relating to the work they’d done during Explore ID, and, in what follows we present one such blog.