Presenting my current work in progress alongside Jane Madson Joy Sleeman and Matthew Beaumont, Florian Mussgnug and others at UCL FIGS (Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies) Friday forum on COLLAPSE investigating the reasons for our fascination with collapse, decline, ruins, the fall of civilizations.
The presentations throughout the day consider the representation of these topics in modern and contemporary narratives and cultural artifacts, and discuss how collapse is defined and measured in different disciplines. How do ideas of collapse travel from art, literature and popular culture to civil engineering, architectural design, urban planning? Do they have an influence on scientific research? do current responses to fragmentation and decline reflect earlier cultural forms (e.g. elegy, religious eschatology)? How are psychoanalytic models relevant to our understanding of collapsing habitats?….. and more …should be an interesting day.
Friday May 11th 2012.
