Week 15 [Southampton Studies, Portsmouth Plastic, EPS & AAA]

This week was a good week. One of the tasks I set myself on my PhD journey was to be able to actually attend conferences, not just turn up and talk. As such the study day at the University of Southampton was a delightful exercise in academic indulgence. How often do you get to lie down and listen to an improvised performance featuring bricks?

The week indeed started with research indulgence but continued with a much less abstract kind. Having a meeting with academics and civic leaders in Portsmouth to discuss Plastics in Live Music wasn’t really anything to do with plastics. The meeting was about the recent advertising ban in the city, and more about systems, supply chains, procurement habits and the innumerable invisible defaults that shape how events are built and delivered. Lots of good work going on across the south coast!

Illustration of the Southampton Study Day by Dr Ellan A Lincoln-Hyde (used with permission)

I had another enjoyable conversation with James from Future Yard, who is exactly the kind of person and venue we need in every town and city across the UK imho. It was to cover Liverpool 2056 - a conversation that sounds speculative, but is really about anchoring long-term thinking in present-day decisions – something Future Yard have marked themselves out as being very good at. I find that futures work has a tendency to drift into imagination, with the challenge keeping it accountable to infrastructure, policy, and the lived realities of venues and audiences now – some tricky plates to try and spin at the same time. As was progressing conversations about the mapping work with Attitude is Everything – looking to explore patterns of access, absence and opportunity in the city. I used to think mapping was just descriptive, but realised it’s much more political – when you can use maps to evidence fundamental changes in industry and policy, you realise it decides what counts.

By Friday I found myself in another meeting with lovely James – this time to learn about the Future Yard carbon literacy training course. The practical business of translating complexity into something people can act on is not easy, so having an advocate leading this work in carbon literacy in the city is like a golden gift that keeps giving. We'll be meeting again in a few weeks to take a look at the course content.

I had a semi-revelation towards the end of the week that there was a common thread in these meetings which explored a shared tension: between knowing and doing; between identifying the problem and intervening in it. None of these sessions resolve that tension within themselves (I don't think they're supposed to) but they move it incrementally, and in my experience consolidating the incremental is a good way to build foundations for the EPIC.