Featured Speakers

Andrew Barry is Professor of Human Geography at University College London and co-convenor of the UCL Anthropocene initiative. He was originally trained in the natural sciences and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and science and technology studies at the University of Sussex, and subsequently held positions at Brunel University, Goldsmiths College and Oxford University, where he was Professor of Political Geography. He is the author of 'Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society' and 'Material Politics: DIsputes along the Pipeline', and co-editor (with Georgina Born) of 'Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences'. He is currently writing a book on Chemical Geography.

Georgina Born is Professor of Anthropology and Music, University College London. Previously she held Professorships at Oxford (2010-21) and Cambridge Universities (2006-10). Her work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, sound, digital/media and interdisciplinarity. She recently published Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology, and is now editing Music and Genre: New Directions with David Brackett. She directed the ERC program ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation’ (2010-15) and in 2021 was awarded another ERC grant for ‘Music and AI: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies’. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and Aarhus, Oslo, McGill and Princeton Universities.

Nicholas Evans is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University (ANU). His fieldwork on languages of Australia and Papua New Guinea, focusses on how they can help us answer a wide range of questions about human history, culture, mind and society. Besides book-length grammars and dictionaries of several Australian and Papuan languages, and over 200 scientific papers, his interest in synthesizing the disciplines of the deep past goes back to his book Archaeology and Linguistics: Global Perspectives on Ancient Australia (1997), coedited with Patrick McConvell. His crossover book Words of Wonder: What Endangered Languages Can Tell Us (2nd edition 2022), has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, German and Chinese. Since 2014 he has been director of COEDL, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and since 2020, of the Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative at the ANU.

Olga Pombo got her PhD at the University of Lisbon and in 2009 the Aggregation title in History and Philosophy of Science. She was professor of philosophy of science at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. She was founder and coordinator of the Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon and of the International FCT Doctoral Program on Philosophy of Science, Technology, Art and Society (until 2016). She coordinated several national and international research projects, was a founding member of the Société de Philosophie des Sciences (Paris) and member of the scientific committee of the Réseau National des Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris). She authored circa 150 titles in Portugal and abroad. She was selected as one of the 100 women to be part of the book Women in Science edited by Ciência Viva, 2016. Her interests are Modern Philosophy, specially Leibniz, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Image and Science and Art whose teaching she has initiated in Portugal. She founded and directed Kairos - Journal of Philosophy and Science and is currently president of the General Assembly Board of the “Portuguese Society of Logics” (SPL).