Individuals who face the chaos of challenge and spend their life in search for the hidden knowledge, so they can reveal it for our society. TEDx is the best venue to celebrate such passion.
University of Greenwich has a culture of diverse multidisciplinary research which has created meaningful impact and helped us discover novel ideas.
Such events will allow our new generation to see that how a single university can create impact towards many areas of our life. The production of this event is based upon combining cinema and diverse research.
Our TEDx speakers
David Luke
Researcher & Senior Lecturer
Title: Psychedelic Parapsychology and the Science of Shamanism.
David has been researching into Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology for decades. Been published more than 100 academic papers he is one the leading researchers in this field. In this talk he asks us the question to explore the terrain on what the path forward would look like if we try to scientifically study the claims of shamans that are the people who go into an altered state of consciousness at will, in the name of their community, to communicate with the spirits of nature and to transcend time and space and bring back useful information for their community. Such study potentially has important implications not just for understanding the nature of consciousness, but perhaps the nature of time, and maybe the nature of reality itself. David's talk is about Psychedelic parapsychology and the science of shamanism.
This question has become ever more relevant at a time of profound changes in the political landscape. The rise of populism in the west, characterised by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, is forcing us to confront the consequences of data manipulation and information echo chambers. It is in this increasingly divisive context that I invite us to consider whether we need to shift our understanding of what constitutes good knowledge, to foster more inclusive practices of making and sharing knowledge for the sake of our political futures.
Giulia have always had a keen interest in studying how policy is made and in whose interests. Her PhD thesis was a comparative discussion of understandings and uses of evidence in drug and prostitution policy. While at Greenwich, she has developed a passion for delivering higher education in prison, and she is a trained facilitator of the Inside Out Prison Exchange Programme.
Fake news, misleading political slogans, the use of information as a weapon. These are not new features today but they're the ones that have started to become the most noticeable characteristic of the use of communications media in the 21st century. How can we understand our place in the world that is dominated by misleading information.World history is largely based on these mistakes becoming no more than a theatre of illusions. Take Columbus who discovered America in a mistake in search for India. So what is this power that leads us on this path of mistakes and eventually becomes the main engine of history.
Maria is a multidisciplinary researcher who writes and curates on cultural theory, film and new media, including her specialisation on history and theory of Russian and Soviet cinema.
What if there was no theatre, would it make any difference, would it really matter no one would actually die. It's not as if we are talking about abolishing hospitals or public libraries. In 1996 taliban seized power in Afghanistan and for five years outlawed theatre and any kind of mimicking performance. In 2014 President Putin of Russia outlawed the use of profanity and swearing on the Russian stage, he was very concerned that it was an external influence and somehow a threat to the elevation of Russian high culture. So to ask about the end of theatre is not a hypothetical question, it is actually happening right now and it is a constant threat.
Mark's research interest lays at the interface between translation, adaptation and dramaturgy. His work in this area has crossed many disciplines including musicology, film, literary and translation studies but his main focus remains on performance writing.
Up until recently, daydreaming has been regarded as idle reverie. However new scientific research suggests that daydreaming is an essential process in how our brains process information and generates creativity. This will explore the benefits of daydreaming to creative thinking in many fields including the mathematical sciences and provide many examples of how daydreamers have changed, and will hopefully continue, to change the course of human history.
Neil is a pure mathematician whose research is in Representation Theory - a field of abstract algebra dealing with symmetry. He uses higher dimensional objects and their related geometry to explore the manifold ways symmetry arises in mathematics and more broadly in the natural sciences.
We live in a multi-sensory world, our senses are constantly being stimulated by an integrated assault of sounds and images. Sensory impressions of different kinds which our brain can fill in gaps when sensory information is not present. The rise of radio and tv and the escalation of the mechanical reproduction of media in the 20th century has changed how media is consumed. Music partly became a commodity often dissociated from performance which is highly visual, this has led to a multi-sensory gap.
How will our digital future look like, if this multi-sensory gap continues. How will we evolve and will we become sensorily desensitised.
Nuno is interested in multi-sensory user experience. Since 2000, he has been teaching and conducting research in media art and design, in various universities. Nuno's work has been presented in more than 20 countries.
Love does not end when someone dies. Love evolves and takes on new forms. It lives on through technology, through the earth cradling our bodies and the memories which we keep in our hearts and on our devices. How we die is a profoundly personal journey. Technology plays a key role in holding onto the precious experiences we collect throughout our short lives.
As the daughter of a palliative care nurse, death has been an ever present character in Stacey's life from an early age. As she entered her design education in 2006 exploring what at the time was the new frontier of Second Life she encountered virtual cemeteries for the first time. This has led her on a 10 year journey to explore how creativity is changing the meaning of death in these online spaces and how designing death for the 21st century can help us examine what it means to be human.
