Director's Seminar with Dr Elke Schwarz

Accessibility

An access guide to Darwin Building, Lecture Theatre B40 can be found on AccessAble.

About the speaker

Dr Elke Schwarz is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen Mary University London. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics of war and technology with an emphasis on unmanned and autonomous / intelligent military technologies and their impact on the politics of contemporary warfare. Over the last decade, she has been involved in a number of policy initiatives on drones, autonomous weapons systems and military Artificial Intelligence. She is the author of ‘Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies’, member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and 2022/23 CAPAS Fellow at the University of Heidelberg.

About this event series

Political turning points, 2024-2025: Causes, consequences, solutions

2024 and 2025 are crucial years for global politics, with a number of highly anticipated elections (in India, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere). These elections are coming at a time ofcoinciding with major armed conflicts (especially in Ukraine and Gaza), as well as rising levels of income inequality (globally and nationally), deflated living standards that still have not recovered to pre-Covid levels, crumbling healthcare systems, and fierce culture wars that are tearing up the fabric of our societies.

The sense of uncertainty and volatility is overwhelming and there is no way to predict what world we will live in two years from now. How can we understand thisthe causes and consequences of this overwhelming uncertainty and volatility? and what are the different components that define its causes and consequences? What is being done to mitigate for its effects and address the different challenges that emerge in it?

This series of Director’s Seminars and Soundbites will approach the question of uncertainty by exploring the complex range of practices and processes that define it today as a condition that is closely interlinked with economic, cultural, and environmental challenges.

Director's Seminars are an opportunity for audiences to get an in-depth theoretical perspective on sustainable and inclusive prosperity. These Seminars are given by academics who are pushing for new ways of thinking and new ways of researching society's grand challenges.

For more events in this series visit the series page ►