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POST-TRUTH SOCIETY: Panel discussion and Q&A

19 May 2021, 1:00 pm–2:30 pm

Banner shows text of 30,573 false or misleading claims from President Trump, with the words 'Post-Truth Society' superimposed. Design by Patrick White.

What is the role of the University - its academics, students, and their products - in the creation, manipulation, and propagation of figments? This roundtable discussion and audience Q&A session asks UCL academics from the fields of science, philosophy, and art to share their personal takes on these issues with students and staff from across UCL.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Daren Caruana
chaired by:
Daren Caruana and Patrick White
 
Academics and researchers both construct knowledge and subject the processes of its construction to scrutiny. As educationalists, a responsibility exists to promote evidence-based practice and understanding, but equally to encourage critical awareness of what becomes anointed as truth and how, and indeed the nature and existence of truth itself in different contexts. With the recent tide of misinformation affecting all our lives, new conceptions regarding the invention of fact have entered mainstream and decentralised media alike, with a profound effect on society. In a political atmosphere of populism, and a proliferation and reinvention of far-right ideologies, what is the role of the University - its academics, students, and their products - in the creation, manipulation, and propagation of figments? This roundtable discussion and audience Q&A session asks UCL academics from the fields of science, philosophy, and art to share their personal takes on these issues with students and staff from across UCL.
 
Chiara Ambrosio is an Associate Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL. Her research interests include the relationship between science and art in the nineteenth and twentieth century, American Pragmatism, and general issues in philosophy of science, with a particular focus on epistemological debates about scientific representations. Her most recent publications explore the use of diagrams in scientific practice, the relationships between modernism and science, and the history and epistemology of photography across science and art.

David Burrows is a Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, teaching on the undergraduate programmes and within the school’s media area. Burrows is a member of the artist’s collective that produces the collaboration Plastique Fantastique and co-author, with Simon O’Sullivan, of Fictioning: The Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy (2019). The collaboration and book explore the ways in which fiction and the imaginary engenders critical and transformative practices. Other research interests include diagrams and diagramming, explored as a common practice bridging arts, sciences and social sciences, and as productive of diagrammatic imaginaries and diverse cosmotechnics; an interest that is explored as a member of two groups, the Diagram Research Group and the UCL-based Social Morphologies Research Unit.

Alan Sokal is a physicist and mathematician who has written and lectured widely about the philosophy and social aspects of science. He is co-author (with Jean Bricmont) of Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1998), and author of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture (2008). He is Professor of Mathematics at UCL and Professor Emeritus of Physics at New York University.  Some of his writings are availablehere.

Daren Caruana is Professor of Physical Chemistry at UCL and current Scientist-in-Residence at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Patrick White is an artist and Lecturer (Teaching) in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Thank you to the director of the Slade Scientist-in-Residence programme Jo Volley for the opportunity to organise this event.