Futures in Committee, the School of Emergent Priorities' seminar series, turns this teaching period to the Horizon Register's own admissions and retirements, with Dr Fenna Okoro presenting.
Dr Fenna Okoro joins the School of Emergent Priorities' seminar series to trace how a horizon-register item is admitted, and how it is finally struck off
Futures in Committee, the School of Emergent Priorities’ standing seminar series, opens its next session on a register most of the University assumes runs itself. Dr Fenna Okoro, who convenes the Horizon Register, will walk the series through what actually happens before an item earns a number, and what has to happen before one is finally allowed to lose it.
An item doesn’t arrive on the register because someone decided it mattered. It arrives because someone drafted it in a form the register would accept, and that’s a completely different achievement.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Horizon Register
The session extends Dr Okoro’s own work tracing an entry’s edit history, this time turned toward the committee moment itself: the wording that gets an item over the admission bar, and the quieter wording that eventually gets it struck off without anyone calling it a retirement. Dr Ingrid Vasseur, who convenes Futures in Committee, said the series exists to make exactly that moment visible. “Most of what a committee does to a horizon item happens in the gap between drafts,” she said, “and that gap is where the series has always wanted to spend its time.”
Futures in Committee runs through the teaching period; the session’s time and venue are to follow.