Futures in Committee, the School of Emergent Priorities' seminar series, turns this teaching period to how a priority's wording outlives the initiative it once described, with Dr Anouk Mensah presenting.
Dr Anouk Mensah joins the School of Emergent Priorities' seminar series to trace which strategic phrasing survives a planning cycle even after the initiative behind it has quietly changed shape
Futures in Committee, the School of Emergent Priorities’ standing seminar series, opens its next session on a habit committees rarely notice they have: carrying a phrase forward from one planning cycle to the next long after the work it named has been re-scoped, merged, or quietly replaced. Dr Anouk Mensah, whose research compares successive strategic and operational plans line by line, presents the session.
A phrase earns its place on page one of next year’s plan the same way it earned it this year — nobody can quite remember voting it in, and nobody wants to be the one who votes it out.
— Dr Anouk Mensah, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Mensah’s work catalogues which formulations survive a redraft unexamined and which are quietly revised into meaninglessness along the way; the session extends that catalogue to the committee moment itself, asking what a drafting group actually does when it reaches a paragraph everyone recognises from last year’s document. The School regards the series as one of the more candid places its own habits of language get an audience.
Futures in Committee runs through the current teaching period; session timing and venue are to follow.