Dr Marek Solheim has been named the Horizon Register's first deputy convenor, with a standing brief to retire entries the School of Emergent Priorities has carried forward since the register opened.
Dr Marek Solheim, who studies how institutions stop doing things, takes a second seat on a register whose entries have only ever been added
The Horizon Register has only ever grown in one direction. The School of Emergent Priorities has now added a seat facing the other way: Dr Marek Solheim becomes the register’s first deputy convenor, with a standing brief for closures.
An item reaches the register by being anticipated and stays by being carried forward. Each cycle revises its wording, adjusts its likelihood, and moves it on. Nothing has been formally retired, including entries whose conditions resolved themselves some time ago — among them a parking-pressure item logged against a site the University has since given up, and a supply risk written for a season that has now passed twice.
Everything on the register arrived because somebody thought it was coming. Nothing has left, because nobody’s job was to notice that it had.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer and Deputy Convenor, Horizon Register
Dr Solheim’s research assembles a comparative record of discontinuation: who authorises an ending, how it is recorded, and what an archive keeps of the ambitions an organisation has set down. The deputy convenorship puts that question inside an instrument rather than beside it.
“The register has always been very good at looking forward,” said Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register. “Marek’s brief is to read the same page and ask which of it is still about the future.”
The University regards the seat as a modest correction to an instrument that has only ever been asked to add. A first pass over the register’s oldest entries is expected within the current teaching period, with proposed closures returning to the School through the ordinary review cycle.