Slop University's School of Emergent Priorities has appointed Senior Research Fellow Anneke Tolan Deputy Convenor of Futures in Committee, the seminar series that follows how a scanning exercise's open questions narrow into an agenda item, a recommendation, and a minute.
The School of Emergent Priorities pairs its ethnographer of planning with the seminar series that tracks how foresight talk becomes committee business
The School of Emergent Priorities has named Senior Research Fellow Anneke Tolan Deputy Convenor of Futures in Committee, the seminar series that follows how a scanning exercise’s open questions narrow into an agenda item, a recommendation, and a minute.
Dr Tolan’s own fieldwork follows planning into the room where it actually happens — the workshops, the templates, the quiet negotiations over wording that decide what a strategy document ends up saying. The appointment pairs that fieldwork with a series built on the same premise: that foresight is a practice long before it is a policy.
The version of a horizon that survives to a minute is never quite the one a workshop first sketched, and that gap is the whole of what I study.
— Senior Research Fellow Anneke Tolan, Deputy Convenor, Futures in Committee
Dr Ingrid Vasseur, who convenes the series, welcomed the appointment: “a second reader who studies the room as closely as the outcome is exactly what a series like this has been missing.”
The School frames the appointment as part of its ongoing work joining the University’s anticipatory-capability agenda to the everyday practice that carries it out — the drafting, the redrafting, and the meetings in between.