Island thinking 2 – ‘Pacific imaginations’ Discussion panel
Following the successful ‘Island Thinking 1’ panel last semester, as part of the second visit by Senior Global Fellow Prof Michael Cronin (Trinity College Dublin), we will be holding another discussion with Michael who will be joined by Professor Uma Kothari, from Manchester University and Prof Emma Sutton and Dr Tony Crook from St Andrews.
Date: Friday May 30
Time: 11am – 12:50pm
Place: Forbes Room, Irvine Building
Uma is a leading postcolonial development thinker in geography, and a current Leverhulme Major Research Fellow https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/uma.kothari she will reflect on her climate change work in the Maldives with a presentation entitled: Becoming an island: Imaginary geographies.
Anthropologist Tony Crook is Director of the Pacific Studies Centre at St Andrews and with wide-ranging interests in field based work in Papua New Guinea https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/social-anthropology/people/tc23/
Emma Sutton from English will be starting a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for her work on music’s role in colonisation and indigenous resistance to it across the Pacific https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/leverhulme-fellowship-for-professor-emma-sutton/
Michael’s Senior Global Fellowship is sponsored at St Andrews by the School of Modern Languages and the School of Geography and Sustainable Development, in particular the Cultural Identity and Memory Studies Institute (CIMS) in the SoML and St Andrews Centre for Critical Sustainabilities (StACCS) in the SGSD. This event also links to the St Andrews Environmental Humanities network and the Centre for Pacific Studies
CIMS Seminar, “Synthetic Memory: AI and the end of the human past” given by Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Edinburgh (personal chair in AI, Memory and War)
Date: Thursday 1 May 2025
Time: 5pm
Location: Arts Lecture Theatre
This talk explored how Generative AI is ushering in a new paradigm of synthetic memory through three key interrelated forces, namely: (1) the human making of memory pushed out-of-the-loop (agentic turn); (2) the end of anonymity (the past is watching you); and (3) the end of forgetting (multi-generational haunting).
Professor Andrew Hoskins holds a personal chair in AI, Memory and War, at the University of Edinburgh. He founded and edits the journals of Memory, Mind & Media, Memory Studies, and Digital War. He is the author/editor of 11 books, including: Sharded Media: Trump’s Rage Against the Mainstream (Palgrave 2025, with William Merrin); Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst/OUP 2022, with Matthew Ford) and The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media (OUP 2024, co-edited with Qi Wang). He holds an ERC/UKRI Advanced Grant ‘The New War Front: Digital Participation in War’ (2025-2030).