Austin Williams is director of the Future Cities Project, and author of China’s Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-cities (Bloomsbury, 2017) and 20 Chinese Architects (Thames & Hudson, 2018). He is also the China correspondent for the Architectural Review, contributing editor for AR Pacific Region, and writes occasionally for L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Austin is senior lecturer at Dept of Architecture, Kingston University, and honorary research fellow at Xi’an-Jiaotong Liverpool University. He is also the […]
Speakers and Panellists
previous speakers
Valerie Bryson
Valerie Bryson is Professor Emerita of Politics (ie officially retired but still academically active) at the University of Huddersfield. She has published extensively on feminist theory and politics, and her work has been translated into Arabic, Russian, Japanese and Greek. Her books include Feminist Political Theory (latest, extensively revised, edition 2016), Gender and the Politics of Time (2007) and Feminist Debates (1999). She taught and researched at a number of UK universities before […]
Wendy Earle
Dr Wendy Earle writes on the arts and culture for spiked and is convenor of the Academy of Ideas Arts & Society Forum, which promotes open and open-ended discussion of the arts and culture and of the place of arts and culture in society. She works at Birkbeck, University of London, to promote knowledge exchange and public engagement with research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Previously she […]
Leanne Buchan
Leanne Buchan works for Leeds City Council‘s Culture & Sport team, alongside running her own freelance cultural consultancy. She led the development of the Leeds Culture Strategy and the associated Delivery Plan for the city pioneering a co-produced, open-sourced approach. She is also the Leeds 2023 team lead for Marketing, Communications & Artistic Projects. Leanne’s professional interests explore how culture can be used as a catalyst for […]
Christopher Bailey
Christopher Bailey is a Visiting Professor at York St John University and Professor Emeritus in Cultural History at Leeds Beckett University. Chris worked in art and design higher education for over thirty five years and has published research on cultural policy, design history and the impact of IT on pedagogy in the visual arts. He established the Centre for Cultural Policy & Management at Northumbria University and […]
Pauline Hadaway
Pauline Hadaway has worked in arts and education in the UK and Ireland since 1990 and is co-founder of The Liverpool Salon, a new forum for public debate on Merseyside. She is undertaking a professional doctorate at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Cultural Practices, researching different uses of cultural heritage as a tool for peace-building in Northern Ireland and Britain. She has been published widely […]
Penny Lewis
Penny Lewis is a lecturer in Architecture & Urban Planning and the Wuhan Joint Degree Programme Leader at the University of Dundee. She is also a founding member of the Foundation for Architecture & Education (AE Foundation), and she writes for newspapers and architectural publications. Her work includes; Challenging Contextualism (2004) and Curious Rationalism (2006). She is co-author of In Defence of the Dome (1999), and contributed a chapter to Future of the Community: […]
Michael Thomson
Michael Thomson is Professor of Law at the University of Leeds. He is a graduate of the Universities of Southampton (LLB) and Birmingham (PhD Law), and joined the School of Law in July 2013, having previously held a Chair in Law at Keele University. His interests span the fields of health law, children’s rights, and legal theory with a particular focus on legal embodiment. He is the […]
Georgia Testa
Georgia Testa is a lecturer in Medical Ethics in the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her main teaching responsibility is for the medical ethics provision in the School of Medicine, and on Biomedical Ethics for the Inter-disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre. Georgia’s current and past teaching for Philosophy includes Introduction to Ethics; Environmental Ethics; War, Terror and Justice; and The […]
Ann Furedi
Ann Furedi has been CEO of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas) since 2003; which is the UK’s leading abortion service. Before then she was director of policy and press for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the UK’s regulator of embryo research and assisted conception. Ann has written extensively in defence of women’s autonomy of reproductive choice, and is the author of The Moral Case for Abortion (Palgrave […]