Christine Wilson, Interim Director of Research and Policy Insight at the British Council and member of our Advisory Board, was recently interviewed for SAHA Conversations, a podcast series from the Scottish Arts and Humanities Alliance.
She talks about her career trajectory, her work on international cultural relations, decolonisation and ongoing research exploring young people’s ambitions and aspirations across the world.
A full transcript is available at https://rse.org.uk/expert-advice/scottish-arts-and-humanities-alliance/ under ALLIANCE ACTIVITY.
I’m constantly hearing about new things or constantly being challenged to understand how the field of humanities is keeping up with the challenges of the wider world: the field of digital humanities - I’m too old, I think, to be considered digital native - [but] some of the things that the fellows, the IASH scholars are doing in that field is quite extraordinary. I think some of the ways that the really transdisciplinary approaches you get within humanities, the real imagination of how problems should be addressed, how problems should be solved is always quite inspiring to me, to be honest. So I remember one of the events we used to have pre-pandemic a little bit more regularly at the IASH building where Board members would be invited in and we’d get short presentations from some of the scholars that were there at the time and just hearing people talking about... archaeological mapping technology, but it was being used to talk about climate change resilience. Things like that are just always quite staggering to me. And I think IASH itself is such a haven of learning, but it’s also not an ivory tower. It’s so connected into real world issues. And I think that’s the absolute best of the humanities.