John Urry Annual Lecture

John Urry Lecture

The John Urry lecture was established in 2017 to commemorate the life and work of one of Lancaster’s foremost researchers and co-founder of the Institute for Social Futures.

For more on John click here

Event Details for 2021

Taking ideas seriously: what does it mean to have a Knowledge Economy?

Professor Diane Coyle CBE, Bennett Professor of Public Policy, University of Cambridge

28 October 2021,

Blended Event: 4.15pm – 5.30pm (GMT) ‘Doors open’ 4pm

Please Register here

It’s at least a quarter of a century since social scientists began to describe the changes digital technologies were bringing about as ’the knowledge economy’ and yet neither policies nor economics itself have yet fully got to grips with the implications. This lecture will discuss how societies need to adapt to the world so significantly shaped by information and ideas, in the face of the immense material challenges we now face.

Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Diane co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research programmes under the themes of progress and productivity. Her own research focuses on the digital economy and digital policy, and on concepts and measurement of economic welfare. Diane is also a Director and research theme leader of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an adviser to the Competition and Markets Authority, and Senior Independent Member of the ESRC Council.

Author of books including The Weightless World, The Soulful Science, The Economics of Enough, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, and Markets, State and People, the constant theme of her work has been the way technological change is driving profound shifts in the structure of the economy, and consequently how economic analysis and policy advice need to adapt if they are to help understand and deliver broad-based economic progress. Her new book (October 2021) Cogs and Monsters is motivated by these underlying questions.

Diane is also an ardent advocate of better communication by economists, and the need for a conversation between the profession and the public, for which she was awarded a CBE.

The Annual John Urry Lecture is organized by the Institute for Social Futures, the Centre for Mobilities Research and the Department of Sociology of Lancaster University.

For any enquiries about the event, please contact Professor David Tyfield or Louise Bush, ISF Administrator.

The 3rd Annual John Urry Lecture 2020 - Covid-19, Mobilities & Futures

If you missed the live event you can watch the full 2020 lecture here. Covid-19, Mobilities & Futures: An Online Panel Discussion with Prof Tim Cresswell (Edinburgh), Prof Mimi Sheller (Drexel) & Prof Noel Salazar (KU Leuven) Chaired by: Prof David Tyfield (LEC, Associate Director CeMoRe)

Professor Tim Cresswell

is Ogilvie Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh. His work has been instrumental in developing connections between cultural geography and the Mobilities paradigm in books such as On the Move (Routledge, 2006), Geographies of Mobilities (ed. with Peter Merriman, Routledge, 2013) and Gendered Mobilities (ed. with Tanu Priya Uteng, Routledge, 2016). Recent works include, Plastiglomerate (poetry) (Penned in the Margins) and Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (University of Chicago Press).
Professor Mimi Sheller

is Professor of Sociology, Head of the Department of Sociology, and founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities, Associate Editor of Transfers, and past President of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility. She has helped to establish the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. She is author or co-editor of twelve books, including most recently Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (Verso, 2018) and Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2020).
Professor Noel Salazar

is Research Professor in Anthropology, Coordinator of the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Centre (IMMRC), and Founder of the Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe) cluster at KU Leuven. His research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, heritage and interpretation, cultural brokering, cosmopolitanism, and endurance locomotion. Recent publications include Momentous Mobilities (2018, Berghahn), and edited volumes Methodologies of Mobility (2017, Berghahn), Mega-event Mobilities (2016, Routledge), Regimes of Mobility (2014, Routledge) and Tourism Imaginaries (2014, Berghahn).