Launch of The Finsbury Institute - Polycrisis Conference

The Finsbury Institute

In Spring 2024, City will be launching The Finsbury Institute, a new centre aimed at translating research into policy. The Institute will offer a space for academics to collaborate with professionals and external institutions (i.e. think tanks, charities, public sector bodies) to think, debate, and find new ways forward to tackling some of the greatest challenges of our time.

The Institute will question the status quo, understand the power behind knowledge, and explore how we can think and act differently in our increasingly complex world. The Institute will offer CPD courses, consulting services, policy writing and other forms of commissioned research.

Launch event

The School of Policy and Global Affairs is organising a two-day conference to engage with the conceptual, practical, multi-disciplinary, and interconnected aspects, and limitations, of Poly Crisis in our era. We are launching the Finsbury Institute as a major step in the School’s and University’s scholarly engagement with the worlds of policy and practice. The Finsbury Institute aims to provide a meeting of minds, a space for the worlds of scholarship and research to consider and explore ideas and practices, to work with external institutions and practitioners to enable and expand ideas and practices.

The Finsbury Institute aims to explore critical thinking about the knowledge and power nexus, debate and develop theories of knowledge and practice; question the relationship between knowledge and power; consider who produces knowledge, how, why and for whom? Hence, we aim to explore the possibilities and limits of decolonising, declassing, and de-gendering knowledge and practice, to deconstruct knowledges and practices, to globalise knowledge and practice.

View the conference schedule.

Conference Organising Committee: Alice Mesnard, Sasikumar Sundaram, Inderjeet Parmar (Chair).

‘Polycrisis’ is a term referring to the overwhelming number of serious problems the world is facing all at once - everything from political unrest, economic troubles, geopolitical rivalries, and the ever-present threats of climate change and global health crises, to deeper issues of inequality, cultural conflicts, and the struggles of keeping democracy and trust in science alive. Ultimately the world appears to be in a state of constant crisis, everything seems uncertain and changing rapidly.

The term is relatively new and further research is being undertaken to understand what it truly means and, most importantly, what leaders/policymakers can do about it. ‘Polycrisis’ isn't an imagined theoretical term - it's a real and powerful way to describe the intense and complicated problems societies are experiencing.

The event will bring together experts in politics, international relations, economics, history, criminology, and sociology to take a multidisciplinary look at these issues. For instance, we'll look at how the big decisions in global politics are connected to our everyday lives, such as how the funding of wars impact human rights and the economy. We'll discuss the complicated issues around borders and migration and how it affects society, the special challenges faced by less developed and re-emerging powers and the way the world's rich and powerful influence global issues.

In our hyper-connected digital age, we'll also be looking at how tech companies and governments are gaining more power, while at the same time, ordinary people are finding new ways to speak up and demand change. But it's not all positive - these connections can also help harmful ideologies spread.