Displays of power | LSE Festival exhibition
How can we visualise different forms of power and their impact on politics?
Bringing together research from across the social sciences, the exhibition explored the people and institutions, technologies, infrastructure and other phenomena that shape our world.
You can browse a pdf of all the walls, or of individual walls via the links below. This year's exhibition included an audio guide with short commentaries from our featured researchers, you can catch up with these via our exhibition playlist.
More about this exhibition
This event is part of the which was held from Monday 10 to Saturday 15 June 2024, with a series of events exploring how power and politics shape our world.
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Projects on display:
Having children requires money, time, resources and energy. Yet, parenthood impacts men and women differently. Mothers spend more time on unpaid childcare and less on paid employment, affecting their long-term economic opportunities. This is known as the child penalty, or the motherhood penalty. This is the average amount by which a woman’s probability of being employed declines in the 10 years after the birth of her first child relative to men.
As of 2024, 24 per cent of women leave the labour force in the first year after having their first child, and 15 per cent are still absent after 10 years. Research by the LSE Hub of Equal Representation asks: how does the child penalty vary globally and how can policymakers help to resolve it?
Jordan is increasingly defined by water scarcity: its status as one of the most waterpoor nations on earth is repeated frequently in both the country’s own economic and climate change strategy documents, and in the reports of international donors. Yet this idea of absolute scarcity obscures the ways water flows are shaped by social practices and by power, making experiences of water scarcity extremely uneven.
Ethnographic research by Dr Frederick Wojnarowski, with users, officials and those whose lives are already being affected by water and scarcity, challenges the technical and apolitical understandings of the system and the types of solutions that might be effective. This display represents Jordan’s water system not as a technical system for the movement and management of a natural resource, but as a social and economic metabolism, in which many people and places are brought into relationships with each other at different scales by the contested flows of water. Water here speaks to wider flows of power, revealing issues of equity and distribution. Through a series of case studies the map looks at the water system, as it is generally understood, and asks some questions about what within this picture is unknown, uncertain, open to question or contentious.
Read more about the research in Research for the World magazine. View a pdf of the wall. Listen to the audio commentary.
Most face libraries used in psychological research include only younger, Caucasian participants from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic cultures. These databases are not representative of the diverse range of facial characteristics and expression found in general populations globally, which presents a major challenge to the quality and impact of research findings.
The study of face perception plays a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of social dynamics, and contributes to real-world developments in fields such as medicine and technology. Dr Deema Awad’s project calls for more researchers to report the demographics of their study participants, and paves the way for diversity in face libraries through the creation of a new, inclusive face database.
Women’s labour, largely unpaid and underpaid, is missing from economic policymaking and is not recorded in key economic measures like GDP. This makes women’s contributions to society invisible. The artworks featured in the display are from the artbook SEEN and were produced as part of the
Invisibilised Labour: Feminist Critiques of GDP and Ideas of Growth
project undertaken by Roos Saalbrink. The artbook resists the erasure of women and their contributions to the economy, and challenges dominant narratives about women’s worth.
Artistic contributions by Aida Namukose, Clariss Rufaro Masiya, Halina Rauber-Baio aka Juno Algaravia, Kashushu, and Olusayo Ajetunmobi aka Ajet. Research by Roos Saalbrink, Senior Atlantic Fellow for Social and Economic Equity. Image credit: Kashushu "A Bright Future"
Listen to the audio commentary from Juno Algaravia and Roos Saalbrink. Listen to Clariss Rufaro Masiya reading her poem, "I have a maid".
The majority of Europeans live in urban areas, giving cities a critical role in addressing the continent’s most pressing policy challenges, from inequality to climate change.
, through the
, has created a knowledge hub of key data from nearly 160 of Europe’s capital and largest cities, allowing us to track the changing nature of these challenges.
Among other things, they are tracking data on the profile of Europe’s elected city leaders, the extent to which they reflect Europe’s growing diversity, and changes in the urban political landscape.
To understand our core political institutions and the power dynamics that sustain, challenge, and transform them, we need to understand the conversations that are foundational to them. Through conversation, different actors – from politicians, to journalists, to ordinary citizens – participate, collaborate, intervene, exclude, silence, and hold each other to account.
Conversation analysis allows us to identify and describe how power is displayed and wielded – second by second, breath by breath, gesture by gesture – through communication practices such as silence, laughter, hesitation, and interruption.
Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE ells the story of classic and (in)famous political conversations. These conversations show how people, from news interviewers to ordinary citizens, hold politicians to account – and sometimes get caught out in political encounters themselves.
We can easily forget that we are only a tiny part of a vast sentient world full of other conscious beings with lives of their own to lead. Even those of us far away from centres of political power have immense influence over huge numbers of animal lives. LSE Philosophy PhD student Daria Zakharova invites us to consider the weight of our influence, especially on those beings far removed from our everyday considerations – the invertebrates.
Installation:
Daria and an interdisciplinary team created an art installation "In search of Spider Consciousness" for Nowhere Festival in 2023, which invited people to enter the head of a giant Portia jumping spider to discover an artistic meditation on the mind of an arthropod. Visitors would enter the giant spider sculpture and be immersed in the spider’s point of view on the world, as represented obliquely through the medium of light, sculpting and original music, inspired by scientific evidence.
Virtual reality experience:
A 3D capture recreates virtually the experience of the original sculpture, which was 3.5 by 12m2. As in the original, the installation invites the viewer into an immersive walk inside of the spider’s head and into the spider’s mind. The artistic interpretation of the imagined subjective states of the arachnid mind are presented through an original music piece paired in a beautiful choreography with light patterns in the two main eyes of the spider. This immersive encounter invites reflection on the complexity of consciousness that thrives in even the smallest of beings, urging us to reconsider the boundaries of our moral and ethical responsibilities towards them.
Daria spoke as part of the Festival event Invertebrate minds: from spiders to octopuses, which is available as a podcast.
Artistic team: Daria Zakharova, Ivan Isakov, Paulo Ricca, Andrey Novikov, Stephen Allwright, Lucy Onischenko, Michael Haber, Maribeth Rauh.
Collaborators: Luke Hollis, Sean Toole.
Supporters: Professor Jonathan Birch and the ASENT team
Generative AI is poised to make a fundamental difference to the functioning of economy and society. While ethical implications and consequences for the nature of work are at the forefront of debates about its impact, the technological and financial dimensions of the rise of large language models like Chat GPT have mostly remained unexamined.
’ research explores the infrastructure that lies behind the biggest computational undertaking in human history, revealing the power dynamics at play.
In the run-up to both the Brexit referendum and to Trump’s US election win in 2016, online tabloid newspapers, including the UK’s
Mail Online, Pudelek
in Poland and the US’s
Gawker
, accurately anticipated voting outcomes, whilst broadsheets were blindsided after a failure to capture the public mood.
Dr Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer
’s analysis of over 2,000 online articles, and over two dozen interviews with tabloid journalists, reveals how the tabloid penchant for celebrity gossip, sensationalist copy and forthright political opinion, far removed from traditional political surveys and expert analyses, helped tabloids to engage and align with the views of the general public.
(Not) Kidding: politics in online tabloids by Dr Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer is published by Brill, read more in this month's Research for the World magazine, Why online tabloids are better at predicting the public’s political mood than broadsheets.
Over the past two decades, our perspective of what lies ahead of us has been radically shaped by Silicon Valley. Research by PhD student
, Department of Media and Communications at LSE, explores how one company, Facebook/Meta, has envisioned the future in different ways over the last 20 years. How do these futures reorient our sense of the present and reshape how we come to retell the past? And how can we imagine the future in alternative ways? If we equate the future with the next technological breakthrough, the next Silicon Valley vision, we find ourselves closing a future that was once seen as open. So how can we imagine and anticipate the future in alternative ways?
The exhibition display is illustrated by Camille Aubry. Read more about Asher's research on the LSE Business Review
What do we know about the people wielding power and influence in Britain? In their forthcoming book,
(Harvard University Press, September 2024), Professors
and
have shown that white men from elite backgrounds, who have all too often attended a tiny group of private schools and highly selective universities, remain profoundly overrepresented in the contemporary British elite.
Research draws on data from the 125,000 people featured in Who’s Whosince 1897, currently representing about 0.05% of the UK population, combined with probate records, survey and interview results, and data sources illuminating specific aspects of the lives of the elite including Desert Island Disc choices and UK Supreme Court judgements. The analysis identifies within Who’s Whothose who hold exceptional wealth, the top 1% of the national wealth distribution – a wealth elite, both positionally and economically elite, around 6,000 individuals or 0.01% of the UK population.
Professor Michael Bruter and Dr Sarah Harrison founded the
Electoral Psychology Observatory (EPO)
to put citizens at the heart of how we study elections, arguing that the experience of the people voting matters as much as the outcomes of elections when it comes to democracy. A better functioning democracy must have the experience of citizens at its heart.
Part of their research has involved observing elections all over the world, and these photographs and quotes from voters help to tell a story about people’s experience of Election Day.
LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of The London School of Economics and Political Science.
From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this event you check back on this listing on the day of the event.
LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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