快播视频

Welcome to our May 2026 newsletter! The past months were busy with our SL Away Day, SL Guest Lecture, Open Innovation Security Policy School, and several theme workshops taking place.

Security 快播视频 Away Day - 15th April 2026

On 15 April, Security 快播视频 brought members together for our annual Away Day: a focused, action?oriented day designed to strengthen collaboration across disciplines and help members connect research ideas to practical opportunities for impact. Security 快播视频 exists to catalyse interdisciplinary security research and engagement, and the Away Day provided a structured space to take stock of progress, surface new collaboration, and agree concrete next steps for the year ahead.

The day opened with scene setting from Profs. Dan Prince and Basil Germond (Co Directors), reflecting on Security 快播视频’s aims and the value we add by enabling collaboration across disciplinary and departmental boundaries to respond to the rapidly evolving security environment defined by “strategic acceleration” regarding geopolitics, technology and climate. This framing established a clear set of expectations for the day: generous engagement and a practical focus on actions and commitments.

Please click here for the full report of the Away Day.

The highlight of the morning was a set of short presentations from our Research Theme Leads, who shared what each theme has delivered over the past year and, crucially, outlined clear pathways for involvement. This showcased what Security 快播视频 does and made it easier for members to connect with themes through projects, workshops, collaborative writing, and grant development.

A key conclusion emerging from the day’s discussions was the need to develop a new research theme focused on cyber security and trusted systems. This reflected both the gaps identified through the morning’s mapping of current strengths and a strong appetite across part of the community to expand Security 快播视频’s work in this area.

The Away Day therefore served its central purpose: bringing the community together to consolidate what we do well, identify where we should grow, and begin shaping the structures that will help us do so.

Security 快播视频 thrives when members translate shared interests into shared work. If you would like to join an existing theme, contribute to an emergent area, or explore collaboration through workshops or grant development, please visit our Research Themes page and connect with the relevant leads:

/security-lancaster/research/themes/

Security 快播视频 Guest Lecture Series: Dr Kevin Rowlands

On the 4th March, Dr Kevin Rowlands, Professor in Practice at 快播视频, recently delivered our Security 快播视频 guest lecture titled "The Deep War, 2026: Great Power Confrontation and Emerging Hostilities at Sea", where he examined the growing evidence that great power confrontation between the West, Russia, and China is unfolding in world’s oceans. You can view both the and a with Kevin, as well as a video-podcast with Basil and Kevin.

Security 快播视频 hosts Government-led Security Policy School focused on Critical National Infrastructure

On 20 March, Security 快播视频 and the School of Global Affairs welcomed the UK Government’s Open Innovation Team (OIT) to campus for a full day Security Policy School, giving students a unique opportunity to develop real-world policy skills in the field of national security and resilience.

The workshop brought together 15 students from Politics, International Relations, Law, Criminology, and History for an immersive, hands-on experience of government policymaking.

The day began with a detailed briefing from OIT policy experts, who introduced students to one of the UK’s most pressing security challenges: the growing threat posed by hostile actors targeting the nation’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).

Students were asked to step into the role of Senior Policy Advisors in a newly formed Cabinet Office taskforce. Working in groups and with a notional budget of ?500 million, they were tasked with producing a policy proposal that would strengthen the UK’s resilience in one of the following CNI sectors: Energy production and transmission, Transport, The health system and NHS, Undersea cables, Data centres.

Each team analysed opportunities, challenges, acceptability, and value for money considerations to design ambitious but actionable policy options.

Throughout the day, students collaborated intensely, researching threats, mapping vulnerabilities, and debating trade-offs. Their challenge culminated in a final round of policy pitches, where each team presented their proposal directly to the OIT facilitators, who played the role of government ministers assessing the recommendations.

After a series of confident and insightful presentations, a winning team was selected based on the clarity, feasibility, and impact of their proposal.

The workshop offered students a rare and invaluable window into how national security policy is developed inside government. Many participants expressed that the experience strengthened their interest in future careers in the civil service, particularly in areas related to security, defence, and resilience.

Boundaries of Being Workshop (26th February)

Boundaries of Being began as an emergent area at the last Security 快播视频 Away Day back in April 2025, out of a shared desire to explore how emerging technologies reshape what it means to be human in the future. Since then, a small group has met semi-regularly to talk about the convergence of our physical and digital selves, the relationship between AI and identity, and the threats and vulnerabilities that are opening up as a result.

Building on the foundations of these discussions, our workshop drew together researchers with these common interests to develop three strands of work on the security of conversations and voices, the ownership and protection of the self, and the transformation of human skills.

The afternoon saw a series of small-group discussions and work sessions. The richness and layers of debate and planning that took place within that short space of time were a testament to the breadth of the interdisciplinary expertise we have at 快播视频 to bear on these topics. It was particularly wonderful to see how easily researchers from different corners of the university, and across all career stages, connected with one another to identify the most pressing questions.

There were lots to take home from the workshop, not least the many more questions that the discussions threw up. In one strand, collaborations were already forming and foundations were laid for research projects, while those working in another strand started making plans for a focused follow-up workshop. The most important takeaway of all, to us, was the unmistakable sense of a community truly coming together by the end of the day, with a wish to continue thinking and working together.

Polycrisis and Human Vulnerabilities Workshop (25th March)

On Monday 23 March 2026, Security 快播视频 hosted an interdisciplinary workshop, Polycrisis and Human Vulnerabilities, marking the official launch of our new research theme, Polycrisis. Led by theme co leads Professor Charlotte Baker and Professor Simon Cook, the event brought together academics and policy-oriented experts to examine how overlapping global crises heighten and compound human vulnerability.

The Polycrisis theme at Security 快播视频 explores how intersecting global challenges (environmental, technological, economic, social, and geopolitical) interact in ways that amplify risk and undermine resilience. More information on the theme is available here: Polycrisis - 快播视频 and a detailed report of the workshop can be found here.

Unsecurities Lab - at Goldsmiths University London

On 2 April 2026, Security 快播视频's Unsecurities Lab recently hosted its first workshop outside 快播视频, bringing together a deliberately diverse group of academics and government practitioners at Goldsmiths, University of London, to explore how immersive art can function as a tool for security foresight in an increasingly unpredictable world.

Led by Dr Nathan Jones, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art and theme lead at Security 快播视频, and featuring artist Joey Holder, the workshop drew participants from across HM Government and academia.

The session centred on artwork by Joey Holder combining AI-generated imagery, deep-sea documentary footage, and biological and technological material into a deliberately ambiguous immersive experience. Participants were invited to develop a collective account of an unknown incident depicted in the film, drawing on their different professional backgrounds, before co-imagining embodied survival logics of four real deep-sea organisms, each chosen for its remarkable resilience to system change.

Participants connected this directly to live challenges across cyber, AI, biological, and environmental security — domains where the capacity to integrate knowledge from different sources, at different speeds, across different temporal horizons, is exactly what is needed and exactly what current disciplinary silos make difficult.

The Unsecurities Lab is a method for foresight development in which artistic projects are called in to seek and seed instincts and perspectives from diverse disciplines with potential for future cyber-physical concerns. The conversations generated in the workshop are being developed into a research report for participants, tracing the instincts and perspectives that emerged across the tables and the points where they converged, diverged, and productively collided. This report forms part of a broader research programme exploring what the lab calls artistic intelligence — the capacity of art to surface forms of knowledge and judgment that more conventional foresight methods do not reach, and to hold them in productive relation to one another.

A full report can be found here.

Unsecurities Lab: 'Sunk Costs'

On 6th May 2026, Unsecurities Lab returned to 快播视频’s Data Immersion Suite for a workshop built around a rich, multi-media immersive artwork called SUNK COSTS, allowing a team of experts to explore foresight across issues of maritime labour, ocean ecology and logistical risk.

This cycle of Unsecurities Lab in partnership with the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business took an artistic rendering of the 2022 fire and sinking of the car carrier MV Felicity Ace in the Atlantic as its starting point. The incident brings together many of the pressures shaping the future of ocean industries: seafarer safety, global supply chains, corporate accountability, ecological damage, financial exposure and the fragile infrastructures of maritime trade.

The workshop involved a team of prestigious scholars and thought leaders from social sustainability, ocean justice, marine governance, corporate accountability, marine biology, environmental policy, seafarer safety, business networks, advocacy, art, media theory and visual culture. Participants moved through immersive audiovisual worlds produced by the Sunk Costs artist collective. Each world combined shipwreck and seafloor 3D scenes, archival material, diagrams and narration. Between worlds, participants made collaborative decisions through a structured game, testing what kinds of futures and outcomes become possible when the crew, the ocean and the market are considered together.

The workshop resulted in a report capturing insights into how ecological harm, labour conditions, financial systems, corporate accountability and logistical infrastructures interact in future ocean ecosystems — and how these can be addressed and described by interdisciplinary teams.

Some items from our Members

Dr Justin Lo has received a British Academy Talent Development Award, with Isobelle Clarke as co-investigator. In this 12-month project, they will be developing a multimodal, interactive and dynamic tool for the visualisation of source similarity in authorship and voice analyses. By producing a new set of digital resources, the project aims to bring the fields of forensic linguistics and forensic speech science closer and advance new approaches to public engagement.

Dr Matthew Bradbury had a paper accepted recently -

Dr Aaron Winter has spoken at the following events:

• Racism, resistance and the mainstreaming of the Far Right, Discussing Decolonisation series, York St John.
• Conspiracy theory and reactionary politics workshop, City St George University.
• Meet the Authors Event, Rebel Book Club Manchester: Beyond the Headlines, Salford.
• Aesthetics of Post digital Extremism - One Day Symposium, University of East London.

Dr Anna Sophie-Maass presented her latest research on

Prof. Claire Hardaker and Georgina Brown are running the ‘Hackacon’, a competition to find out the state-of-the-art of AI-generated conversation. It opens on the 1st August and runs to 30th September. More details can be found .

Prof. Basil Germond talked to BBC Radio 5, BBC Cumbria, BBC Ulster, Croatia National TV, ABC Radio, Global News Canada and France 24 as well Bloomberg, BBC Verify, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, L’Express, The National, and Forbes regarding the situation in the Strait of Hormuz.