RISCS Fellowship – Anticipation and Prospection
University of Bristol research project aims to to identify new ways in which we might better understand futures thinking in cyber security, and develop new skills in “futures literacy” to optimize its effects in risk related policy and practice.
Dr Genevieve Liveley, Reader in Classics, is a RISCS (Research Institute in Sociotechnical Cyber Security) Fellow leading on this new programme theme.
Anticipating future threats, assessing their probability, imagining their possible harms, and identifying strategies to mitigate and defend against them, are the core activities at the heart of all risk management – including cyber-risk. Successfully managing such risk, therefore, involves particular expertise in thinking about the future, using future-based information to guide decisions and actions in the present.
We draw on two relatively new research fields in the academic space, combining future-oriented insights generated from the fields of Psychology, Philosophy, Narratology, Anthropology, Political Science, Mathematics, and others, to better understand how we as humans, individuals, organisations, societies, and boards think about the future – and how this informs our practical abilities to prepare and plan for futures and risks both anticipated and unanticipated. We will be conducting a comprehensive scoping and landscape review of the research field, alongside associated networking and community building activities (tbc – contingent on Covid-19 restrictions), to produce an in-depth portfolio detailing the extent of interdisciplinary expertise in this area, evaluating areas and impactful opportunities (including the design of research funding calls) that are ripe for strategic development in the near and longer term future.
