Studio Michael Shanks Stanford This week I am off to join Sabine (Remdisch) and colleagues as part of our collaboration — Trans-nation Co-creation. Here’s a kind of prospectus. TNCC Tour and Dialogues: A Week of Innovation, Leadership, and Foresight From June 13 to 19, 2026, the Institute for Performance Management at Leuphana University Lüneburg holds a…
future of learning
Some archaeological notes on futures studies
The Janus Maneuver Hindsight, foresight, and futures studies Everyone, it seems, is a futurist now. Here are some loosely gathered thoughts on why an archaeology of design may be a missing foundation. These are notes – so expect inaccuracies and mistakes of memory (hopefully minor). After Janus – the divine principle of looking both back…
Newsletter — Stanford Archaeology Center
Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…
AI and collaboration — lessons from Stanford
Here is the keynote I presented at our reunion last week in Odense, of Danish alumni of the Stanford H-Star fellowship program (2010 to 2015). Keith Devlin (H-Star director emeritus) and Connie Svabo of the STEM Education Research Center – FNUG at University of Southern Denmark [Link], were our hosts. The program enabled about 50…
Science Learning – a future
I am in Copenhagen at the annual meeting of the European Science Education Research Association ESERA [Link]. Here is my summary statement for our plenary session that introduces Creative Pragmatics as a framework for reshaping science education [Link]. The world our students face today is not stable, predictable, nor neatly divided into disciplines. It is…
Andrew Pickering — acting with the world
In a complex world of uncertainty, precarity, risk, and trouble, how do we conceive and teach science? I got to read Andrew Pickering’s new book today — Acting with the World [Link]. I have long admired his philosophically-informed studies of scientific practice. With such elegant and compelling clarity he makes the case for a sustainable…