Future Projects - Durham University

Future IAS projects

We are committed to supporting and developing exciting ideas with potential

Across a 3-year project cycle, we support PIs to deliver their goals and objectives

Year 1 - Pre-project year (developing preliminary ideas and planning for the project start)
Year 2 - Project year (joined by visiting Fellows for an intensive term of research collaboration)
Year 3 - Post project year (building on outcomes of Y1 and Y2)

Our Major Projects for next year, 2027/28 are:

Futures of Democracy

Exploring how people respond to democratic decline, especially in post-industrial communities like County Durham where traditional systems feel ineffective.

Hand of a person casting a ballot at a polling station during voting

Colonial Archives, Endangered Heritage, Future Imaginaries: the Sudan archive at 70

Addressing an urgent and unresolved question: what challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities do colonial archives face at our present moment?

Out of Service: engaging with infrastructure rupture, failure and collapse

Examining failure in maritime, digital, & financial infrastructure; how it’s recognised & managed, using maritime networks to model risks, assess prevention & containment

Aerial view of a high-tech smart port with digital technology overlays and ships in the ocean

The Quantum - Classical Boundary: understanding, concepts, and language

This project explores how quantum effects persist at large scales and how classical behaviour emerges in large systems.

Abstract pink atomic or molecular structure on blue background

TempoSphere: time inheritance as a cross-disciplinary paradigm and testbed for temporally just institutional design

Exploring how time pressures affect students, using tools to visualise inequalities. A pilot to build a framework for understanding these inequalities and implications