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Displays of power | LSE Festival exhibition

Hosted by LSE Festival: Power and Politics

Ground and Lower Ground Floors, Cheng Kin Ku Building (CKK)

How can we visualise different forms of power and their impact on politics?

Bringing together research from across the social sciences, the exhibition explores the people and institutions, technologies, infrastructure and other phenomena that shape our world.

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This year's exhibition includes an audio guide with short commentaries from our featured researchers. Headsets will be available to borrow during Festival week or by appointment for the LSE community until 1 July, or you can listen on your own device to our exhibition playlist.

More about this exhibition 

This event is part of the LSE Festival: Power and Politics which was held from Monday 10 to Saturday 15 June 2024, with a series of events exploring how power and politics shape our world.  

We would love to hear from you after you visit the exhibition, please take a moment to complete our short feedback survey. If you leave your email address you will be entered into the Festival feedback prize draw.

Projects on display:

Who has the power to address the child penalty globally?

childpenaltygap_thumb200Having 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?

The uncertainty and scarcity of water in Jordan

Contestedflows_thumb200Jordan 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.

Making research less... WEIRD

Faces_thumb200Most 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.

SEEN: Making women's labour visible

Seen_thumb200Women’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”

Who is leading Europe's cities?

cityleadership_thumb200The 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. LSE Cities, through the European Cities Programme, 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.

The politics of conversation

conversation_thumb200To 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. 

In search of spider consciousness

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.  

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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 will be speaking as part of the Festival event "Invertebrate minds" on Saturday 15 June from 2-3pm.

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

What goes into the making of a sentence in Chat GPT?

AI_thumb200Generative 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. Dr Nils Peters’ research explores the infrastructure that lies behind the biggest computational undertaking in human history, revealing the power dynamics at play.

The tabloid effect

tabloids_thumb200In 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.

Who has power over our visions of the future?

visions_thumb200Over the past two decades, our perspective of what lies ahead of us has been radically shaped by Silicon Valley. Research by PhD student Asher Kessler, 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

Who rules Britain?

Elites_thumb200What do we know about the people wielding power and influence in Britain? In their forthcoming book, Born to Rule (Harvard University Press, September 2024), Professors Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves 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 Who since 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 Who those 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. 

Why do elections matter?

Bruterelections_Thumb200Professor 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. 

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. 

How can I attend? Add to calendar

This exhibition is part of the LSE Festival: Power and Politics. Entry is free and open to all Monday to Saturday of Festival week from 10am to 5pm.  The exhibition will be open to the LSE community after Festival week from Monday 17 June until Friday 5 July, Monday to Friday from 10am to 5pm, but use of the VR headset and audio guides will be by prior arrangement only. For any queries email events@lse.ac.uk.

 

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Displays of Power Audio guide playlist (Soundcloud)

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