Human Futures: Steering Group
The direction of the Human Futures initiative is guided by a steering group composed of representatives from each partner institution.
The members are:
Christina Garsten
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
Christina Garsten is Principal and Permanent Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS), and Professor of Social Anthropology affiliated with Stockholm University and Uppsala University. Her research focuses on globalization, governance, organizations, and the production of knowledge in transnational contexts.
A recurring theme in her work is how think tanks, policy professionals, and other knowledge actors shape political decision-making and future-oriented governance. Her research has also explored anticipation, foresight, and the ways institutions seek to imagine and influence possible futures.
What kinds of perspectives or questions do you hope Human Futures can open up?
I hope Human Futures encourages questions about how AI reconfigures social life, human relations, and our conceptions of knowledge. How does it reshape ideas of sociality, trust, and human creativity? Also, what new forms of stratification and/or community does AI produce? I’d especially value conversations across disciplines and geographies that attend to the contextual nature of AI as both discourse, practice, and epoch-changing technology.
Ericka Johnson
Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS)
Ericka Johnson External link, opens in new window. is Professor at Linköping University and Director of the WASP-HS graduate school. With a background in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and medical humanities, her research explores how the world becomes data and what happens when data representations meet AI. Her work focuses on technologies, data, and material-discursive practices of knowledge and the body, particularly at the intersection of STS, medical sociology, and feminist science studies. Current research interests include synthetic data, AI, and the relationship between ontology, epistemology, and machine learning.
What kinds of perspectives or questions do you hope Human Futures can open up?
I would love to listen to conversations that approach AI as local and contextual. My hope is to see scholars engaging across disciplines, domains and places in ways that force us to examine the specificities of AI and how its discursive contours are fluid and contingent.
Edward K. Kirumira
Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS)
Edward K. Kirumira External link, opens in new window. is Director of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Professor of Medical Sociology, and Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Stellenbosch University. His work combines sociology, anthropology, and global health research, with a longstanding focus on how social structures, institutions, and inequalities shape lived experience across different contexts.
His research has focused on areas including global health, reproductive health, population studies, and emerging diseases, alongside broader questions of governance, development, and social transformation. Alongside his academic work, he has extensive experience building international research collaborations and advising regional and international organisations across Africa and beyond.
What kinds of perspectives or questions do you hope Human Futures can open up?
Within the framework of the ethos of Institutes for Advanced Study, Human Futures provides a platform and space for facilitating and enabling, rather than directing or regulating AI research, experience, insight and perspectives. In the interconnected and often precarious world we live in we are bound into a shared future. Human Futures presents a nuanced perspective to AI innovation and raises the question of how to establish longer term networks of engaged and context responsive scholarship across disciplines and geographies.
Naoko Shimazu
Tokyo College, University of Tokyo
Naoko Shimazu is Professor and Deputy Director at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo, and a Non-resident Long-term Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS). A historian with strongly interdisciplinary foundations, her work explores how historical methods can engage meaningfully with the humanities, social sciences, and other fields, including science and technology.
Her research focuses on global and cultural history, diplomacy, memory, and international relations, with particular attention to Asia and transregional forms of exchange. A recurring theme in her work is how knowledge, narratives, and symbolic practices shape global interactions across different historical and cultural contexts.
What kinds of perspectives or questions do you hope Human Futures can open up?
Human Futures is designed as an innovative, and dynamic, global platform connecting the three institutes of advanced study in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It is an ambitious initiative, pushing the boundaries of possibilities of what IASs can do in a fast-evolving world which challenges the values and preconceptions of yesteryear.