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Institute of Advanced Study
External shot of Institute of Advanced study at Cosin's Hall

The Cases for Plural, Innovative and Novel Evidence (PINE)

3 November 2026
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Claire Craig giving a paper in the IAS_image courtesy of Prof Noam Lesham

I gave this seminar in the second week (19th October 2026) of my stay at the IAS, whilst also falling in love with the beautiful city during the exceptional clear, crisp and colourful days of Autumn. Despite a lifetime working in multi-disciplinary environments, the Institute was exceptional in helping me make a flying start:

and talking about what you love, to people who want to engage with it, and who do so curiously and positively from an extensive range of backgrounds and types of academic experience, is a privilege.

In more concrete terms, at the seminar I travelled fast from outlining why every big public policy issue needs plural, innovative and novel evidence (PINE) – from Classicists helping with cybersecurity to Anthropologists informing how to tackle Ebola - to the particular need to bring in evidence from the humanities and qualitative evidence more generally, to the new method of Storylistening I am working on with my collaborator, Sarah Dillon, Professor of Literature and the Public Humanities at Cambridge. (Sarah and I will be running a participatory workshop on this on 19 November, so if you have any interest in the topic of narrative evidence, from any disciplinary perspective, we would love to see you).

Sarah and I are just starting work on developing the Storylistening framework to find out how societies could better resource their thinking about the future in the context of climate change. The great questions and contacts from the seminar included the fundamentally difficult “if I am going to design a research project in my area with the aim of getting better evidence for policy, how do I decide whether to focus on the needs of current generations, or on future ones?”  And some valuable ideas for Science Fiction to add to our list of stories that show societies grappling with dangerous and uncertain futures such as Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, or NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth series.

Dr Claire Craig