Festival of Failure Launch

The opening plenary session of the Festival of Failure is an opportunity for all to meet, connect and discuss notions of failure across the university’s disciplines; to consider how its disadvantages can be minimised and some of its potential benefits exploited.  

Recent events show how failure can affect entire nations as well as individuals be it physically, socially or mentally. From the world’s conflict zones and the migration of peoples, to the welfare of athletes and management of crime, across society and countries there is a pattern of failure to act or failure from acting. With the current Horizon scandal at the Post Office being a prime example. Failure in sport can be understood from the sub-cellular level up to and including failures of governance within organisations such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA.   

This multi-scale view of failure will be highlighted in this introductory session where four international fellows have been invited to focus discussions on the language and psychology of failure, the failure to tolerate exercise from the cellular to the whole organism level, failure in conflict and philosophical belief systems: alongside system failures in engineering and software.

The opening session on Monday June 3rd from 2pm at International House will be of interest to you, if you want to hear about research into various aspects of failure from the Loughborough team and our 4 international experts. This will expand into a series of sandbox events through the first week of June that seek to establish multidisciplinary teams to research failure and deliver funded outcomes from multiple perspectives.  

Featuring IAS Visiting Fellows - 

Professor Antulio J. Echevarria II (US Army War College)
Professor Niels Ørtenblad (University of Southern Denmark)
Professor Ruqiang Yan (Xi’an Jiaotong University)
Associate Professor Wyke Stommel (Radboud University)

Arrivals from 1:45 pm for a 2:00 pm start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served before the seminar from 1:00pm.

This event is hybrid format, please use the required booking button at the bottom of the page to choose either in-person or online attendance.
(Please note that in-person spaces are limited and booking is required, so we can manage numbers for catering and also the space inside International House)

By booking a place at this event, attendees agree to behave in a respectful manner such that everyone feels comfortable contributing as they wish. The IAS reserves the right to eject anyone who does not abide by this policy.

IAS seminars are typically recorded, minus any Q&A sessions at the end, again to encourage contributions. The recordings are then uploaded to our website on a Fellows bio page and/or Programme page, along with our IAS YouTube Channel. If you are not able to attend a seminar live online, please do still register for the Zoom Webinar as we will email everyone who registered to let them know once the recordings are made available.