The Next Crisis: What we think about the future Danny Dorling and Kate Pickett
Event details
Every month, surveys around the world ask people to tell them what they are really thinking. The results are at times reassuring, sometimes chilling and often unexpected.
Leading UK geographer Danny Dorling, author of The Next Crisis, will unpack polling data and show that our global crises are often very different from what’s in the headlines – and that we need to take these issues very seriously.
In conversation with Kate Pickett, co-author of the best-selling The Spirit Level and The Inner Level, Danny will explore our main concerns about the world in order of urgency. What the cost of living shows us about inequality. How the connection between employment and immigration is used to stir up insecurity. Why we are frightened by distant wars. How corruption corrodes care. What we should really be worried about when it comes to climate change – including what the scientists get wrong about people’s fears. And finally, how the great ‘unknown unknowns’ dictate the way we think about the future and what we should be less afraid of: pandemics, asteroids, tsunamis, even each other.
Using the most up-to-date research to redraw our assumptions about where our greatest threats come from, Danny will offer a series of solutions for tackling, or at the very least coming to terms with, our uncertain future.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
About the speakers
Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, UK. He appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and other papers. He advises government and the office for national statistics. Among his books are All That Is Solid; Population 10 Billion; So You Think You Know About Britain?; and Injustice. His new book is The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future (Verso, May 2025).
Kate Pickett OBE is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York where she leads the Public Health & Society research group and is the Director of the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change. She is an academic co-director of Health Equity North and co-founder and patron of The Equality Trust. She is the co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of the award-winning and best-selling The Spirit Level (2009) and The Inner Level (2018). The Spirit Level was awarded Publication of the Year by the Political Studies Association, chosen as one of the Top Ten Books of the Decade by the New Statesman, and one of the top 100 books of the century by the Guardian. In 2023, Kate received an OBE for services to societal equality.
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