Since the 2015 publication of Globalizing Knowledge, Professor Kennedy has engaged in a number of global conversations with radically different scopes of imagination, principles of design, and visions of consequence in the articulation of transformative knowledge cultures. In his presentation, he juxtaposed three: a) a technocratic approach to governing the future, associated with the Oxford Martin Commission and Pascal Lamy; b) the pragmatic imagination of ecosystem design associated with the work of Ann Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown; and c) an AfroFuturism made popular by the cinematic debut of Black Panther and the more transgressive works of John Jennings, Stacey Robinson and others. This comparison illuminates radically different assumptions about innovation's source. More importantly, it moves possibilities in the design of knowledge networks and their public effervescence by establishing a different sense of connection among facts, objects, and visions in the design of globalizing knowledge.

Michael D. Kennedy is a professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. Throughout his career, Kennedy has addressed East European social movements, national identifications, and systemic change. For the last 15 years, he has also worked in the sociology of public knowledge, global transformations, and cultural politics, focusing most recently on social movements, universities, and solidarity within and across nations resulting in three books and over a hundred titles. His most recent book, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation (Stanford University Press, 2015) addresses those themes. Recent political transformations within the USA and across the world has moved him towards a more public sociology, and the resulting transformations of human and social capacity.

Kennedy was the University of Michigan's first vice provost for international affairs in addition to being director of an institute and five centers and programs at UM; he also served as the Howard R. Swearer Director of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Kennedy concluded nine years of service on the Governing Board of European Humanities University and as chair of the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations' Higher Education Support Program.

His academic honors include several keynote addresses for distinguished lecture series and conferences, a Distinguished Diversity Scholarship and Engagement Award from the University of Michigan and a Gold Cross of Merit award from the Republic of Poland.

For more information on Michael D. Kennedy please visit his faculty publication page found at the Brown University Academia website.