King's College London

The Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy’s new series of ‘mini-inaugurals’ hosted by Executive Dean Professor Linda McKie launched on 20 January, highlighting the breadth and richness of research across the faculty.

The event commemorated two academic members of staff recently becoming professors: Kieran O’Halloran, now Professor of Education in the School of Education, Communication & Society, and Julia Gallagher, now Professor of Politics and Development in the School of Global Affairs. Rachel Mills, Senior Vice President (Academic) at King's, gave opening remarks.

While ostensibly covering very different subject matter, both talks explored a common theme, the use of metaphor in social science to both illuminate and educate.

Professor Kieran O’Halloran, in his talk, Creative Thinking with Generative AI Video in Literature Education, discussed how generative AI video can be used in higher education to boost imagination. He focuses on visual metaphor, which plays an important role across disciplines, from science to the arts, by allowing complex ideas to be explored through concrete visual forms.

Kieran shows that creating generative AI videos of poetry is particularly effective for enhancing this capacity. Rather than treating the interpretation of poetry as something completed in words alone, students use generative AI video to translate a written poem into a visual metaphor.

Through this method, Professor O’Halloran showed how using the ancient creative principle of ‘constraint to enable’ can still be deployed using the most contemporary digital tools. This teaches young people to be creative adaptors, working with media and techniques with which they are not familiar.

Professor Julia Gallagher’s talk, while exploring different subject matter, also discussed the use of metaphor, this time reading the state through its buildings.

Her lecture drew on over a decade of research visiting, exploring and talking to citizens about their state architecture across five African countries. These buildings create a physical representation of the state, a way for elites to express ideology and power, but also an observable record of state history, success and failure that is available to citizens to interpret in their own ways.

Buildings discussed included Jubilee House in Accra, Ghana, a symbol of decolonisation, and the Supreme Court in Kinchasa, DRC, a modern building conveying ideas of authenticity rooted in local culture.

She also discussed how in her research the reverse process is studied: the way people turn their state buildings into ideas. In this way the metaphor is a tool for turning the abstract into something concrete- and back again.

Future SSPP mini-inaugurals will address other areas in the richness of research across the faculty. All SSPP research and professional services staff are welcome to attend.