2025/10/08 by Errington, Kate
paper · doi:10.82191/pp.100
Kate is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her thesis, funded by the Bloomsbury Colleges Consortium, considers the history of public communication and understanding of pregnancy risk, 1948-present. The thesis uses historical materials to initiate contemporary conversations in public engagement events. Kate is also the co-founder of the Broadly Conceived interdisciplinary network for early career researchers interested in topics of reproduction. With funding from the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research and the Consortium for the Humanities & the Arts South-East England AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, Broadly Conceived has delivered over 30 events including two conferences with speakers from across the world. Whilst teaching on a module called "Writing London" at Birkbeck, University of London, Kate used an AI image generator to create multiple images of the city in different art styles. This series of images served as a jumping off point for discussing how a single topic can be represented in different ways, and to introduce the overarching theme of the module: how London has been represented in literature, 1500-present. Drawing inspiration from one of these examples, Kate created the attached image by hand. While it is recognisable as a London landscape, the distortion of the geography by AI makes it unfamiliar. The outcome is a surreal, dreamlike depiction of the capital city.