English
Michael Thompson
Michael Thompson
studied anthropology, while also following a career as a
Himalayan mountaineer (Annapurna South Face 1970, Everest Southwest Face
1975). His early research on how something second-hand becomes an antique, or
a rat-infested slum part of Our Glorious Heritage (“Rubbish Theory”, 1979, Oxford
University Press; new and extended edition, 2017, Pluto Press) diverted him into
teaching at the Slade School of Fine Art, in London, and at Portsmouth University’s
School of Architecture, and from there to the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria. There he has worked on energy futures, on
risk perception, on participatory processes and on environment and development
in the Himalayan Region, the key unifying concept in all that being “plural rationality”:
people doing very different things and yet still behaving rationally, given their
different sets of convictions as to how the world is and people are.
E-mail: thompson@iiasa.ac.at
