James Harkin

James Harkin is a social forecaster who writes regularly for the Financial Times and the Guardian. He is also director of Flockwatching.

Between 1996 and 1999 he taught and lectured in social and political theory at the University of Oxford. In 1999, he exited academic life to work as an analyst of global social, cultural and technological trends. He also became a regular contributor on politics and contemporary society to newspapers and magazines, and managed projects and wrote several pamphlets for the think-tank Demos.

After 2003 he became a regular writer for the Financial Times magazine, writing features, interviews and essays. Between September 2005 and October 2006, he wrote a column for the Guardian’s Saturday paper called BIG IDEA, and before that he wrote similar columns for The Times and the Financial Times. He's also written for the London Review of Books, and The Economist. He's lectured on contemporary cultural, social, technological and political trends everywhere from Oxford University to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, from the Ottawa Writers Festival to the LSE, from the annual conferences of the Arts Marketing Association to that of Schroders Bank.

He was the associate producer of Adam Curtis's three-part series about game theory, The Trap, which aired on BBC2 in March 2007. In the same year, he took second prize in the annual Sean O'Faolain short story competition in Ireland. His first book was Big Ideas, based on his weekly column for the Guardian. His essay "Caught in the Net" has been re-published in Yale University Press's annual Best of Technology Writing book for 2010.

James won a K Blundell award from the Society of Authors for his third book Niche about the changing shape of culture, politics and society.