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Xiaolu grew up in China, but moved to the UK in 2002. She is an award winning author and film-maker, named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, a prestigious list published only once a decade.  Her new novel, , explores a very specific type of vicarious experience – that of a translator.

Elinor is Network Facilitator of the ‘’, a research project at the Ruskin School of Art, at Oxford University. In conjunction with leading neuroscientists, and film and art theorists, the project investigates mirror-touch synaesthesia, a recently discovered, deeply resonant neurological condition, and its implications for art and the spectatorship of art. People with mirror-touch synaesthesia respond to touch that is seen out in the world- applied to other bodies or even to objects- by feeling a corresponding touch on their own bodies.

Armita is a psychologist at the Emotion Lab of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.  Her research interest is in the indirect experience we all draw on – watching others, so we can better navigate our surroundings and learn what is safe and what is dangerous. Her current project is investigating how learned fears can be extinguished via social learning – i.e. watching someone else react calmly to an object of fear.

In this week’s 60 second idea, art curator Elinor Cleghorn wants to set up a Global Education Skill Swap. Traditional crafts people, such as cobblers, builders, potters, leather-workers and weavers would share their methods with school teachers and their students.  In return the teachers would offer the crafts people education for education's sake.  The main aim of this Skill Swap would be to increase the viability and respectability of those who work with their hands, as learning these crafts is often viewed as somehow inferior to more academic pursuits.