Category Archives: Philosophy and The Environmental Humanities

Last Chance to register for Critical Ecologies Summer Symposium 2025

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Last call to participate in our C3 Critical Ecologies Symposium, July 9th 2026!

Where:    Level 3, Catalyst Building. Leek Rd. Campus, University of Staffordshire
When:    July 9th 2026 10 – 4pm

Last chance to sign up and join Rebecca Nunes and Anna Francis and other researchers whose practices intersect with climate alliance and social equity for a day of research sharing and development of exploratory future collaboration. If you would like to join us please email or Teams me: rebecca.nunes@staffs.ac.uk so we can add you in. The day will be held in Catalyst, and food and drinks will be provided.

Critical Ecologies Summer Symposium 2025

Critical Ecologies is a grassroots research hub, generating a community of practice holding space to focus discussion and innovation around nature recovery and environmental justice.

The outcomes of our collaboration throughout the day will form a Research Document, which will be shared immediately after the Symposium with all participants and will inform our ongoing efforts for the next year’s cycle of Critical Ecologies Seasonal Gatherings for 2025/26.

Symposium Date: Wednesday, 9th July 10 – 4

Level 3, Catalyst Building. Leek Rd. Campus, University of Staffordshire 

“Speak to the earth and it will teach you”: a theological Bestiary for the ecological crisis

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A slime mould, as imagined by AI
A virus, as imagined by AI

In “Speak to the earth and it will teach you”, C3 member PETER KEVERN is seeking to recover the wisdom of the mediaeval Bestiaries to rethink our relationship to the natural world.

Professor Peter Kevern is a theologian whose research focuses on the influence religious ideas and images have on our individual and social wellbeing. He is currently working on a project to use the thinking behind the mediaeval Bestiaries to inform our response to the ecological crisis.

The mediaeval Bestiaries were books of ‘beasts’, often imaginatively written and richly illustrated. Although they are often treated as manuals of early (and very inaccurate) natural history, they are more concerned with theology and ethics. In most examples, each creature is considered to display some deep truth about human beings, God, or good and evil, meaning that can be discerned by thoughtful reflection on the creature’s properties and behaviour.

The Bestiaries emerge out of a world where human beings were inseparably linked to creation and believed the natural world to be charged throughout with deepest meaning and wisdom. In an age when our alienation from the natural world is bringing it, and us, to the brink of collapse, the pattern of thought behind the Bestiaries may have something to teach us.

“In this project I seek to recover some elements of that pattern, and apply them to creatures (such as viruses, slime moulds, black holes and Schrodinger’s cat) which were undreamt of by our forebears. In the process I hope to recover for our own time this sense of a world charged with meaning, and develop a set of practices that respond to its prompting.”

Contact Peter Kevern or the C3 Centre at C3Centre@staffs.ac.uk if you want to know more.

Philosophy Research Seminar Series – Life Matters: Thought, Nature and Technology

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  • When: 27th March 2025
  • Where: Online
  • Registration: Please contact Patrick O’Connor if you would like an invite to the meeting.

You are invited to Staffordshire Philosophy’s research seminar series. This time we will be speaking with Prof. Katherine Withy who teaches Philosophy at Georgetown University.

Paper: The World of the Kitchen

Abstract: When Heidegger introduces the notions of world and being-in-the-world in Being and Time, he speaks of the carpenter’s workshop.1 The carpenter’s workshop is both part of a world—namely, the world of a tradesperson in early 20th Century Germany—and a model for what it is to be in a world at all. As a model, the carpenter’s workshop has profoundly influenced how Heidegger’s concepts of world and being-in-the-world were developed and how they have been given uptake. You can hardly take two steps into Heidegger scholarship without running into a carpenter and their hammer. Using this example as a model for being-in-the-world makes certain features of us and the worlds we inhabit salient while obscuring others. Some of what this model obscures is crucial to the phenomenon of being-in-the-world, and it is made perspicuous by a different model. I want to suggest that a better model for being-in-the-world is being in the world of the kitchen.

Please contact Patrick O’Connor if you would like an invite to the meeting or if you are having trouble accessing the paper

EVENT: Critical Ecologies, Thursday 11th July 2024

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  • Thursday 11th July 2024
  • Catalyst CA2 Creative Lab
  • 10 am – 5pm

Critical Ecologies is an opportunity for academic and non-academic staff to come together and share research in alliance with communities and ecologies.

We have two exciting keynote presentations, and space for 6 presenters from within the University to share their research. In creating this fledgling research hub we are acknowledging the need for an open and respectful space where we can build (and rebuild) an interdisciplinary research culture. We also aim to centre nature recovery and environmental justice within these interdisciplinary conversations.

Research Seminar Series – Life Matters: Thought, Nature and Technology

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Visiting Speaker – Prof. Joost Van Loon – Historical Materialism and Actor Network-Theory
31 October 18:00 Online
For a link, contact Patrick O’Connor

Research Seminar Series – Life Matters: Thought, Nature and Technology

You are invited to Staffordshire Philosophy’s research seminar series. This time Prof. Joost van Loon from Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt will be joining us online for an MS Teams event to discuss his paper “Historical Materialism and Actor Network Theory.” The paper is available at the bottom of this message.

Paper: ““Historical Materialism and Actor Network Theory.”

Abstract: “Those who invoke the term new materialism mainly do so because they want to distinguish it from materialism-as-we-know-it, or better, from materialism-as-we-thought-we-knew-it. This materialism usually goes by the name of Marxism. However, I prefer to use historical materialism as this is the term that Marx and Engels themselves used to describe their approach. By contrast, ANT is itself working with an already established tradition whose roots go back via Deleuze (1994) and Whitehead (1978) to Tarde (2009), Nietzsche (1992), Leibniz and Spinoza (2004), I am implying a wider philosophical trajectory than those usually invoked by sociologists when dealing with ANT…”

Bio: Prof. Joost van Loon is the Chair of General Sociology and Sociological Theory from Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. His research is concerned with theoretical engagements with social and cultural processes with a specific focus on media and technology. Professor van Loon is editor-in-chief of a great journal called Space and Culture and his publications include the monographs Risk and Technological Culture (2002) and Media Technology: Critical Perspectives (2008). He has also published several articles.

Please note Joost has supplied a copy of his paper so please read in advance. Bring your questions, queries and comments with you, and we can explore the themes of the Joost’s paper together. The session will comprise a short interview with Joost and I. Then we will take questions from the floor. Asking consent here to record event.

Please contact Patrick O’Connor if you would like an invite to the meeting or if you are having trouble accessing the paper.