SCE | Constructed Environments

MFA ID Professor Co-organizes Conference with NSSR

MFA ID Faculty Member Eva Perez de Vega is co-organizing a conference with the New School Social Research, featuring presenters from the MFA ID Program. Find out more Here.

Conference:

WITH/IN ENVIRONMENTS

REIMAGINING FRAMEWORKS AND PRACTICES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY

Description of overall conference:

Since Plato, western philosophy has been set down a path paved by a disavowal of the sensuous, bracketed material bodies, and delimited aesthetic conceptions, leaving human beings and their built environments separated from the natural world. Such exclusions have left philosophy ill-equipped to deal with the various environmental crises we currently face, as economic rationality and utilitarian logic further de-animate the world and sharpen the human/nature distinction. Even the concept “environment” often, and ironically, brings with it implicit anthropocentric assumptions, conceptualizing, and thereby separating, the human as independent from the surrounding world and reinforcing the human/nature divide. As a result, our (mis)understandings of “nature” and “environment” may make us insensitive to and perpetuate, rather than address, climate change and other environmental catastrophes. To avoid ambiguities and clarify our understanding, we must ask: what role does Nature play within our theories and practices concerning so-called Environmental Philosophy? Furthermore, what spaces, practices, and questions are made possible when we broaden our understanding of “environment” to include a more robust conceptualization of the natural world and how the human being ought to be contextualized within it?

This conference asks how we might reorient the language and practices of philosophy in a way that can enable us to adequately respond to ongoing environmental crises. As a starting point, we propose a need to reimagine the concepts “human,” “nature,” and “environment,” as well as the reciprocal relations that constitute them. To recognize humans as natural organisms, we must reevaluate the sensuous, the material, and the aesthetic and the roles they play in our attempts to construct, understand, and preserve our environment(s).

Program

Thursday, April 14th

6:00 – 8:00 pm
Keynote Address
Aesthetic Perception and the Intrinsic Value of Nature
Sandra Shapshay (CUNY)
Location: Kellen Auditorium Room N101 66 Fifth Avenue

Friday, April 15th

11:00 am – 12:30 pm
Session I: Graduate Paper Presentations (online)
Emptying the Climate Crisis through Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika | Anish Mishra (Hong Kong University)*
Lewis Mumford: A Science of the Organism | Jacob Tucker (University of Denver)*
Carbon Leviathan: A Planetary Sovereign Governing the Anthropocene | Florian Skelton (Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main)*
Location: 66 West 12th Street Room A410

1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Conference Sustainability Workshop (online)
Kaitlin Louise Pettit (University of Utah)*
Philosophers for Sustainability
Location: 66 West 12th Street Room A410

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Session II: Graduate Paper Presentations
Epistemic Injustice and Native Peoples: An Epistemic Failure | Corinne Persinger (Colorado State University)
Consequences of Panpsychism: Towards Andean Chrono-Political Ecology | José Rafael Luna Valencia (The New School for Social Research)
The Human Development of Nature: A Virtue Theoretical Approach | Kyle Cox (CUNY Graduate Center)
Location: 66 West 12th Street Room A410

6:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Musical Performances
Tar Sands Song Book | Tanya Kalmanovitch
Collective Sounding | Melissa Grey & David Morneau
Location: 66 West 12th Street Klein Conference Room A510

Saturday, April 16th

11:00 am – 12:30 pm
Session III: Graduate Paper Presentations (Online)
Colonialism, Conservation, and Epistemic Injustice | Alina Anjum Ahmed (University of Georgia)*
Rewilding in a Disenchanted World | Linde De Vroey (Antwerp University) *
“Look at the person who looks at the trees”: Subjectivity, Environment and History in Timothy Morton’s Ecology Without Nature | Renzo Nuti (University of Padua)*
Location: 6 E 16th Street, Wolff Room D1103

12:45 pm – 1:30 pm
Graduate Project Presentations
Breaking the Stress Bubble | Namita Chandrashekar (Parsons School of Design)
Revealing Stories | Li Xiang, Paula Rodriguez, Yoni Remacka (Parsons School of Design)

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Session IV: Graduate Paper Presentations
The Unrest in the Limit: On the Spatial Dialectic of Inside and Outside | Florian Endres (Princeton)
Toward a Social Framework of Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature | Timothy Mahoney (CUNY Graduate Center)
Misplaced Objects: Aesthetic Emotions and Photography | Silas van der Swaagh (CUNY Graduate Center)
Location: 6 E 16th Street, Wolff Room D1103

4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Session V: Graduate Paper Presentations
Getting Out of the Epistemic Way: A modest proposal for eco-emancipation | Danielle Douez (Concordia University)
A Jihad on Climate Change: Mitigation as an Islamic Obligation | Ahmed AboHamad (University of Connecticut)
What Counts in Environmental Activism? A Case in the Colombian Mountains | Isabel Arciniegas Guaneme (The New School for Social Research)
Location: 6 E 16th Street, Wolff Room D1103

6:00 – 8:00 pm
Keynote Address
Emanuele Coccia (EHESS)
Location: 6 E 16th Street, Wolff Room D1103

Sunday, April 17th

Hike in Cold Spring New York
All conference participants and attendees are invited!

*Asterisk indicates presentation via Zoom
All times listed are eastern standard time

Supported by The New School for Social Research Dean’s Office, Philosophy Forum, and GFSS.