EDCP is pleased to welcome noted scholar Dr. David Abram to UBC for our summer semester!
Dr. David Abram, a cultural ecologist and philosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1997), and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon, 2010). Hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by Science, David’s writings have catalyzed the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning fields of ecopsychology. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous scholarly anthologies and are regularly discussed in scholarly journals. David’s public presentations often engage the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform the felt relation between the human animal and the animate earth. A recipient of the international Lannan Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Watson Foundations, in 2014 David held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo. He lives with his children in the upper Rio Grande valley of New Mexico.
A brief Talk by David Abram can be viewed here.
Dr. Abram will be teaching EDCP 585B 951: Between the Body and the Breathing Earth: Language and the Ecology of Sensory Experience.
July 10 – 21, 2017 | 1:30 p.m. – 5 p.m. | Daily
In this course, Dr. Abram will discuss how we can open a fresh and deeply-felt solidarity between humankind and the other animals, plants, and elemental forces that compose this breathing biosphere. In a society as sophisticated as ours, technologically insulated from the vagaries of weather and illness and famine, is it even possible to catalyze a renewed recognition of our thorough dependence upon the animate earth? Seeking practical answers to such questions, this course will engage the phenomenological tradition of experiential inquiry and reflection, while drawing insight and wisdom from various indigenous, oral cultures native to this continent. During the first week, focus will be upon the ecology of perception, exploring the dynamic participation between our bodily senses and the earthly sensuous. During the second week, the inquiry will widen to explore the ecological dimensions of language, examining the manner in which different ways of speaking — and different technologies of communication – influence and inform our direct experience of the more-than-human earth.
Dr. Abram will also be delivering a public lecture:
Earth and Dark Wonder: Notes on Animism and Technology in an Age of Ecological Wipe-Out
Wednesday, July 19, 2017 | 5:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. | Scarfe 100
Link to Dr. Abram’s July 19th public lecture page.
Link to EDCP Noted Summer Scholars page.