Conference Agenda

This Game Changer will explore barriers to collaboration and opportunities to facilitate paradigmatic shifts towards more equitable co-existence and co-flourishing. It will consider how we can ensure that justice and, in particular, multispecies, social and environmental justice have a seat at the table and are taken seriously. This may involve a shift from pusillanimity to magnanimity and the necessary integration of spiritual health and growth into learning and teaching.

This Game Changer explores how bringing slow-pedagogies into Higher Education can help us rediscover our place in the universe. It recognises that a reflexive turn is needed if we are to transcend dualistic thinking and explore co-presencing and genuine meeting with the more-than-human. If the practice of ecological pilgrimage as a methodology for re-imagining our fraught relations with the world is to realise its transformative potential, however, it needs to engage with and contribute to the biomedical sciences, especially where they seek to explore inter and transdisciplinary approaches to complex planetary health challenges. One Health and the related fields of Ecohealth and Planetary Health offer opportunities for such transformative work. There are many obstacles, however to such collaborations. A particular obstacle to such transformations lies in the analytical traditions and habits of those working in STEM disciplines and their historical siloing away from the SHAPE disciplines, where process-philosophy and methodological pluralism and diversity may have already contributed to a Great Turning (Macy and Brown, 2014) into re-imagining and re-creating the world. It will challenge One Health to build on its recognition of equity as a guiding principle (OHHLEP, 2022), to address its anthropocentrism and historical animal, plant and fungi blindness.

In this Game Changer, we draw on walking practices to consider how qualitative researchers can engage with quantitative researchers whose disciplines may still be invested in and wedded to objectivism, rationalism and materialism, anthropocentrism and androcentrism. This can challenge us to make sense of our grapplings and struggles when facing into the realisation that the Cartesian model is still running our institutions and that God is an engineer or mathematician. Descartes maintained that truth is found only in clear and distinct ideas. For Thomas Aquinas, however, truth is a passion of the heart for “the objects of the heart are truth and justice” (Sheldrake and Fox, 1996, p.73). A concern for justice is therefore a game-changer, providing it is recognised as central and foundational to the inquiries we engage in and lives we lead. But what if our collaborators have not bought into this brave new world and are content working on technofixes to preserve the old order? What if our collaborators do not recognise the rights of more-than-human animals, rivers and the life-sustaining systems we depend on? These represent very real tensions and challenges within the academy.

Walking affords unique opportunities to slow down and come into relational ecological presence. The significance of this shift in mode of being has been recognised by philosophers, writers and researchers from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Gros to Solnit, Kahn and Ingold. It is perhaps best summed up by Thich Nhat Hanh’s invitation to find peace in every step. Stepping off the busyness of life to gain perspective is therefore a serious activity and one that has been recommended as a search for presence, grace and right-relation. It represents a shift from ego to eco and as such can be viewed as ecological pilgrimage: a journey on foot through which we learn to live our questions. This shift embraces the wholeness of experience and the many epistemic practices through which we become more ecological. The pedagogical potential of pilgrimage allows us to explore fourth person knowing (both at the level of the individual and the collective) and to encounter and resolve conflictual tensions in our relationships with ourselves, others and the more-than-human.

This Game Changer will be of interest to pedagogues, psychotherapists and other professionals working in reflexive interdisciplinary ways to promote health and flourishing and interested in exploring how education can guide and heal the soul. It is hoped that this will allow us to take our path making more seriously to better realise transformative learning and fourth-person knowing.

References:

Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming back to life : the updated guide to The work that reconnects. New Society Publishers.

Sheldrake, R., & Fox, M. (1997). Natural grace: Dialogues on science and spirituality. Bloomsbury.

One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP). (2022). One Health: A new definition for a sustainable and healthy future. PLoS pathogens, 18(6), e1010537. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1010537