CURRENT + ONGOING RESEARCH
DEEP AESTHETICS
Deep aesthetics is essentially transdisciplinary in nature. It is rooted in the primary ground of the aesthetic as sensuous engagement, woven from strands from philosophy - especially phenomenology - depth psychology, philosophical anthropology, and diverse cultural knowledges. Deep aesthetics foregrounds the backgrounded relational and interconnected aspects of life and living beings, re-situating humankind within a complex world of enmeshed and interdependent Being and mutual becoming. It focuses on depth of engagement and a radical intersubjectivity. Most importantly, deep aesthetic engagement offers revelatory, and potentially transformative, experience. My interest in developing a deep aesthetics is rooted in the question of how to transform human-world and interspecies relations, with a focus on abandoning the dangerous reductive and dualistic ontology of modernity, changing human consciousness and ultimately our behaviours and technologies. Can it be that this is more a matter of re-membering what has been dis-membered, or split apart than of anything new? In the words of psychologist James Hillman speaking of the aesthetic and the Anima Mundi, or soul of the world, "I {often] wonder less how to shift the paradigm than I wonder how we ever got so far off base.”
To read or download conference talks, papers, and publications developing and working with these ideas, please visit: Academia
RESEARCH INTO
PRAXIS
INTO FLOURISHING
WELCOME
to this small personal site with examples from 3 decades of research and practice investigating how aesthetic engagements, and especially arts and design based praxis, can seed and nurture transformative change in socio-cultural systems toward a sustainably flourishing future for all life.
...we emphasise again that culture is not just a topic of cultural policy.
It should also inform and be integrated within all other policies. Dessein, Soini, Fairclough and Horlings (2015). Culture in, for, and as Sustainable Development
