IEP 426: Contested Natures

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Tutor

Phil Macnaghten

My research interests centre on the embodied dimensions of people’s experience in, and of, technology, the future and the natural world. Much of this interest has focused on the ways in which contested ideas and discourses of nature and the natural world continues to permeate everyday life, and the implications of such fine-grained understandings for the development of socially-resilient and sensitive public policy and governance.

Over the last 10 years my research has focused broadly on the cultural dimensions of environmental policies, movements and practices. This has included working with government commissions and agencies, business, local government, environmental NGOs, as well as on research council grants and fellowships. I am currently directing a major new ESRC funded research project entitled: Nanotechnology, Risk and Sustainability: Moving Public Engagement Upstream.

Matthew Kearnes

My research interests are defined broadly around a conceptual project that seeks to explore the material and the physical. I am interested in co-constitution of the social, the cultural, the natural and the material. My work explores ontological question of what ‘objects can do’ in the constitution of subjects, beings and cultures. Whether in previous research concerning the use of public art in contemporary urban landscapes, the socio-natural co-constitution of the city, or in current research on the material innovations of nanotechnology, my concern is to re-think notions of physicality toward an active account of material agency, or ‘what things can do’.

My research is informed by, and seeks to contribute to, current social theory and continental philosophy. I am particularly interested in drawing upon post-structuralist authors in addressing questions of the physical, the material and the ontological. To this end I also draw on wider work in metaphysics, theology, anthropology and mystic traditions. I see my work as not only drawing upon such work in an applied manner, but engaging with it to produce new accounts of ontology and metaphysics.