Some recent lectures
Mist on the mountain: Uncertainty in research, teaching and life
Beauty in the darkness (2021)
On Teaching Time with Plants
Flourishing during the Ecological Crisis
Between Anthropocentrism and Non-anthropocentrism
The story of Kok Mai Bak: Individuality and Plant extinction
Sentience and Mechanism in Biology Curriculum
More videos below…
Ecologizing Education blog
Here is my new blog. I increasingly believe that new ideas should get out there and be shared, and that approaches such as blogging must complement more traditional academic publishing. Here I write in more tentative and exploratory ways about some of the stuff I have been thinking about. It is also here where you will have the chance to dialogue with me in an open forum.
Jazz Ecology
I write a monthly column for the magazine “Herbology News,” entitled “Jazz Ecology.” Articles are freely available.
The Genetic Engineering Debate blog
Another area of research for me is the importance of technological literacy for sustainability education. For example, the impasse between proponents and critics of modern gene technologies presents man misleading simplifications on both sides, which reduces the capacity for people to democratically engage in imagining and shaping the role such technologies might take. “Gene editing” is becoming easy and cheap, “gene drives” are being pondered and developed for ecological and evolutionary restructuring, and human genetic engineering is being considered internationally and in the US by organizations such as the WHO and the NAS. As these technologies gallop in power, an opposite shift has occurred in our understanding of the genome. The past several decades have seen a major challenge to the conventional view of biological evolution. One of the most striking changes is that the gene is losing its place as the canonical unit of biological organization. Because genetic engineering technologies (and many of their criticisms) are still based on the conventional -and on the face of it, increasingly outdated- view, there is an urgent need to examine whether new approaches to understanding the causal relations between genes, organisms, and ecosystems, entail a significant revision in our grasp of the scope, risks, and opportunities of genetic interventions in its various applications. In this blog (http://thegeneticengineeringdebate.blogspot.com/), I explore some of the ethical and ontological problems posed by such technologies along with their pedagogical implications.
Interspecies Design
I have spent some time thinking about architecture and design in the 21st Century might become a more collaborative affair with the more-than-human world. Below you will find an exploratory discussion on this idea. I was invited to speak on this issue at “Reinventing the City: A workshop on habitecture for wildlife.” February 5th—8th 2016 Hosted by University of Toronto & York University, funded by SSHRC Connections Grant.