Note on: how we think, speak and write about ecology

This morning I went to Sciences-Po in Lille to assist to a lecture of philosopher Stéphane-Hicham Afeissa, entitled La fin de l’humanité. Essai de généalogie du discours écologique, which is also the title of his last book.

It was a revelation to see the assiduity, with which these French students copied down the entire one and half hour (!)  lecture, by hand (!!), on the classic, blue and red millimeter checkered, Carant D’Ache paper, which I still nostalgically remember from my own time in the French education system.

Afeissa is one of the speakers, whom I have invited for a conference cycle that I co-curate with textile designer & researcher Aurélie Mossé, and design theoretician Anna Bernagozzi, both also teachers at l’École des Arts Déco here in Paris. He will deconstruct the way we think, speak and write about ecology, and demonstrate the analogy with apocalyptic discourses of the end of the world, in order to show that if we want to address ecological issues in a lucid way, we first need to understand how we should frame these issues. To this end, he developed an “outillage mental”, a mental toolbox.

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Further reading:
Afeissa’s conference page (in French); he will speak on January 7th 2015 à Ecole des Arts Déco.