Focusing Roundtable: Let the Landscape Speak to You

Thursday, August 29, 2024 - 1:00 pm-3:00 pm New York Time

Times worldwide: convert to your time zone

Free for members.

Live attendance required - no recording.

The TIFI Membership Committee is pleased to offer this series of Focusing Roundtables, designed especially for members of the Institute. If you are not a member, please join at this link and then return to this page to register. This program will afford members a valuable opportunity to engage in casual peer-to-peer conversation with other members who share Focusing-related interests.

Roundtable Topic:
This Roundtable will explore how Focusing and Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit can open up a space for a different kind of understanding and experience of our relationship with nature and the environment. Facts and information alone are not enough to change our views of nature. Different sensibilities and a focused listening to the body-environment connection are needed to face the challenges of climate change. Focusing is grounded in phenomenological and feminist philosophies of the body that acknowledge the interactivity between bodies and environments. Nature is not something external to us; rather, it is the elements and the ground that sustain us. As bodies, we are organic life forms like plants and animals—material, relational, temporal, contextual, and conditional beings always already entangled and intertwined with natural, man-made, cybernetic, and digitalized environments we interact with.

Guðbjörg and Sigríður, who teach and research environmental ethics and philosophy of nature, will present their thoughts on this topic and lead discussions and exercises to deepen group reflection.

Who might be particularly interested in attending this Roundtable?

This Roundtable is intended for anyone who is interested in bringing Focusing practice more into everyday life and felt sensing of nature and the environment.

Utilizing breakout rooms as well as full group discussion, participants will have the opportunity to resonate their own experiential background with the topics discussed.

CONNECTION>CONVERSATION>COMMUNITY

What to expect from Focusing Rountables:  Each Focusing Roundtable is designed to promote informal peer-to-peer conversation. Rather than acting as expert presenters, the Hosts will serve as conversation moderators to encourage sharing and exploration of the topics from the participants’ own perspectives. All participants’ sharings are welcome and valuable, no matter what level of experience or knowledge you have on the topic. To preserve the nature of informal conversation, the program will be offered live only and no recordings will be available. Registration is limited and on a first-come, first served basis. Participants are encouraged to create follow up opportunities for connection among themselves after the Roundtable.

About your hosts:

Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir (Gugga) is an associate professor at Iceland University of the Arts' department of art education. Environmental philosophy has been at the center of her works from the start of her philosophy studies at the University of Iceland. Her research centers on environmental ethics, phenomenology and aesthetics, and she has published papers and book chapters on landscape, beauty and sensuous knowledge. In her PhD project, Icelandic Landscapes: Beauty and the Aesthetic in Environmental Decision-making, she provides a phenomenological account of the concepts of landscape and beauty, and discusses the meaning and values that are derived from aesthetic experiences of landscapes and the role of such values in environmental decision-making. Her current research within phenomenology and aesthetics focuses on human-environment / body-landscape relations and processes, and their role in human thinking and understanding. She is a certified Focusing trainer and has been an active member of the Embodied Critical Thinking research team. In her teaching at the IUA she has been developing ways to integrate ECT methods into research practices in art and education. 

Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir (Sigga) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. She studied philosophy in Boston and Berlin and has taught philosophy in Germany and Finland. Since her dissertation on Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body, she views embodiment as one of the main philosophical discoveries of the 20th century, with feminist, phenomenological, and environmental philosophies at the forefront. Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy and his focusing-based methodology of philosophical thinking offer a leap into practice, which she understands as breaking new theoretical ground and a return to the basics of the practice of philosophical thinking. Sigga is the co-editor of two books on this topic published this year: Embodied and Elemental Thinking for a New Era (co-edited with L. Škof and Sashinungla, Springer 2024) and Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning (co-edited with Donata Schoeller and Greg Walkerden, Routledge 2024).