Projects
This page describes philosophy endeavours that are not research, media, or teaching.
My ikigai is ‘the art of academic gathering'. That is, bringing scholars together in innovative ways to develop supportive research communities.
Art of Academic Gathering: Bodies of Researchers
My ‘art of academic gathering’ projects consider how body position and conversational contexts, such as being outside, walking together, or sitting on the floor change the kinds of thoughts and comments that researchers have. We can use embodied cognition to improve academic research communities. Below I sketch some recent projects within this aim.
Here is an Art of Academic Gathering Statement.
Table of Contents:
Philosophy Through Theatre Games
What is Philosophy Through Theatre Games (PTTG)?
PTTG uses interactive, participatory activities to bring philosophy to life. It adapts engaging, thought-provoking games to explore philosophical questions.
It builds on the expertise of theatre game facilitators, and leading
It aims to enrich classroom teaching, and to create new possibilities for community-engaged philosophy and K-12 (school) outreach. That is, it creates interactive philosophy in schools and in the community that isn't modelled on adversarial debate, panels, or talks-followed-by-Q&As. It is a new model for public philosophy.
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PTTG has two branches at this stage:
(A.) Running events in the community, and sessions in high schools, to build experience.
(B.) "Train the trainers". That is, creating workshops to inspire and empower professional philosophers to do Philosophy Through Theatre Games in their own classrooms and communities.
To do this, we are creating a network of people who are interested in building this initiative.
Some activities are below.
We are grateful to the Berry Fund of the APA and the University of Tennessee Humanities Center for supporting this endeavour, and to Jessamyn Fitzpatrick for volunteering her time and expertise to help launch the initiative.
A Free, Fringe, How-To Workshop.
Philosophy Through Theatre Games (PTTG) Workshop during the 2024 Eastern APA, Wednesday, 17th Jan, 2024. This is a fringe, off-programme workshop, with philosopher Georgi Gardiner and theatre games expert Jessamyn Fitzpatrick.
The workshop location is Madison 2. This room is on the 5th floor of the APA hotel. My number is 773 524 9355. Feel free to contact me.
Who?
Georgi Gardiner is a philosopher, circus performer, and director of a lowkey countercultural community arts and gathering venue. Jessamyn Fitzpatrick is a theatre games expert. She specialises in interactive participatory games to generate deep conversations and change social scripts. Jessmyn typically focuses on sex positivity, gender, equity, pleasure, and social justice.
What?
This workshop adapt games and activities to explore philosophy. Participants will learn Jessamyn's recipe for creating theatre games, and apply her recipe to philosophy teaching, public outreach, and more.
We will do/explain examples of Philosophy Through Theatre Games. Participants can share ideas and co-create new ideas about how games and facilitated activities can enhance philosophy.
Why the Fringe?
This event is not on the programme. It is a fringe event. The fringe doesn't conform. It is not sanctioned by the dominant institutions, and so it is free to innovate. The fringe eschews existing expectations: Provider-payee; audience-actor; expert-learner. Free from the confines of standardised professionalism and social scripts, it can re-ask: What are we doing, and why?
The fringe nourishes the mainstream, by igniting novelty. A huge gathering of philosophers, like an APA, warrants a fringe.
Climate Change, Language Change:
Creating a Vocabulary of Healing Through Theatre Games
An evening of participatory theatre games to explore our emotions about climate change.
To heal from trauma or to process emotions, we need to tell our stories. To tell these stories, people need apposite words and concepts. These words and ideas are known as “hermeneutical resources”. Without these cognitive resources—the ingredients of thought—emotional processing can be stymied. People cannot describe their experiences to themselves or to others, and so cannot adequately comprehend their social and emotional circumstances.
We are experiencing a climate catastrophe. We lack the hermeneutical resources to understand its emotional toll. We feel the emotions, but we lack the words to name, describe, and discuss them. These hermeneutical lacunae contribute to an entangled web of emotional, mental, physical, environmental, and economic harms.
This gap is the play-space of the workshop. We will ask: What words do we lack? What terms could we invent, if we felt free to play? What emotions do we feel, yet seldom feel in community because we lack the words to name them?
Theatre games are a powerful tool for conceptual exploration and innovation. They allow us to collaboratively innovate new terms to understand emotions. In this philosophy through theatre games workshop, everyone is a participant and no one is an expert. We will play with ideas.
Funded by: UTHC and One Health at UTK as part of One Health and Humanities Days
By invitation.
High School Outreach
My graduate student, Dario Vaccaro, and I are bringing this initiative into high schools. High School Ethics Bowl appeals to the "debate team" students; Philosophy Through Theatre Games will appeal to "theatre kids". This brings a variety of philosophical modes to K-12 students.
Please contact me for information or if you would like to be involved.
Magazine editors, activists, theatre directors, librarians, teachers, and scholars
Intergenerational activities that imagine conversations with
future generations
Founding director of NimBioS, Louis Gross, & Georgi, helping create a five-person tableau
Reflections on the words we need, but lack, to describe emotions about climate change
The Ethics of Attention
CEU Institute
CEU Institute
1st-5th July 2024, Budapest
Information is here
Apply here. Application deadline 14th Feb 2024.
Secondary information page (Link)
Directors:
Georgi Gardiner (University of Tennessee, USA)
Cathy Mason (CEU, Austria)
Ella Whiteley (LSE, UK)
Guest Teachers:
Tatyana Kostochka (Ashoka University, India)
Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge, UK)
Samantha Vice (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)
Wayne Wu (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Course Assistants and Admin
Dario Vaccaro (University of Tennessee, USA), director's assistant
Emese Havadtoi (CEU, Austria), local coordinator
Kornelia Vargha (CEU, Hungary), course administrator
Topics include attentional virtues, norms, rights, activism, aims, flourishing, character, power, & inequality. Participants first survey major theories of attention, including in Asian philosophy, analytic philosophy, and psychology. We then apply these frameworks to real-life case studies about technology, media, AI, advertising, power, prejudice, bias, colonialism, art, love, friendship, religion, self-improvement, mental health, the body, science research, and skepticism about vaccines, pandemics, and climate change.
This work received support from the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) under grant number IHS017504 and from the Open Society University Network (OSUN). We are grateful for this support.
The Philosophy of Sexual Violence
(Edited Volume)
(Edited Volume)
eds. Yolonda Wilson & Georgi Gardiner
Routledge, 2024
Details and submission instructions are here. (The CFP).
Deadline Dec 1st 2023.
In addition to standard essays, we welcome experimental philosophical contributions, such as poems, artworks, letters, short stories, manifestos, and diary entries. This flexibility of format reflects that thinking philosophically about rape often happens in conversations, community, diary entries, and artworks, rather than in standard academic essays. It also honours the rich feminist, Black, and non-Western traditions of varied scholarly engagement and formats.
The hardback version will be $170 / £130. The eBook and paperback versions will be $52.95/£38.99.
Center for Applied Epistemology
Details Coming Soon. (Funding application available on request.)
The Philosophers CoWork Cafe
It's on Zoom. All welcome.
Find the community here.
Details and pictures coming soon.
The First Gen Philosophers Club
The Coursier Cross Library
As an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, I started this library.
The name honours two brilliant young women, Mim Cross and Charlotte Coursier, who both studied Philosophy at Edinburgh and passed away shortly afterwards.
Mim donated the very first books to the library. She handed them to me in what is now 56 North (at 2W Crosscauseway). Charlotte published in the PhilSoc journal during her time at Edinburgh University
Reflections Retreat:
Philosophical Reflections on Life Experiences
Philosophical Reflections on Life Experiences
Mountain retreat workshop to generate new public-facing philosophy, supported by UTHC. Details on request. I'm very happy to provide them. This event has received $9,000 in competitive grants so far.
The New Ethics of Belief Retreat
At Narrow Ridge
Off-grid in the Appalachian Mountains
In Autumn 2021 I did a vision fast at Narrow Ridge Intentional Living Community. Before and after the time on the mountain, the vision fasters conversed as a group. I was struck by how deep, rich, and powerful our conversations were, in just a few days. I wanted to bring this power to academic research contexts. In Spring 2022, I brought early career scholars to the same off-grid location in the mountains for a philosophy retreat.
The philosophy retreat had almost no standard talks. We instead experimented with a range of conversation structures. We aimed to cultivate new, embryonic ideas in applied epistemology. This event fomented my passion for "the art of academic gathering".
Epistemology Working Group
My advanced students and I meet regularly to workshop each other's research. Description here.
Philosophical Art
The Interstitial
- Collaborative art that explored metaphysical ideas, at Broadway Studios and Gallery.
- Received third place in the Gaudy Gold Frame Competition, March 2023. (Pictured left.)
- The competition rules said 'Anything in a gold frame is fair game'. Our pieces explored what kinds of things can be within a frame. It asked whether magnetic fields, tastes, smells, potential energy, etc. are spatiotemporally located.
Local Producer
- For Plato’s The Apology of Socrates a touring play about the death of Socrates, starring Yannis Simonides, Edinburgh 2009.
Assistant Curator
- For ColloquiArt, an exhibition of philosophical art, the GRV Gallery, Edinburgh, March 2008.
Best Event
- Edinburgh University Students Union, for Poetry Underground, a philosophical poetry slam and cabaret series, March 2008.
Knowledge in Crisis
I am an international collaborator on the Austrian 'Knowledge in Crisis' project. More details coming soon.
The project involves researchers at CEU, and the Universities of Vienna, Graz and Salzburg. The board of Directors is Tim Crane, Katalin Farkas, Jason Means, Paulina Sliwa, Marian David, Max Kölbel, Hans Bernhard Schmid, and Charlotte Werndl.
The four international collaborators are me, Jessie Munton, Jason Stanley, and Quassim Cassam.
Daily Nous update.