Past Events:
November 6, 2025
Seminar Series: Environmental Ethics
Bukonla Olisa (PhD): Environmental Sustainability and Solidarity With(in) Nature: An Afro-Complementarist Approach (November 6 2025 from 14:00 – 17:00)
Hybrid lecture: In-person at The Roots, 954 M.C. Roode Drive, Potchefstroom, online on Teams.
Abstract: The challenge of achieving environmental sustainability is atthe forefront of global discussions today. The borderless nature of environmental crises necessitates a fresh, collaborative approach to sustainability, particularly one firmly rooted in solidarity. This work advances the concept of Afrocomplementarist solidarity as an approach to the discourse on environmental sustainability with(in) nature. Drawing from African environmental theories, especially from the Igbo tradition, with principles such as Ibuanyidanda (complementarity), Ndu Mmili Ndu Azu (Live and let live), and Ohanife (ecosystems: interdependence and complementarity), this work argues that Afro-complementarity demonstrates that entities complement one another by showing how the existence and thriving of one is connected to the survival of others within the overall ecosystem. This perspective establishes solidarity as an ethic that acknowledges the shared vulnerabilities, responsibilities, and interdependent roles humans and non-human entities play within the ecosystem. By underscoring the importance of peaceful co-existence amidst diversity and collaboration over exploitation, Afro-complementarist solidarity provides a foundational framework for redefining sustainability as not just the preservation of resources but as maintaining a relational equilibrium. This work concludes that ecological and sustainability challenges can be effectively tackled by fostering a sense of solidarity with(in) nature, informed by insights found within the African thought system.
About the speaker:
Bukonla Olisa holds a Doctoral Degree (PhD) from the Philosophy Department of Lagos State University, Ojo, earned in 2023. She earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) and a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Philosophy from the University of Lagos, Akoka, in 2008 and 2011, respectively. She also holds a National Certificate in Education (NCE) from Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Ijanikin, Lagos, (2004). Her current research focuses on environmental philosophy, sustainability, ethics, and phenomenology. She has published academic papers, some of which are currently under publication in peerreviewed journals and book projects. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Philosophy at the North-West University, Potchefstroom, in South Africa.
Shawn Simpson: On the Case Against Revolution in Hobbes’s Leviathan (November 6, 2025 from 14:00-17:00)
Hybrid lecture: In-person at The Roots, 954 M.C. Roode Drive, Potchefstroom, online on Teams.
Abstract: In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes offers several arguments against revolution. In this paper, I identify and analyze what I see as four key lines of reasoning: (1) the logical argument, grounded in the nature of the social contract; (2) the representation argument, concerning who may properly negotiate on behalf of a group; (3) the theological argument, appealing to a covenant with God; and (4) the undue risk argument, a prudential argument emphasizing the inherent risks of rebellion. I argue that the first three arguments fail due to unjustified and questionable assumptions about the nature of contracts, agency, and divine authority. I take the undue risk argument to be more compelling, but I show that when recast as a decision problem it reveals scenarios in which Hobbes’s own method of calculation renders revolution more rational than submission.
About the speaker:
Shawn Simpson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at North-West University. From 2022-2025, he was a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His interests are in aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of language, and biology.
November 17, 2025
Seminar Series: Merging Theory and Practice
Adriaan Buys (PHD): From Armchair To Fieldwork: Operationalising Empirically Engaged Philosophy Through The Lens Of Saunders’ Research Onion (November 17 2026 from 14:00-17:00)
Hybrid Lecture: In-person at the NWU Senate Hall, Potchefstroom Campus, online on Teams.
Abstract: Empirically Engaged Philosophy (EEP) represents a paradigm shift, moving philosophical inquiry from purely theoretical reflection to data-driven investigation. However, this "empirical turn" presents a critical methodological challenge: how do we translate complex, abstract philosophical concepts into rigorous, measurable instruments without losing their semantic richness? This presentation explores this challenge from the unique perspective of a data collection partner. Using Saunders’ Research Onion as a diagnostic framework, we examine the critical middle layers—methodological choice and strategy—where philosophical intent must be converted into practical research design. We will discuss the collaborative friction and necessary alignment between the philosopher’s theoretical stance (outer layers) and the operational realities of data collection (inner core). Attendees will gain insights into bridging the gap between high theory and hard data, ensuring that empirical mechanisms faithfully serve philosophical ends.
About the speaker:
Dr Adriaan Buys sits at the intersection of high-level academic theory and the gritty reality of operational fieldwork. As the founder of iFeedback Consulting, Adriaan is a "pracademic" specialising in academic data collection. He has spent over a decade wrestling complex research questions into rigorous, workable field instruments for most of South Africa’s top universities and key international institutions. He doesn't just design research; he builds the mechanisms to deploy it, developing bespoke platforms like iFeedback.app to navigate the messy reality of gathering hard data. Adriaan holds a PhD in Environmental Management, where he used systems thinking to tackle multi-stakeholder complexity. He remains rooted in theoretical demands as a lecturer in Ethics and Governance at Milpark Business School, while managing the daily friction of fieldwork.
July 1, 2024
Lecture Series: Conceiving the Ethico-Political Power of Africa’s Contemporary Art(ivism) (August-October 2024)
This lecture series appraises (South) Africa’s contemporary art(ivism) as a key site and resource for direly needed ethico-political renewal and leadership often overlooked in the dominant focus on political, corporate, technological and scientific actors.
The series showcases on-going research on the aesthetic-ethical-political work performed by engaged artists, its multiple modes and strategies, its transformative potential and efficacy, as well as related risks and trouble spots. With the lectures series, ICE endeavours to facilitate and stimulate interdisciplinary and intersectoral conversations on art(ivism) as a singular mode of agency at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics.
Dates:
14 August 2024: Pfunzo Sidogi (Tshwane University of Technology)
11 September 2024: Nomusa Makhubu (University of Cape Town)
9 October 2024: Carlos Castellano (University College Cork)
Further context:
In the 2015 preface to On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe credited Africa’s aesthetic and imaginative disciplines for having been inspirational trailblazers in the early 1990s when established intellectual and political models became increasingly defunct. Mbembe here highlights their “paradoxical and at times risky play with both the limits set by moral or political orders and those that shape language and style, thought and meaning.” Africa’s creative and artistic practices are thus valued for their irreverent, transgressive play with exhausted moral, political, linguistic, aesthetic and conceptual frameworks, unlocking and imagining novel ways of feeling, being, doing, and thinking in the process.
More recently, at a turbulent period in post-apartheid South Africa heralded by events such as the 2012 Marikana massacre and the 2015 FeesMustFall protests, artistic actors were also at the forefront of the cultural, social and political ferment. Within or alongside emerging social movements, transgressive and imaginative aesthetico-political acts engaged enduring issues of socio-economic inequality, racial oppression, colonialist legacies, spatial exclusion, gender violence, patriarchic domination, cultural marginalisation, and their multiple intersections. While Mbembe was mainly inspired by African popular music and novels, more explicitly socially committed, “artivist” and public art practices played a prominent role at this later juncture, whether as creative conduits for societal discontent or by experimenting with more just or remedial social relations.
October 9, 2024
Carlos Garrido Castellano: Thinking through Practice: The Potential of Decolonising Socially Engaged Art (9 October 2024 from 14:00 – 15:30)
Online public lecture as part of the lecture series Conceiving the Ethico-Political Power of Africa’s Contemporary Art(ivism)
This lecture will engage with non-Western genealogies of socially engaged art in order to think how art can be a tool for effective, practice-based decolonisation. Gathering a diverse array of creative and activist strategies, socially engaged art remains a crucial platform for progressivist social transformation and direct action. Professor Garrido will argue that anti-colonial processes and genealogies were already advancing and mobilising some of the main concerns that have become commonplace within the global contemporary art world. Claiming these processes and genealogies is important because many of the pitfalls and criticism associated with socially engaged art derive from long-lasting exclusionary and Eurocentric dynamics.
Carlos Garrido Castellano is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer at University College Cork, where he coordinates a BA programme in Portuguese Studies. He is also a Senior Associate Researcher at the University of Johannesburg’s Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD). He is the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future (SUNY Press, 2021), Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System (Routledge, 2023) and Chorus: Sonic Politics of the Carnivalesque in Tragic Times, as well as of two other monographs in Spanish and one in Portuguese. His work has been translated into several languages. In Cork, he has developed an active programme of socially committed, community-based cultural and research activities. His focus on cultural activism and the legacy of colonialism implies placing diversity and non-extractive research practices and methodologies at the centre of current debates on cultural production as a tool for social transformation.
August 14, 2024
Pfunzo Sidogi: Ubuntu Aesthetics and Urban Design Equality in South Africa (14 August 2024 from 14:00-15:30)
Online public lecture as part of the lecture series Conceiving the Ethico-Political Power of Africa’s Contemporary Art(ivism)
In this lecture, Professor Pfunzo Sidogi proposes the notion of Ubuntu aesthetics as a panacea to the historical and ongoing urban design segregation in South Africa. He will argue that Ubuntu design considerations can result in a soft equality between the deeply unequal urban living patterns in South Africa. While acknowledging the benevolent ethos inherent within the decolonisation rhetoric, it will be proposed that Ubuntu design thinking, as opposed to decolonial aesthetics/design, can genuinely transform the built environment in South Africa and the rest of the continent. Ubuntu design aesthetics thus offers a localised and humanist impulse that cannot be delimited to the African experience.
Pfunzo Sidogi is a lecturer in the Department of Fine and Studio Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology. His latest books are Mihloti Ya Ntsako: Journeys with the Bongi Dhlomo Collection (2022) and The De-Africanization of African Art: Towards Post-African Aesthetics (2022), co-edited with Denis Ekpo.
September 11, 2024
Nomusa Makhubu: What’s Class Got to Do With It? Art and Civic Engagement (11 September 2024 from 14:00-15:30)
Online public lecture as part of the lecture series Conceiving the Ethico-Political Power of Africa’s Contemporary Art(ivism).
In this lecture, Professor Makhubu reflects on the photography exhibition The Evaton Peoples’ Archive (2022) as a way to address class politics and civic engagement through the arts. Designed to catalyse intergenerational dialogue among residents, the aforementioned exhibition sought to uncover the suppressed histories of Evaton (an area that lies south of Johannesburg) once defined by its flourishing Black transnational and pan-African institutions and the locus for key intellectuals in the liberation movement and protests in South Africa. Currently, Evaton is mired in land disputes and state neglect. Images of cosmopolitan educated landowners in Evaton show inter-class dynamics and how, through photography, class consciousness shaped local and transnational solidarities, and what the lessons might be for the decolonial perspective.
Nomusa Makhubu is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Cape Town. Her many articles and chapters focus on African popular culture, photography, interventionism, live art, and socially engaged art. Makhubu also does curatorial work such as the international exhibition Fantastic in Michaelis Galleries in 2015, co-curated with Nkule Mabaso.
June 5, 2024
Janae Scholtz: At the Limits of Agency and Freedom: Para-Freedom and Response-ability (5 June 2024)
Public lecture as part of the project Posthuman Ethics: Reimagining the Art of Living.
In this lecture, Professor Janae Scholtz addresses the disturbing rise of fascism in many parts of the world and the frightening acceptance of genocidal strategies in the name of freedom, agency and self-defense. Given this, she argues that it may be time to reconsider the language of politics itself. Her presentation thus takes aim at the limitations of the concepts of freedom and agency as the hallowed values of liberal politics, human rights, and concepts of sovereignty. She argues that these much-hailed values are themselves harbingers of the kind of totalizing and hypostasizing prerogatives which lend themselves to fascist violence and self-centeredness that suspends the possibility of compassion. For her, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze offers the means to operate at the limits of these concepts (or beyond), and to re-align political language and thought towards ontological relationality and compassionate recognition of our shared experience of chaos, irrationality, and indeterminacy – the suffering and pain of existence.
Professor Janae Sholtz is a Fulbright Specialist and visiting Professor from Alvernia University. She is the author of The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (2015). Sholtz has published research in the areas of Continental philosophy, feminist theory, philosophy of art, posthumanism, and social and political philosophy. She has a strong interest in aesthetic practices and how the affects created through these practices contribute to a new ethos that can be shared and transmitted on social and political levels.
Conference Panel: Artistic Approaches to the Environmental Crisis (24 March 2024)
This panel (subtitled: “Re-imagining Human-Nonhuman Relations through Drawing, Film, Relational Art, and Sculpture”) was organised by Dr Nicola Grobler and Dr Matthias Pauwels at the inaugural conference of the Southern African Society of Environmental Philosophy (SASEP) at the Krüger National Park’s Skukuza Camp.
Presentations:
Marili de Weerdt (Vega School): “Making Conversation: Surface Encounters and Material Exchanges Between an Artist and a Tree.”
Cow Mash (Tshwane University of Technology): “Plastic Kraals and Woman Cows: An Ecofeminist Exploration of Selected Sculptural Work.”
Chantelle Gray (North-West University/ICE): “White God: Rethinking Human and Nonhuman Subjectivities through Underdog-Superhero Narratives and Ahuman Theory.”
Nicola Grobler (University of Pretoria): “Encouraging Multispecies Sociability Through Art: Anthropomorphism in The Visitor Centre.”
Panel description:
In addressing contemporary environmental issues and challenges, scientific and technological approaches are clearly dominant and prioritised. However, since the environmental crisis also importantly involves a crisis of the imagination, artistic approaches should be given more prominence and recognition. Ongoing contributions by artists range from creating tangible, embodied experiences of the often intractable environmental processes informing climate change, raising awareness of our profound dependency on other life-forms, to exposing and renegotiating dominant cultural attitudes toward nature, and re-imagining different relationships between human and nonhuman beings.
This panel will specifically focus on the latter operation and thematic, and the ways they have been taken up in philosophical-aesthetic and artistic-creative work in South Africa. Covering diverse art genres such as relational art, collaborative drawing, sculpture, and film, the panel’s four presentations interrogate human exceptionalism whilst creatively appraising possibilities for stretching and re-imagining human-devised categories and practices. In doing so, presentations take their inspiration from theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Despret, Harraway, Latour and Callon, and Puig de la Bellacasa, while tapping into conceptual resources such as actor-network and ahuman theory, indigenous African spirituality, ecofeminism, and speculative care ethics.
Overall, the panel asserts art’s singular role and potential in challenging and resetting pervasive human attitudes towards the nonhuman which underlie the inconsistent and slow response to environmental crises such as mass species extinctions and biodiversity loss. As such, it hopes to contribute to exploring and nurturing more caring, balanced and reciprocal interspecies relations.
See link here to the special issue published after this panel: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rdat20/60/1?nav=tocList
SEMINAR SERIES: Thinking our Environmental Future: Conversations on the Environment, Climate and Ethics
November 29, 2023
Catia Faria: Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature
Part of the seminar series Thinking our environmental future: Conversations on the environment, climate and ethics
Catia Faria will be talking to us about her book Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature. The book explores wild animal suffering as a moral issue and argues that there is a moral obligation to intervene in nature to alleviate this. It begins by establishing two main assumptions: suffering is bad, and if we can prevent or reduce suffering without causing greater harm and without jeopardizing other important values, we have an ethical obligation to do so. The first chapter emphasizes that nonhuman animals, including wild animals, are morally considerable beings due to their sentience and well-being, which should be equally valued regardless of species membership. The book contends that if death is bad for humans, it may also be bad for nonhuman animals, providing additional reasons to act on behalf of wild animals to prevent their suffering and death.
The subsequent chapters address various objections to intervention in nature, such as perversity and futility arguments, which suggest that intervention could make things worse or is bound to fail. The book rejects these objections, asserting that intervention should occur when the expected outcome is net positive for wild animals. Additionally, the concept of speciesism is examined, with the book arguing against unjustified disadvantages based on species membership. It rejects anthropocentrism as a justification for speciesism and criticizes flawed accounts of moral considerability, advocating for a broader understanding of positive obligations toward wild animals.
The book also discusses the prevalence of suffering in the lives of wild animals, detailing the ways their interests are systematically frustrated by natural events. It concludes that intervening to reduce wild animal suffering is both feasible and morally justified. Overall, the book calls for a more compassionate and proactive approach towards wild animals, urging readers to extend their ethical obligations beyond merely refraining from harm and actively intervening to help animals in need.
Catia Faria is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics.
EMBED THIS VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MPj6XrR4Xw
August 23, 2023
Workineh Kelbessa: Environmental Philosophy in African Traditions of Thought
Part of the seminar series Thinking our environmental future: Conversations on the environment, climate and ethics
Professor Workineh Kelbessa discusses the environmental thought and worldviews of some traditions in Africa. He argues that, unlike mainstream Western philosophy, African environmental philosophy articulates the interconnectedness of all aspects of reality. It supports a holistic view of the world that recognizes the interdependence of humans, non-humans, and ecosystems. In the African worldview, human beings are essentially part of a dynamic interconnected whole from which they are inseparable. When human beings see themselves as outside of nature, it is purely for the purpose of conceptual need. Even here, humans are still in nature. African environmental philosophy has the potential to contribute to environmental rehabilitation, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, climate change mitigation and adaptation, thereby helping to address environmental and development problems in Africa. Kelbessa suggests that philosophers and other intellectuals must begin collecting and documenting oral and non-academic sources of wisdom both in urban centers and remote rural areas around the world. Integrating these sources of wisdom into the human knowledge base is crucial.
Professor Kelbessa is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.
EMBED THIS VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyOHk195SlI&t=494s
June 15, 2023
Simona Capisani: Centering Climate Mobility Justice: Livability, Loss and Damage, and the Climate Governance Regime
Part of the seminar series Thinking our environmental future: Conversations on the environment, climate and ethics
The influence of climate change on mobilities is complex, and possible outcomes of the mobility-climate nexus range from instances of mobility to immobility, with varying degrees of agency across such outcomes. Yet climate-related mobility, is largely portrayed in the media and in the public debate through the lens of one specific outcome: displacement across borders, particularly from non-Western to Western countries. These foci appear reflected in the current international policy landscape relevant for climate mobilities as well. The global climate change regime under the 2015 Paris Agreement (PA) is somewhat more expansive in its consideration of the challenges climate-related mobilities . Yet the focus of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s institutional arrangements with regard to mobility as described in the PA remains narrow: first, it regards displacement as the central problem requiring address; second, it consigns climate mobilities to the Warsaw international mechanism for Loss & Damage (L&D). Consequently, the current setup is both normatively and practically limited in its capacity to address the whole range of mobility outcomes resulting from climate change.
In this talk, we propose a novel normative framework for addressing climate mobilities justice which addresses the full heterogeneity of climate mobility outcomes and provides a principled approach for determining the nature of the obligations to protect those at risk. Both tasks are critical for evaluating and further developing international governance mechanisms for addressing climate-related mobilities. We argue that our framework, based on the right to a livable space, not only offers moral and pragmatic advantages on prevalent normative approaches but also identifies the potential of the global climate regime under the Paris Agreement as mechanism to protect this right, consequently identifying its potential as a key governance framework for meeting justice-based requirements of climate mobilities.
While we highlight the advantages of the Paris Agreement as a governance mechanism, we also demonstrate that more must be done for it to satisfy the demands of climate-mobilities justice. To do so we suggest that further evaluation of the normative scope of Loss & Damage is required. Depending on how this new pillar of the climate change regime will evolve in coming years, we provide several options describing how the Paris Agreement can meet the demands of climate mobilities justice by identifying various approaches to understanding the L&D and Adaptation pillars, how they relate to each other, and the consequence of their relation for climate-related mobilities. By making climate mobilities more central to the Paris Agreement, we demonstrate how doing so raises important considerations for how we ought to interpret L&D as it assumes a more prominent role in the global climate regime.
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SEMINAR SERIES: Thinking the Future: Conversations on Technology, Subjectivity and Ethics
September 29, 2022
Seminar with Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Part of the seminar series Thinking the Future: Conversations on Technology, Subjectivity and Ethics
Ezekiel’s research critically engages technologies of quantification, particularly the entanglement between power and inequality, and how these assemblages are produced and reproduced. He is deeply interested in how sociotechnical systems of quantification work on the body and generatively shape human learning and development. At the same time, his work is aimed at developing alternative philosophical and methodological practices of inquiry and quantification that counter and repotentialise the flows of social and political life. Ezekiel is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (University of Minnesota Press) and the co-editor of Thinking Comprehensively About Education: Spaces of Educative Possibility and Their Implications for Public Policy (Routledge) for which he received the Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association in 2018. In this talk, Ezekiel address Blackness, measurement and algorithmic governance.
Embed this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzP5Oo8T6RM
July 21, 2022
Paolo Vignola – Notes on the Extractivist Image of Thought
Part of the seminar series Thinking the Future: Conversations on Technology, Subjectivity and Ethics
NB: due to a technical glitch, the first few minutes of this talk were not recorded.
The era in which we live is characterized by an unprecedented wave of extractive activities. From traditional extractivisms, related to subsoil resources, to the massive use of data mining, extending even to the extractivism of attention, emotions and dopamine in online activities (dopa mining), it seems possible to find a pan-extractivist thought that structures the western forma mentis and a whole series of narratives linked to it. Everything can now be extracted, by and for the current political economy, up to the point that Artificial Intelligence should be called Extracted Intelligence, because of the systematic dependence of AI on the activities of data mining and capture technologies. In this vein, by recalling the concept of Noology, forged by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, as the historical and societal image of thought that shapes the way of thinking of citizens at all scales of life, it is possible to detect a particular concretization of this image, one that converges in a kind of “extractivist image of thought”, that is to say, an anthropic way of living, thinking and producing information that circulates unconsciously everywhere. This talk, then, aims to develop a radical critique of such an image that implies not only the unveiling of the epistemic and ontological assumptions on which it is based, but also a reconfiguration of all the conceptual sets that have allowed for the establishment of such a vision.
Paolo Vignola teaches Esthetics, Literature and New Technologies, and Literary Theory at the Universidad de las Artes of Guayaquil in Ecuador. He is also Professor of Contemporary Philosophy for the Masters in Philosophy of Azuay University (Ecuador), and adjunct lecturer at the Technological University of Dublin. He is a scholar of French philosophy, esthetics, political ecology, and philosophy of technology and co-founder of the international journal La Deleuziana.
July 14, 2022
Elena Esposito – Algorithms as Communication Partners?
Part of the seminar series Thinking the Future: Conversations on Technology, Subjectivity and Ethics
Research on automatic information processing has always been driven by the idea of reproducing human intelligence with machines. Advanced machine learning algorithms, which inherit and develop this research perspective, are now able to perform many complex tasks that previously had always required the contribution of intelligence. Should we then conclude that machines have become intelligent? If one looks at the work of recent algorithms, one sees that intelligence is neither the point nor the purpose. The project of artificial intelligence has led to building machines that have not learned to become intelligent, but to do something else that humans do on the basis of intelligence: they have learned to participate in communication. Rather than speak of artificial intelligence, then, we might speak of a novel form of artificial communication.
Esposito is professor of sociology at the University Bielefeld and the University of Bologna and is the author of Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence.
Embed this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reqdTgy7M70