Online Zoom Forum: David Abram: The Spiritual, Ecological, and Philosophical Vision in His Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 4 February 2026.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Dr Nadine Andrews:
Bio: Dr Nadine Andrews is a mindfulness, nature-connection and Qi Gong teacher, and a researcher and facilitator of climate and eco psychology processes. She works part-time in the Scottish Government as a systems thinking and learning lead for strategic organisational change. With her work she aims to help people live in deeper connection and harmony with nature, addressing root causes of the climate and nature crises and contributing towards a life-friendly world.https://lifefriendly.earth/
Speakers:
Dr Adrian Harris:
Title: Ecological Crisis as Imaginal Crisis: David Abram's Vision.
Description: Adrian Harris explores the imaginal dimension at the heart of David Abram's work - the psychological ground that makes his animism and embodied ecology both possible and transformative. Drawing on depth psychology, ecopsychology, and fieldwork with contemporary animist practitioners, Harris suggests that ecological devastation is accompanied by imaginal impoverishment: when the world no longer addresses us as living presence, both psyche and place suffer. This presentation examines how Abram's vision calls us back to a more careful mode of attention - one that is ethical without moralising, spiritual without doctrine, and ecological without abstraction.
Bio: Dr Adrian Harris is a psychotherapist, ecopsychologist, and psychedelic research therapist. He has been involved with ecotherapy for nearly twenty years and is Lead Editor of the European Journal of Ecopsychology. Harris has published work on animism, ecotherapy, psychedelics and embodied knowing. His book ‘Nature Connection: Remembering Wholeness’, was published in 2025. He has a PhD in Religious Studies.
Prof Glen A. Mazis:
Title: Entering Into the Sensuous Spell: Abram and the Aliveness of Being.
Description: David Abram has offered the human animal a path of humility and magic that reawakens the spell of the sensuous, to use the phrase of his first book title, that is currently buried and rendered seemingly a fantasy by the currents of global culture that alienate us from this underlying treasure. My talk will try to evoke how Abram’s work takes its starting point with Merleau-Ponty and then dives within a richer flow of necessary energy and communication that is available to us in entering a round dance with the animals, plants and all the material beings of the world, as well as with those strange other animals, the humans. I will concentrate of what is the kind of listening to the world Abram articulates as well as how we move with it in rhythms, gestures, feeling, song, and eros by opening to a different sense of Being of others and ourselves. I will also talk about what prevents us from entering into this vital realm and how we can free ourselves from this self-enclosure.
Bio: Glen A. Mazis is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Emeritus at Penn State Harrisburg. He is the author of Emotion and Embodiment: Fragile Ontology (Peter Lang, 1993), The Trickster, Magician and Grieving Man: Returning Men to Earth (Inner Traditions, 1994) and Earthbodies: Rediscovering Our Planetary Senses (SUNY, 2002), Humans, Animals and Machines: Blurring Boundaries (SUNY, 2008) and Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination and Poetic Ontology. He has published more than three dozen essays on aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in journals and collections, as well as numerous essays on emotion, imagination, art, film, dreams, embodiment, animality, archetypal psychology, gender issues, ethics, ecology, technology, etc. He is also a poet who gives readings, performances, and has published more than 100 poems in leading literary reviews and two poetry collections, The River Bends in Time (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012) and Bodies of Time and Space (Kelsay Books), as well as a poetry chapbook, The Body Is a Dancing Star (Orchard Street Press, 2020).
Dr John Robert Bagby:
Title; Perceiving-Animal: Openness, Rhythm, Place.
Description: I will discuss the Merleau-Pontian themes of openness and rhythm as keys to enliven our primordial but slumbering powers of animality, as sense-engendering movements that inhabit a living sense of place. Place is the very openness by which our movements form rhythms with a multiplicity of contexts and contents. I will suggest that, following Abram, philosophers should be less preoccupied with building a static system of concepts that explain all reality in advance of our daily life, and rather work on altering and developing our powers of perception: to enliven a rhythm of meaningful-movement-honoring-place. Animism is, then, a way of living and moving, rather than an idea or belief.
Bio: Dr John Robert Bagby (Jack) is associate professor of Philosophy, Consciousness, and Cosmology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He received a BA in philosophy at Pennsylvania State University and Doctorate at Boston College. His research focuses on the history of philosophy from a phenomenological perspective, especially problems related to consciousness, nature, and aesthetics. He has published on ancient Greek philosophy, Henri Bergson, and Baruch Spinoza, and has strong research interests in 19th-20th century European philosophy (esp. process philosophy, transcendental philosophy, and French Spiritualism) and philosophy of music. He regularly teaches classes on Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology.
Prof Melissa M. Parks:
Title: Ecocultural Adjustment: Embodied Approaches to Acculturation.
Description: Drawing from Abram’s concept of the more-than-human world, ecocultural identity theories, and authoethnographic studies, this research critiques the dominant anthropocentric frame of cultural adjustment, reconceptualizing the process as ecocultural adjustment. Ecocultural adjustment theory calls attention to the impact of the environment on the transitioning human body and points to the need to reimagine the acculturation process as deeply sensuous, embodied, and ecological.
Bio: Melissa M. Parks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. Her teaching and research interests span the areas of environmental and science communication, place-based pedagogy, and ecoculture. She is also the Associate Director at the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education, where she is committed to providing impactful experiential learning experiences in Montana’s unique Centennial Valley.
Dr Mariko Thomas:
Description: Directed by Abram’s work with animism and the sensuous flesh of language, this offering will position the telling and reading of fairy and folk tales as re-animating acts of spell-work, in which humans may intimately engage with the ecological materiality of more-than-human beings all around them. While literature on folk and fairy tales often position them as morality vehicles infused with cultural decrees around everything from gender norms to identifying good and evil, or alive and dead, this presentation pushes back on this presumption and considers the wild, powerful and sometimes persistent animism of stories, and the language they are often unsuccessfully buttoned into. In closing, an exercise will be offered with heuristic suggestions on using queer ecology perspectives in the rewriting and retelling of familiar stories to draw the more-than-human, and indeed the human, into sensuous visibility.
Bio: Mariko Oyama Thomas Ph.D. is a writer, instructor, and independent scholar living between Northern NM and Whidbey Island, WA. She has an M.S. in Communication and Research from Portland State University (2013) and a Ph.D. from University of New Mexico in Environmental and Intercultural Communication (2019) as well as a background in creative writing and performance. Her research interests are largely focused on plant-human relationships, environmental justice and racism, and more-than-human communication; all with a methodological focus on storytelling.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Booking: By Paypal.
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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Bank Address: Edinburgh Royal Mile Branch
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