AIRE

Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment

We are AIRE.

In response to contemporary individualism, reinforced by political, economic and academic systems, we challenge the assumption that meaningful scholarship must centre on individual authorship, competition, and institutional prestige.

We work as a collective, embracing a hybrid, collaborative form of subjectivity. Our aim is not only to demonstrate that research can emerge through shared inquiry, but to actively embody and promote this alternative model of academic work.

AIRE stands for a different way of doing scholarship, one that values dialogue, collaboration, and care over isolation, productivity, and status.

Aire means attention and care in Irish. It also stands for Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, a reminder of our commitment to engaged, ethical, and environmentally aware forms of thought and practice. Our work explores how practices of attention can reshape the way we think, learn, and live, in relation to the environment, to others, and to ourselves.

We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; …  Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention. (Murdoch, Against Dryness)

  • Philosophy in the wild – first workshop

    On Wednesday afternoon all members of AIRE came together for our first Philosophy in the Wild workshop at the Ballinfoile-Castlegar Neighbourhood Centre in Galway. The session explored Mary Midgley’s idea of mixed communities, bringing attention to the ways humans and nonhumans co-inhabit shared spaces. Through a biodiversity walk and talk led by scientist Caitríona Carlin, sit spot practices, creative activities, and group inquiry, participants were invited to notice what usually escapes attention and to reflect on how different forms of…

    Read More here

  • Philosophy in the Wild – Finding Hope in Mixed Communities

    We are the AIRE collective research group. We are philosophers and researchers based in Galway, working at the intersection of Public Philosophy and Environmental Philosophy, particularly interested in the philosophical and moral value of attention. As part of the Philosophy in the Wild initiative, our project will consist of a series of meetings and practices spread over several months. Our central aim is to explore the complex relationships between non-charismatic species and humans, focusing in particular on those species inhabiting…

    Read More here

  • Music in Ireland- be part of it

    The final phase of our research project is currently in preparation. This will be an exhibition of reproduced materials from the Iris Murdoch archive, new and exsting contemporary art and a very special sound piece. We are looking for people to take part! We are incredibly excited to have been granted permission by the Iris Murdoch Archive to create a recording of an unpublished poem entitled Music in Ireland. For this, we are hoping that female and female-identifying Murdochians will…

    Read More here