AIRE

Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment

We are AIRE.

We work as a collective. We think, write, and do our practice together.

In response to contemporary neo-liberal universities, we challenge the assumption that meaningful scholarship must centre on individual authorship, competition, and institutional prestige.

We think, instead, that there is another way of inhabiting academia, one that values dialogue, collaboration, and care over isolation, productivity, and status.

Our aim is not only to demonstrate that research can emerge through a caring and creative dialogue done together, but to actively embody and promote this alternative model of academic work.

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)

We are AIRE.

more birds singing – exhibition

Call for Papers: Seeing Beyond the Human: Attending with Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley

Call for abstracts special Issue Simone Weil & Art