AIRE means attention and care in Irish — two guiding principles at the heart of this project. AIRE began as an exploration of how we care for and about others, ourselves, and the environment through philosophical dialogue. What started as a facilitated reading group soon grew to commissioned art, an archival exhibition, and a conference, all grounded in collaborative and creative inquiry.

AIRE was made possible through funding from the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations Award, and was led by Dr Lucy Elvis and Michela Dianetti.

Reading Group

2023 was the 60th anniversary of the novel The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch. Set in a fictionalised vision of the burren, a unique landscape in the West of Ireland, this beautiful book explores love, loss guilt and isolation.

In this project, we established two reading groups that engaged with The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch through the method of Community of Philosophical Inquiry.

These groups met weekly over the course of four weeks. They operated as philosophical communities, using Murdoch’s novel as a gateway to explore themes of home, environment, and identity, both as they appear in the text and as experienced in the participants’ diverse lives. The CPI sessions were facilitated by Lucy Elvis, Michela Dianetti and project assistant Ronan Geraghty.

This part of the project had two main purposes:

• To create communities that think and discuss together about themes that matter today
• To use the facilitators’ learning from this process to develop a publicly available reading group resource, enabling others to engage with the novel and think philosophically together.

Mapping Attention: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

An interdisciplinary conference on the theories, practices, and beneficiaries of attention
Galway, 18–19 April 2024

This international conference took place in April 2024 as part of the AIRE – Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment project, supported by the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations Award. Building on a Community of Philosophical Inquiry centred on Iris Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn, the event brought together scholars, artists, and educators to explore attention as a critical concept across disciplines.

Framed around three thematic strands—theories of attention (yesterday), practices of attention (today), and beneficiaries of attention (tomorrow)—the conference featured a rich programme of papers, creative presentations, and roundtable discussions. Topics included the ethics and politics of attention, its role in education, artistic and activist practices, and the implications of attention for care, marginalised identities, and the natural world.

A highlight of the event was the launch of an exhibition of newly commissioned artworks alongside archival materials, offering new insights into Iris Murdoch’s relationship with the West of Ireland.

(Un)real Ireland – Exhibition

The final phase of our research project culminated in an exhibition that brought together reproduced materials from the Iris Murdoch Archive, both new and existing contemporary artworks, and a specially commissioned sound piece (sound engineer Fabrizio Urbani).

We were honoured to receive permission from the Iris Murdoch Archive to create a recording of an unpublished poem entitled Music in Ireland. For this, we invited female and female-identifying Murdochians to lend their voices by recording readings of the poem’s various drafts. The resulting sound work featured six lead voices layered with contributions from a broader group of Murdoch scholars, creating a rich, immersive wall of sound that offered a moving tribute to Murdoch’s literary and philosophical legacy.