AIRE

What is Philosophy in the Wild?

This project explores the ethical and philosophical significance of attention to non-charismatic species – such as pigeons, seagulls, bugs, worms, woodlice, rodents, eels, herring – within human-dominated environments. As part of the Philosophy in the Wild initiative, we focus on the overlooked multispecies community of the university campus. Through a series of public philosophy events, reflective practices, and sensory engagements, we aim to challenge anthropocentric perceptions and cultivate attentiveness to the shared lives and entanglements of humans and non-human beings. Drawing on Simone Weil and Mary Midgley, our activities, culminating in a multispecies poetry performance, invites participants to reimagine the campus as a hybrid, co-inhabited and complex space of care.

Influences

In her 1983 book, Animals and Why They Matter, the philosopher Mary Midgley coined the term ‘mixed community’ to highlight that we live in communities made up not only of other humans, but also a diverse range of other-than-human beings. But, it is not always easy to notice this reality. As humans, we spend much of our lives inside – in buildings, classrooms, cars and buses – and when we are outside, the forces of the attention economy and the related prevalence of technology can be distracting and overwhelming. Even when there is time and space for attention, we are often preoccupied with our own thoughts and worries and fail to fully perceive those around us.

For philosophers of attention, such as Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, inattentiveness presents a moral problem. If we do not attend well, our world becomes small, a projection of our own needs and desires, and consequently the propensity for selfish and immoral action increases. Their solution is to cultivate practices of sustained attentiveness that strive to see others in their own right, an approach that has particular relevance in the context of the natural world and in the midst of a biodiversity crisis in which vulnerable species are routinely ignored, rendered invisible, and subject to human-centric bias. 

In this project, we seek to put these ideas into practice by encouraging students and other members of the University of Galway community to attend closely to the other-than-human cohabitants of our campus mixed community, with a particular focus on species and individuals often considered non-charismatic (‘weeds’ or ‘pests’, pigeons, crows, rodents, bats, etc.). We invite participants to cultivate and document these attentive encounters. All the encounters gathered will be featured in an on-campus exhibition and a related publication.

PRACTICE

This project is part of a wider Women In Parenthesis public philosophy project called Philosophy in the Wild – Finding Hope in Mixed Communities.

It was conducted through a series of workshops at the University of Galway using Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI), storytelling practices, sit-spot activities, and poetry-making. The outcomes of these sessions will inform an exhibition and conference in September 2026.

Many of the activities and ideas behind the project are outlined in the forthcoming AIRE article Climate Crisis as a Matter of Inattention: Practising Shared Attention to Invisible Beauty, which will appear in Rethinking Emergency through Aesthetics and Arts, edited by Enea Bianchi and Zhuofei Wang, CIAA: Contemporary Issues in Aesthetics – Annual, vol. 2 (De Gruyter Brill, forthcoming 2026). To learn more about our work, visit the IDEAS webpage.

If you want to know more about the different phases and sessions of this project, check out the Philosophy in the Wild post.

If you would like to know more, please write to info@airecollective.org