Whitney Bauman
is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He teaches and lectures on science and religion, religion and nature, and religion and queer theory. His books include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (Columbia University Press 2014), Theology,Creation and Environmental Ethics (Routledge 2009), with Lucas Johnston Science and Religion: One Planet, Many Possibilities (Routledge 2014), and with Kevin O’Brien and Richard Bohannon, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology (Routledge 2010; revised and updated edition May 2017). He is currently working on a manuscript that examines the religious influences on Ernst Haeckel’s understanding of the natural world.
Sigurd Bergmann
holds a doctorate in systematic theology from Lund University and is Professor in Religious Studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. His previous studies have investigated the relationship between the image of God and views of nature in late antiquity, the methodology of contextual theology, visual arts in the indigenous Arctic and Australia, as well as visual arts, architecture and religion. He has initiated the European Forum on the Study of Religion and Environment, and ongoing projects investigate the relation of space/place and religion and ‘religion in climatic change’. His main publications are Geist, der Natur befreit (rev. ed. Creation Set Free); God in Context; Architecture, Aesth/Ethics and Religion (ed.); Theology in Built Environments (ed.); In the Beginning is the Icon; Så främmande det lika (on Sámi visual arts, globalisation and religion); Raum und Geist: Zur Erdung und Beheimatung der Religion; and Religion, Space and the Environment. Bergmann was a co-leader of the interdisciplinary programme ‘Technical Spaces of Mobility’ (2003–07) and co-edited The Ethics of Mobilities; Nature, Space & the Sacred; Religion, Ecology & Gender; Religion and Dangerous Environmental Change; Religion in Environmental and Climate Change, and Christian Faith & Earth. 2011–12 he was a visiting fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in München. He is editor of a book series, board member of several international journals, and former leader of the section for philosophy, history of ideas and theology/religious studies in the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters.
received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in Modern Religious Thought. He is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Ohio Northern University, where he teaches classes in contemporary theology, ethics, and the history of Christian thought. He is co-editor of Placing Nature on the Borders of Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (Ashgate, 2011), Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Theological and Ethical Perspectives on Climate Engineering (Lexington, 2016). Clingerman has published a number of journal articles and book chapters in the environmental humanities. His recent publications have focused on the meaning of place in environmental philosophy and theology, the relationship between nature and the arts, and theological responses to climate change and climate engineering.
Reiko Goto Collins
was born in Japan and is an environmental artist and researcher. Her creative practice is concerned with empathic relationships with living things for over twenty years. Reiko is currently focused on the development of new work dealing with empathic relationships, sentience and collaboration with a horse, a philosopher and an animal behavior scientist. She has been a participant in the women’s group, the Council for Uncertain Human Futures at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.
Tim Collins
is from the US and is an artist, author and planner and an honorary research fellow at the University of Aberdeen. He works across science and philosophy to develop projects related to nature, culture and public space. He is currently collaborating with an anthropologist and a social scientist. Together Tim and Reiko are principals in the Collins and Goto Studio in Glasgow. They are currently focused on developing new work around the Centre for Nature in Cities (CNC). The first project The Caledonian Decoy will be an installation and a series of programs that play with the time and space of a forest in an urban setting. It is scheduled for exhibition in the Intermedia Gallery at CCA, Glasgow, in 2017. Other recent exhibitions include Future Stratigraphy at the University of Sydney, Australia; plans are underway to exhibit a touring version of Plein Air in USA in 2018.
J. Sage Elwell
is Associate Professor of Religion and Art at Texas Christian University. He is author of Crisis of Transcendence: A Theology of Digital Art and Culture. He also
Arto Haapala
received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and his M.A. in Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. He has been Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki since 1995. He has been a visiting Professor at Temple University, Philadelphia, Lancaster University, UK, Universities of Murcia and Málaga, Spain, and a visiting researcher at Universities of Freiburg and Bochum, Germany. He has done research in different problems in aesthetics, particularly in ontology and interpretation, as well as in environmental aesthetics and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. His most recent interests are in the aesthetics of everyday environments and urban aesthetics. His publications include What Is a Work of Literature? (1988), The End of Art and Beyond (ed. with Jerrold Levinson and Veikko Rantala, 1997), City as a Cultural Metaphor: Studies in Urban Aesthetics (ed. 1998); Interpretation and Its Boundaries (ed. with Ossi Naukkarinen, 1999), Aesthetic Experience and the Ethical Dimension: Essays on Moral Problems in Aesthetics (ed. with Oiva Kuisma, 2003), Paradokseja paratiiseissa: näkökulmia urbaanin luonnon kysymyksiin (Paradoxes in Paradises: Issues in Urban Nature, ed. with Mia Kunnaskari, 2008). Ympäristö, estetiikka ja hyvinvointi (Environment, Aesthetics, and Well-Being, ed. with Kalle Puolakka and Tarja Rannisto, 2015). In 2010 he founded a journal entitled Aesthetic Pathways together with Gerald Cipriani, and the journal was relaunched in 2014 under the title Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (Routledge: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfap20).
Tim Ingold
is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he went on to establish the UK’s newest Department of Anthropology. Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on comparative questions of environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, as well as on the
Karolina Sobecka
is an artist and designer who has been working at the intersection of art, science and technology, examining social arrangements that exploit, resist or accommodate technological change. Karolina’s recent projects are centered on experimentation in the fields of climate engineering and synthetic biology, considered in the larger context of climate disruption. Karolina’s work has been shown internationally and has received numerous awards, including from Creative Capital, Rhizome, NYFA, Princess Grace Foundation, Eyebeam, Vida Art and Artificial Life Awards and Japan Media Arts Festival.
George Steinmann
is a visual artist, musician and researcher based in Bern, Switzerland. He studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Basel, as well as painting, sound and Afro-American culture at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work focuses on the relationship between contemporary art and science and the interconnectness of art, culture and sustainability. He has completed transdisciplinary projects and conceived multimedia-based exhibitions at the Helmhaus Zürich, Salo Art Museum, Kunsthaus Interlaken, Kunstverein Kassel, Villa Elisabeth Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, Kunsthalle Bern, Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto, The Contemporary Arts