Dr. Adam Briggle, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas, will deliver a plenary address on field philosophy at the 2016 SENCER Summer Institute. This year’s Institute will be held at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois July 28 – August 1, 2016.
Field philosophy, which eschews a disciplinary approach to understanding problems in favor of an on-the-ground examination of them, will be the main focus of Dr. Briggle’s plenary address. He will explain the field philosopher’s approach to wicked problems and the similarity of that technique to SENCER’s methods. He will also offer a critique of disciplinarity as a limited way of understanding these problems, using his involvement in the fracking debate as an example. The address will also include an interactive session where participants will work together to devise strategies for further connections between STEM and the humanities.
Dr. Briggle holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His areas of focus are fracking and energy politics, ethics and policy of science and technology, environmental ethics and policy, and bioethics. Dr. Briggle is well known for his work on a ban on hydraulic fracking passed in his local community of Denton, Texas, and for his continued opposition to fracking in the wake of state legislation negating the ban. He is the author of A Field Philosopher’s Guide to Fracking, a book about his work on the fracking ban, and co-author of Socrates Tenured, a forthcoming book about the state of contemporary academic philosophy and the move by some toward the practice of field philosophy.
Registration for the Institute is open now. Early registration ($700 per person) will end on March 11, 2016. From March 12 – June 17, 2016, the registration fee will be $750 per person.
If you have any questions about the Institute, please contact Kyle Simmons, NCSCE’s Faculty Development Events Manager at kyle.simmons@ncsce.net. You can register for the 2016 SENCER Summer Institute here.