Research

My research falls in the field of environmental political philosophy and ethics.

I take a pragmatist perspective to think about ethics related to real-world environmental problems in the globalized context of pluralism of worldviews. So I’m at the crossroad of disciplines and cultures, in particular between East Asian and Western traditions of thoughts.

My (far too big and dreamy) objective is to contribute building an motivational framework that supports sustainable behaviours and that can also reach a global consensus by being compatible with different worldviews.

“Milieu studies” is the rough translation for the Japanese “fudoron” (風土論). Indeed, my main influence comes from a Japanese philosopher, Watsuji Tetsuro (和辻哲郎). I borrow and adapt his idea of a dynamic and adaptable human-environment relation based on a conception of the individual as non-atomistic (人間) and in constant dynamic cycles with her milieu (風土). I integrate these ideas with ecofeminist and political perspectives on the relation to address the risks of abuse coming along a conception of the individual as vulnerable and relational.

From there, I work on what I call the “three levels model” in which the embodied individual agent lives, thinks and acts embedded in the webs of meanings and practices of her milieu. In our daily life, we never experience the environment as a neutral and objective receptacle. Instead, we inhabit it as covered with meanings and guidances for practices. This is the milieu.

We live in the world guided by our cultural imaginary, informed and constrained by the practices that are accepted in the milieu we inhabit, and by making sense of the world with other people. As we share the milieu with other individuals, it is also the place of intersubjectivity, encounters, and negotiations of meanings and usages. As such, the milieu is also a political arena.

I started exploring these ideas with the concept of relational and embodied self as a basis for ethics of sustainability (around ecofeminism in my first years in university in Switzerland, and then with cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives on the self after moving to East Asia). The intuitive question during this period was how are we making decisions, how making decisions is shaping who we are, and so how can we make more sustainable decisions.

Then I zoomed out of the micro-scale of the self to explore how we interact with each over to make sense of the world and negotiate our shared milieu. Currently, I’m working on my doctoral dissertation. Here is the general flow of the questions that guide my thinking and structure my doctoral dissertation.

All this is a work-in-progress!

For more visual material, check out my previous posters, and for more “serious” texts, have a look at my publications.

Feel free to contact me and exchange your comments and ideas!

---

I’m currently affiliated to the Laboratory of Global Environmental Policy (地球環境政策論研究室), in the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies (地球環境学舎) at Kyoto University (京都大学) in Japan.