REGISTER: Contact Professor Long Bui via email at longb@uci.edu. 

About the talk:
In this talk, Donaldson will blur the line between the secular and religious by showing unquestioned anthropocentric assumptions within both. We will then rethink “religion” through philosophical frameworks of the South Asian tradition of Jainism and Alfred North Whitehead's process-relational thought, wherein religion functions not so much as assent to a dogmatic creed, but as an embodied ethical practice of increasing awareness and response toward animals and planetary life.

About the speaker:
Brianne Donaldson explores how implicit metaphysical beliefs inform social inclusion and ethical action toward plants, animals, and marginalized people. She is the author of Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation (2015) and Insistent Life: Principles for Bioethics in the Jain Tradition (2021, co-authored with Ana Bajželj). She is the editor of Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature: A Common World for Animals and the Environment (2014), The Future of Meat Without Animals (2016; co-edited with Christopher Carter), and Feeling Animal Death: Being Host to Ghosts (2019; co-edited with Ashley King).