Philosophical Approaches to Cultures and Environments

Miguel Prado Casanova’s six-month community research project, Risks Beyond Human Eyes, co-led by UWE Bristol and the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), explored how systemic risks facing the River Tone in Somerset can be understood from the perspectives of its non-human inhabitants.

Working with local participants, the project focused on five species, red deer, otters, earthworms, kestrels and Atlantic salmon, asking participants to learn about their sensory worlds and then use field-based observation to identify risks that conventional human-centred approaches can overlook. The resulting testimonies were used to map risks across the river catchment and explore how more-than-human perspectives might inform environmental decision-making and community responses.

The project partnered with Friends of Longrun Meadow and Somerset Wildlife Trust, and was funded by the Ecological Citizen(s) Network+. It builds on the More-Than-Human Lens Toolkit, developed with Patricia Fraga and Miguel Prado Casanova, and has also led to the development of an Animal Collaboration Guide, designed to make the approach adaptable to other species, landscapes and communities.

Dr Jessie Stanier supported a patient-led group and nurses at an NHS Trust to rethink how the executive board received and responded to patient stories, co-identifying common concerns and together developing a distinctive narrative framework for effecting change by sharing patient experiences. This engaged project chimes with her philosophical work on the phenomenology of pain with Dr Nicole Miglio on

1. the benefits and limitations of standard methods (such as “pain scales”) in contrast to other collective modes of meaningful expression
2. how structural conditions can make pain, especially chronic pain, more or less difficult to bear.

Dr Fidel Meraz explores philosophical and phenomenological perspectives on architectural conservation, heritage, and adaptive reuse. His work bridges theory and community-led spatial practice, investigating how built heritage fosters collective memory, identity, and social reality. As a trustee of both Trinity Community Arts and Stokes Croft Land Trust, he contributes to community asset acquisition, protects historic spaces from gentrification, and secures long-term citizen ownership.

Professor Phil Cole’s work explores challenges for Global North academics in addressing the experiences of the forcibly displaced and constructing an ethical framework that speaks to those experiences. This means confronting the issues of white supremacism in ‘western’ thought, and of privilege and positionality when working on these questions. He was awarded a British Academy Research Fellowship in 2019 to work on this project, resulting in a book, Global displacement in the Twenty-First Century: Towards an ethical framework, published in 2022. His most recent publication is Displacement and human security, published in the Oxford Handbook to Human Security in 2026.

Dr Fidel Meraz investigates philosophical frameworks in architecture and urbanism, focusing on sensory experience, bodily presence, and socio-spatial inclusion. His research spans the phenomenology of spatial experience and aural wellbeing, such as exploring how adaptive spaces support individuals with dissimilar sensoriums, to critical examinations of urban praxes, histories, and phenomenological frameworks concerning marginalised homeless youth in European cities, as presented at the European Association for Urban History Conference. Co-editor of Designing for health and wellbeing: Home, city, society, his work applies integral theory and architectural metaphysics to advance inclusive, sustainable, and health-oriented urban environments.

Dr Jessie Stanier studies how older age is experienced and shaped by socio-political conditions, through engagement and qualitative interviews with older people. She has published work on how nostalgia interacts with perceptions of intergenerational conflict, conditions enabling open-mindedness at older age, and anticipation of transitions at older age (see also video lecture). She is also a member of the interdisciplinary DFG-funded MOVIDEM Network.

Professor Francesco Tava has been awarded UWE Bristol Strategic Research and Impact Programme (SRIP) funding as project lead, working with Dr Kyle Alves and Dr Elizabeth Green, to explore the ethical governance of secure infrastructures that allow approved researchers to access sensitive data. The project builds on their recently published interdisciplinary study (Tava, Alves, and Green, 2025), proposing a fairness model for Trusted Research Environments (TRE) governance grounded in public benefit.

Drawing on the concept of fairness, the model integrates both defensive motivations, such as non-discrimination and redistribution, and progressive ones, including transparency, participation, and data agency. The article concluded with four concrete policy and practice recommendations for TRE operators and data practitioners, and explicitly identified the collection of expert feedback on the model’s practical applicability as the essential next step for research in this area. Their new project engages a targeted group of practitioners including data managers, gatekeepers, ethics committee members, and data scientists through workshops and structured interviews, to empirically test the TRE fairness model, refine it in response to their expertise, and document measurable changes in professional practice.

Dr Katrina Mitcheson has worked extensively on understanding the limits and possibilities of self-cultivation and the role of artistic practices in modelling and facilitating processes of constructing and deconstructing the self. She has explored this in publications in relation to visual art, with a monograph on Visual art and self-construction, and in terms of narrative identity. Her research on these topics draws on her expertise on Foucault, Ricoeur and Nietzsche, as seen in her recently published chapter on ‘The transformative potential of Ricoeur's narrative self’. Her work on Nietzsche’s comparatively neglected text Dawn highlights both Nietzsche’s critique of a socially constructed ego and his exploration, through metaphors of pregnancy and gardening, of the potential to re-shape ourselves.

Outputs from this research include a recent article in Nietzsche-Studien on Nietzsche’s use of the metaphor of pregnancy and a forthcoming guidebook on Dawn. Currently, she is drawing on Paul Ricoeur to address whether we have an ethical obligation in how we narrate and construct the self. She is also extending her work on Nietzsche to explore themes of sculpting the self in a forthcoming book chapter, while discussing the intersection between self-cultivation and the problem of style in both art and philosophy.

Dr Niall Keane and Dr James Costello are working on how phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics can inform our understanding of psychological suffering and the relationship between therapist and client. Their co-authored book, Entwined selves: Relational encounter in psychotherapy, is forthcoming with Routledge. Drawing on Straus, Heidegger, Gadamer and Arendt, it explores selfhood as something shaped in and through our relations with others and asks how genuine encounter remains possible where understanding falters, communication becomes difficult, and outcomes cannot be secured through method or explanation. Two related co-authored articles develop these themes in phenomenological and clinical contexts. The first, on Carl Rogers' core conditions, asks what reflective practice alone cannot provide in the therapeutic relationship, and is forthcoming in Person-centered and experiential psychotherapies. The second, revisits Ludwig Binswanger's The Case of Ellen West, arguing that existential analysis can render a life coherent without changing the conditions it describes, and that it needs to be supplemented by a Gadamerian account of encounter. 

Dr Niall Keane is completing a book on Heidegger and Gadamer for Cambridge University Press's Elements series. The book examines the relationship between Heidegger's thinking and Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, tracing how Gadamer took up and transformed Heidegger's account of understanding and interpretation, and what this means for how we think about language, tradition and our belonging to a shared world.

Dr James Costello is bringing a phenomenological approach to the study of sleep and is currently conducting a series of funded interviews exploring the lived experience of insomnia, with particular attention to how sleeplessness alters people’s experience of time, agency, the body and the everyday world.

Dr Lita Crociani-Windland has been working on the project Psychostructures - a transdisciplinary collaboration seeking to understand and enhance our relationship with architecture - with Jonathan Mosley, Sophie Warren, Nigel Williams and Anthony Faramell. It is a coalescing of psychology, psycho-social studies, conceptual art and architecture. The researchers have developed innovative techniques that explore the psychology of buildings and the communities of users they serve, drawing from continental philosophy, critical theory and psychoanalysis.