This category contains posts related to my research project on the language of freedom, liberation and emancipation in key social debates today. Western modernity has understood itself as having been liberated from past oppressions, and has viewed its future as one of an incremental increase in freedom.This has been its self-understanding, its identity. But since the mid-twentieth century a number of philosophers have argued that this "emancipation narrative" of modernity is at an end, that factors including environmental crisis and the demise of the grand modern political ideologies mean that we can no longer understand ourselves as those who will always become more free.In the light of these arguments, and in an attempt to show that they are not sufficient to capture what is happening to freedom today, I am currently working on a project that combines approaches from philosophy, literary studies, theology, the social sciences and linguistics to explore how understandings of freedom and liberation are being transformed in current debates around technology, religion, identity and climate change.Some of this work is undertaken in collaboration with the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub (MCCCRH).My profile page on the MCCCRH site.
