What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
My PhD project with GOODATTENTION and SalientSolutions at UiO delves into the relationship between the temporal dimension and the normative implication of attention. My investigation will be along the following interconnected lines:
(1) Are there norms of attention pertaining to the temporal dimension of attention? In other words, are there temporal parameters of attention that are of normative significance?
(2) How does attention, as it temporally structures our experience over time and figures into our perception of reality, capacity for reasoning and action, serve as a source and expression of normativity, possibly across domains?
(3) How are norms of attention and norms as attention, as examined in (1)&(2), related; and how can we cultivate such normative attention and normatively-enabling attention through time, individually and collectively?
I am particularly interested in how certain experiences (moral emotions, limit-experience, aesthetic and religious experience) could temporally restructure and reorient our attention in distinct ways that are of normative significance and, in so doing, how they are related to and could be incorporated to practices of ethical or normative attention. These lines of investigation will inform how certain infrastructure of salience, as curbed and channelled by technology, public space, language, art, could be conducive to or disabling to the kind of attention that embodies certain temporal features, which safeguard or undermine the normative sight and motivational structure that instantiate and protects autonomy and humanity.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
My main philosophical interest engages philosophy of mind (especially perception), moral philosophy, aesthetics, and phenomenology, and has revolved around experience, temporality, and normativity. I am particularly interested in the examination of the structure of experience through the lens of temporality, on the one hand, and how experience could be illuminating, expressive, or generative of normativity, on the other. I am drawn to investigating attention for attention structures experience over time and underlie acts in general and reason-responsive action in particular --- bringing together both strands of her philosophical interest.
I received my MA in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia and studied philosophy, psychology, and the visual arts at Boston University for my BA. During my previous studies, I have done work examining the structure that distinguishes and demarcates various experiences and mental processes, including visual perception, the phenomena of absence in perceptual and non-perceptual experience, the prospect of death, the experience of grief, pain, and the process of conceptual formation, with an emphasis on time. Most recently, I have been examining how grief, when proactively evoked by a practice of imagination of possible but unanticipated loss, could reorient the temporal viewpoint of our attention and subsequently cultivate one's attentiveness to morally relevant facts and moral reason.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I tend to take on creative practice and embodied practice as complementary to and extension of my philosophical inquiry. My creative practices usually deal with visual and spatial forms, edible ingredients, and linguistic configurations. I like to take strolls and hikes whenever I can, and if I have a long duration of spare time, there is a good chance you can find me in a meditation retreat in a zen monastery. During breaks from academia, I found myself drawn to space-making (I co-ran a bookstore in Boston before the pandemic), community-building (I worked with a community of elderlies in Vancouver before I came to UiO), and training for dragon boat racing.