Spiritual traditions, semiotics and learning for sustainability
Maureen Phoebe Ellis
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Meeting ID: 973 6542 6365
How can spiritual traditions and metaphor contribute to learning for sustainability? Drawing on the edited collection Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning: Exploring Myth, Metaphor, Magic for Sustainability, this interactive talk explores how people use narratives, symbols and metaphors to understand themselves and their responsibilities towards others and the environment.
This participatory discussion brings together three frameworks: critical realism, which examines reality and our knowledge of it; Cultural Historical Activity Theory, which explores learning through social activity and its contradictions; and semiotics, which studies signs and meaning. It considers how these approaches can help us understand different beliefs and values, engage with paradox, and explore questions of sustainability.
Participants will be invited to interject and discuss how spiritual traditions and metaphor can support dialogue, reflection and action.
Maureen Phoebe Ellis attributes her oekumenism to the Anglo-Indian community in cosmopolitan Bombay; Kimmins a Bible Medical Mission Fellowship boarding school; and life within the British diplomatic service. An Associate Lecturer at The Open University, UK (2006-2021), she has worked in Europe, Australia, China, Africa, and the Middle East, teacher-training, examinations, and consultancies for universities, publishers, the British Council, and Ministries of Education. She gained an Unconditional Pass PhD (2013) at the Institute of Education, London University, where she is currently Senior Research Associate. Three Routledge publications, ‘The Critical Global Educator’ (2016), ‘Critical Global Semiotics’ (2020), and ‘Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning: exploring myth, metaphor, magic for sustainability’ (XSCEL, 2025), reflect her passionate belief in a world beyond war.
Further contextual background:
Kant’s Critical Realism, C. G. Jung’s East-West psyche, Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenology address the ontological question, ‘What is real?’. Philosophy as Proverbs 8 love of Perennial Wisdom, Satchitanand, Semiotic search for Truth Consciousness Bliss, answers: meontology, LOGOS, word made flesh that dwells amongst us.
The edited collection ‘Spiritual Consciousness as Evolutionary Learning: exploring myth, metaphor, magic for sustainability’ (XSCEL) demonstrates Critical Realism as philosophical foundation, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as methodology, and Semiotics, the science of signs, as intuitive, inclusive life-long education for a just world. Relating diverse faiths, twenty semioticians, theologians, and akkademics counter theological illiteracy. Binding maths, music, conventional religions, shamanism, feminism, humanism, and environmentalism, Linguistic Anthropology, Neuroscience, and Quantum Theory confirm Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory.
This interactive session will discuss three comprehensive frameworks which merged and transcended XSCEL dharma, drama, dreams and trauma. Yin/yang trinity, semantic squares, CHAT contradictions, empower Krishtians to live with paradox. Pragmaticism spirals purposeful life, supporting and sustaining complex metaphors – God, Time, Soul, Life, … s/S/self itself. Sans script Sanskrit phono-semantics, Proto-Indo-European reconstruction which undergirds computer science today, even the seventeenth century addition of the final English alphabet ‘j’, invite depth hermeneutics: Ies-u? Yes-us!