Kate is a lecturer in the department of philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, ON. She received her PhD in philosophy from Queen's University in Kingston, ON and was a visiting graduate student at Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity during the Lent 2020 term. Kate received a Master's degree from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in 2017.
As a lecturer and teaching assistant, Kate seeks to bring together rigorous scholarship in the history of philosophy, exploration of burgeoning thinkers, and passionate engagement with how philosophical ideas are relevant to student’s lives.
Kate’s research interests include continental philosophy, applied ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, phenomenology, Indian philosophy, existentialism, and ecological ethics.
Kate is co-editor of and contributor to the forthcoming book "Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil: Unprecedented Conversations" with Bloomsbury press.
Kate's adapted her dissertation into a manuscript, which is forthcoming from Routledge Taylor and Francis' Environmental Humanities series. It places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene.
The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil’s work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology. Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil’s work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of ‘decreation’ in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil’s thought to propose a decreative ecological ethics that decenters the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics.
This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies.