Peter Doran
Editor: Peter Doran
Publication date: 2026
RRP: €25
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 9781914596513
In his contribution to this Field Day collection, the renowned writer, Amitav Ghosh, reminds us that as the planet hurtles towards environmental and societal breakdown, brought about by the interlinked vectors of global warming, species extinctions and the spread of new pathogens, it is becoming ever more evident that European modernity is founded on a profoundly mistaken understanding of the world.
The elevation of humans above all other species, and indeed the Earth itself, has had disastrous consequences for humanity as well as all other living Beings. Ghosh locates campaigns for the rights of Lough Neagh and the Rights of Nature in Ireland as part of a wider counter-movement informed by the island’s mytho-poetic and linguistic heritage. He adds: ‘In Ireland, the land, the loughs and the rivers are re-entering history through a trans-colonial prism of the kind that has been so imaginatively excavated by Field Day. It would come as no surprise to me to see new narratives of liberation and belonging take hold on the island of Ireland, narratives that will extend liberation to the landscapes, to the land of Ireland herself.’
In this inspired collection, Peter Doran has curated a selection of responses to the 2024 Seamus Deane-Field Day Lecture delivered in Derry and Dublin by Amitav Ghosh. The Lecture and the collection self-consciously invoke the spirit of Field Day’s quest to turn that ‘trans-colonial lens’ on our island experience, with a fresh and hopeful recasting of how we might come to understand, recast and respond to the socio-ecological crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.
Through the eyes of some of the island’s most creative thinkers and scholars, the collection is, above all, a contribution to what might be described as an emergent eco-centric literary revival, one that will come to free up the contours of a new island imaginary, a New Republic, an Earth:Republic where the island herself and all of her communion of Beings re-enter our lives as subjects – not objects – of history.
About the author
Dr Peter Doran is a senior lecturer at the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland. His research interests include the rights of nature, the wellbeing economy, the commons, geopolitics and the politics of the environment.
He draws heavily on a life-long interest and engagement with Zen Buddhist philosophy to inform aspects of his critical writing on themes such as the ‘attention economy’, including his 2017 book, A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness, and Consumerism: reclaiming the mindful commons. Peter is a founding member of the Environmental Justice Network Ireland and convenes the Wellbeing Economy Alliance hub for the island of Ireland.