European Summer Research Institute

The European Summer Research Institute (ESRI) is an event initiated by Mind & Life Europe bringing together around 120 scientists and practitioners in a unique retreat setting.

ESRI 2023 will take place from August 20th to 24th (arrival date: 19th August) at the Lama Tzong Khapa Institute in Pomaia, Italy.  

The application for ESRI 2023 and the MLE Retreat is now open! Click here to apply. 

Application deadline extended to Friday, May 19th, 2023 at midnight CEST. 

Contents 

• What is ESRI?
• ESRI 2023
• ESRI 2023 Faculty
• Who should attend
• Venue
• Cost 
• How to apply 

Dr. Laura Candiotto is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Centre for Ethics of the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. She is also a Research Fellow of the Intercontinental Academia on “Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence” by UBIAS. Originally from Italy, she moved to Scotland, France, and Germany in the last seven years for carrying out different research projects. Her research focuses on the epistemic role of emotions as embedded in dialogical interactions and communities of inquiry. She has extensively worked on love, wonder, and shame bridging her expertise in the Socratic method of inquiry and the enactive approach to participatory sense-making. She also published on the ethics of knowing with a virtue theoretical approach to epistemic responsibility. She is now exploring the intertwining of the enactive and pragmatist approaches to affective habits and contributing to the development of an enactive ethics grounded on affects as what disclose existential concerns and values, especially regarding environmental issues. As a Tibetan Buddhism practitioner, she has a long standing interest in the transformation of negative emotions, the intertwining of compassion and wisdom, and the role of desire, aspiration, and devotion in contemplative practices. Websites: www.emotionsfirst.org; https://upce.academia.edu/LauraCandiotto

Jennifer Deger is co-director of the Centre for Creative Futures and Professor of Digital Humanities at Charles Darwin University. Her work moves through the intertidal zones of anthropology, art and environmental humanities. It finds form in film, digital media, experimental writing, and curation. For the past 25 years Jennifer has worked on media projects in northern Australia under Yol?u Aboriginal leadership. These intercultural and intergenerational collaborations continue to profoundly energise her commitments to co-creative research and its socially transformative potential. Together with Paul Gurrumuruwuy, Jennifer is a co-founder of Miyarrka Media, an arts collective based on Yol?u country in northeast Arnhem Land; co-author of their award winning book, Phone & Spear: a Yuta Anthropology. She is also co-curator with Anna Tsing, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou of the digital project Feral Atlas: the More-than-human Anthropocene and co-author of this team’s forthcoming book Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene.

Jay L. Garfield chairs the Philosophy department and directs the Buddhist Studies Program and Tibetan Studies in India program at Smith College. He is also visiting professor of Buddhist philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. Academicinfluence.com has identified him as one of the 50 most influential philosophers in the world over the past decade. Garfield’s research addresses topics in the foundations of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind; metaphysics; the history of modern Indian philosophy; topics in ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of logic; the philosophy of the Scottish enlightenment methodology in cross-cultural interpretation; and topics in Buddhist philosophy, particularly Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka and Yog?c?ra. He is the author or editor of over 30 books and nearly 200 articles, chapters, and reviews.

Ven. Gendun Losang is a Dutch buddhist monk, resident teacher of the Maitreya Institute, Amsterdam and visiting teacher of Jamyang Buddhist Centre Leeds, UK, Garuda, Monaco and One-Dharma, Portugal. Having been ordained in 2006, he studied Buddhist philosophy and psychology at the Nalanda Monastery France, after which he spent over four years in solitary retreat in both Tibetan Gelug and Theravada monasteries in France, Nepal, and Burma.

He is currently developing a program for the long-term support of Western meditators, that combines traditional methods and contemporary theory, in collaboration with Nicolas Pellerin, a researcher from Toulouse University, aiming to investigate perceptional and semiotic evolution in long-term meditators.

He is active in interreligious dialogue and practice, working together with Benedictine monastic communities and a Turkish Mevlevi Dargah.

Dr. Edel Maex is a psychiatrist and Zen teacher living in Antwerp, Belgium. Teaching mindfulness became his way to integrate his Zen practice and his practice as a psychiatrist. He founded the Stress Clinic at the ZNA Hospital in Antwerp. He is the author of several books (in Dutch) on mindfulness and Buddhism. He is currently translating the Dharma talks he has given over the years into English and publishing them on Substack. 

Josipa Mihic, is an associate professor and head of the Department of Behavioral Disorders at the study program of Social Pedagogy at the Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb.She teaches courses in the field of mental health promotion and prevention science at the graduate and postgraduate level. As a co-founder of a Laboratory for Prevention Research (PrevLab) she has been involved in multiple international projects focused on prevention of mental, emotional and behavioral problems of children and youth and mental health promotion. Her areas of research focus are promotion of socio-emotional learning and mental health of children and adults in education, prevention of behavioral problems, effects of mindfulness/meditative practices on positive development of individuals (involving mindfulness apps), positive youth development, and role of compassion and self-compassion in preventing behavioral problems and mental health promotion. She is a co-founder of the national platform for the promotion of meditative activities for children and teachers – minimindfulness. She was trained in Gestalt psychotherapy at The European Association for Gestalt Therapy (EAGT) and works as a children and adults’ psychotherapist at the Teaching and Clinical Center of the Faculty.

Dr. Ven. Carola Roloff (Bhikkhuni Jampa Tsedroen) has been a permanent visiting professor for Buddhism and Dialogue in Modern Societies at the Academy of World Religions at the University of Hamburg, Germany since 2018. Becoming a Buddhist nun in 1981 (Bhikkhuni ordination in Taiwan in 1985), she has studied Buddhist philosophy and practice as well as Tibetology and Indology with a focus on Buddhist studies (Magistra 2003, doctorate 2009). From 2010 to 2017, Roloff led a DFG research project on the ordination of Buddhist nuns. From 2013 to 2018, she was part of the European research project "Religion and Dialogue in Modern Societies&quot. Her current research focuses on dialogical theology and practice, intra-Buddhist dialogue, and recognition processes of Buddhist minorities in Europe. In addition, she has been an ongoing participant in the in-service course Conflict Counselling and Mediation at the University of Hamburg since the summer semester of 2022. She is particularly interested in Buddhist and interreligious chaplaincy and Buddhist care practice. Website: http://www.carolaroloff.de/ Email: carola.roloff@uni-hamburg.de

Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. He was born in London and taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He is by training a historian, and works especially on Sufism and esotericism, and also on right-wing ideology and extremism. His most recent book is Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order (2023).

Martijn van Beek is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and affiliated with the Interacting Minds Centre, both at Aarhus University, Denmark. Having previously spent many years working and conducting research in Ladakh and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, his current research explores the meeting ground between contemplative traditions, especially Buddhism, consciousness research and modernity. One of the goals of his current research is to contribute to refining our understanding of the significance of the spread of mindfulness and related forms of modern contemplative practice for people and for society today. He is also engaged in research on the (micro--) phenomenology of contemplative experience. Martijn teaches on contemplative life in context, in theory and in practice at Aarhus University; in the programme “Training Empathy” for professionals working with children and young adults offered by Børns Livskundskab, The Danish Society for the Promotion of Life Wisdom in Children; and at Vaekstcenter, the intentional community where he lives, and elsewhere.

Marieke van Vugt is an assistant professor at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Engineering (ALICE) of the University of Groningen (Netherlands). The research in Dr. van Vugt's lab focuses on how, when and why we mind-wander, and what the fundamental cognitive operations are that underlie meditation and mindfulness. Most recently, she started to investigate how analytical meditation practiced by Tibetan monks and nuns affects cognition and emotion. She addresses these questions using a combination of computational modeling, neuroscience, and experimental psychology tools. She very much enjoys projects were science, art (particularly classical ballet), and contemplation meet. https://mindbrainmindfulness.wordpress.com/

Dr. Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher and writer. His work focuses on a re-evaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes to view – and treat – all organisms as subjects and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Andreas teaches at Berlin University of the Arts, is Visiting Professor at the UNISG, Pollenzo, Italy, and holds an Adjunct Professorship at the IIT, Guwahati, India. He contributes to major German newspapers and magazines and has published more than a dozen books, most recently Enlivenment. A Poetics for the Anthropocene, MIT Press, 2019 and Sharing Life. The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity, Boell Foundation, 2020.

Photo credit: Florian Büttner