In mid-October, Jea Oh will be visiting Amsterdam and will give a guest lecture titled “Life-Affirming Democracy: Donghak, Salim, and Affective Transformation”. This talk explores the possibility of a life-affirming democracy through a creative conversation among Donghak (Eastern learning), salim, and jeong. It brings Donghak’s relational vision of life into conversation with salim, a Korean ecofeminist philosophy of life-keeping, enlivening, and life-making, and jeong, an affective relationality through which the flourishing and wounding of others come to matter. Against extractive, patriarchal, and exclusionary structures, the talk asks how democracy might be reimagined beyond territorial logics of borders, possession, and control. Through a comparative, decolonial, and ecofeminist lens, it proposes a life-centered politics grounded in relationality, care, affective transformation, regeneration, and mutual flourishing.
Jea Sophia Oh is Professor of Philosophy at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Asian and comparative philosophy, philosophical theology, environmental ethics, and feminist and decolonial thought. Her first monograph, A Postcolonial Theology of Life: Planetarity East and West (2011), pioneered a Korean ecofeminist theology through Whitehead and Donghak. Her forthcoming Korean Goddesses and Cultural Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2027) develops a decolonial feminist thealogical hermeneutics for planetary care. Her edited volumes include Emotions in Korean Philosophy and Religion (2022) and Greening Philosophy of Religion (2024). She is President-Elect of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (President, 2027–2028).
For further information please contact Michiel Leezenberg at m.m.leezenberg@uva.nl.

On the 16th there will be a workshop at the VU. See picture.