Colin Curnow

Colin is a second-year PhD student in the Environmental Studies department. His work largely focuses on how philosophy and social theory can speak to the precarious environmental situations of our contemporary age. Originally interested in the study of Biology at large (though more specifically evolutionary biology and ethology), Colin was drawn to the study of philosophy after beginning to investigate the scientific research process and its societal relationship to the production or establishment of knowledge.

In the past, Colin has primarily worked on the incorporation of environmental imagery or rhetoric into commodity or brand advertising, most notably through the phenomenon of greenwashing. To this end, he investigated the ethics of greenwashing utilizing a largely Kantian approach and applied critical social theory to assess how and why greenwashing exists at all. Moving into the future, Colin has hopes to apply critical social theory to other interstitial points of society and culture where economic incentives seem to clash with our ecological imperatives.