OSPAPIK Research Seminar – Earth-Space Illiteracy, Cultivated Dyslexia, and Moralized Agnosia: Exploring the Grammar of Contemporary Sustainability Governance – Brad Tabas

On Monday 8 December 2025, 16:00–18:00 (French time), OSPAPIK is honoured to welcome Brad Tabas, Associate Professor at Institut Polytechnique de Paris, for an online presentation on “Earth-Space Illiteracy, Cultivated Dyslexia, and Moralized Agnosia: Exploring the Grammar of Contemporary Sustainability Governance”.

Abstract : Contemporary sustainability governance—particularly with respect to democratic engagement—is crippled by a triad of cognitive failures. Earth-Space Illiteracy denotes a basic lack of vocabulary and understanding of the physical and ethical interdependencies between our planet and the near-space environment. This is exacerbated by a Cultivated Dyslexia, a historically conditioned linguistic tendency within Western thought resulting in the treatment of Earth and Heaven as a rigid binary, hindering the development of Earth-Space inference patterns. Within contemporary philosophy, these latent biases have culminated in a Moralized Agnosia, an actively produced ignorance exaggerated by speculative theories which legitimize the disregard of critical facts about our orbital environment in the name of a narrowed, planet-turned attention. Unlearning these self-incurred learning disabilities is critical for acquiring a more extensive and conceptually adequate vocabulary to address the challenges that the New Space economy and the militarization of outer space pose to the sustainability of the Earth-Space commons. Drawing on perfectionist theories of education and Stanley Cavell’s vision of philosophy as the “education of grownups,” this intervention suggests that in our post-planetary era in which orbital debris and a crowded nightscape are becoming ever more salient collective problems, we must be ready to question the fixed terms and ideas that structure our understanding of ecological praxis, developing new critical languages and increasing our Earth-Space literacy.

This session will be held in English.

The login details will be provided later on our website and in a reminder email. We are hoping to provide subtitles in French.