MLE 2026 Inaugural Panel

Constanza Baquedano, PhD, is a neuroscientist and Assistant Professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile), where she is part of the Centro de Neurociencia Social y Cognitiva (CSCN). She trained in biochemistry and completed her PhD in Neuroscience at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (France). Her work lies at the intersection of contemplative science, human–nature connection, and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Her research integrates neuroscience, phenomenology, and contemplative approaches to study how lived experience relates to brain and behavioral dynamics. She combines experimental methods (e.g., EEG/ERPs) with qualitative and micro-phenomenological approaches. She currently leads interdisciplinary projects on psilocybin-assisted therapy and on the role of nature-based experiences in well-being and ecological behavior.

Her work aims to bridge scientific and experiential perspectives, understanding cognition as situated, embodied, and relational.

Laura Candiotto is Associate Professor in Moral Philosophy at the University of Cagliari (IT) and at the Center for Ethics of the University of Pardubice (CZ). Her main research field is philosophy of emotions, at the crisscross of enactive ethics and social epistemology. She is leading two research projects: (1) “Vicious Epistemic Cultures”, on the ethics of knowledge with a specific focus on emotional friction in revision responsibility; (2) “Loving is Caring”, on Plato’s care of the soul and its contribution to the contemporary ethics of care.

Over the last ten years, she has worked on love, compassion, wonder, grief, and shame, bridging her expertise in the Socratic method of inquiry and the enactive approach to participatory sense-making. She contributed to the epistemology of emotions research by carving out a situated model of epistemic emotions as embedded in dialogical interactions and communities of inquiry. She is now focusing on environmental emotions, especially the intertwining of love, grief and hope in inhabiting a place that is dying and in climate migration. She is very much interested in the potential transformative power of the affective experience under the weight of oppression. As a Tibetan Buddhism practitioner and member of Mind and Life Europe, she has a longstanding interest in the role of emotions in contemplative practices with a focus on embodiment and desire. She edited "The value of emotions for knowledge" (Palgrave 2019), "Emotions in Plato" (Brill 2020), "The Philosophy of Environmental Emotions" (Routledge 2025). By December 2026 "Vice Epistemology and the Philosophy of Emotions" will be out with Routledge. She wrote four monographs in Italian and she is now completing her first monograph in English, titled "Emotional Friction" (forthcoming in 2027).

Websites: www.emotionsfirst.org; https://upce.academia.edu/LauraCandiotto; https://centreforethics.upce.cz/en/doc-laura-candiotto-phd

Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. In 2019 he was the Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His latest books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). He co-edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press, and is the editor or co-editor of seven essay collections, most recently Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). In Fall 2024 he led the Cybernetic Countercultures Intensive hosted by the San Francisco cultural incubator Gray Area. Since 2019 he has co-curated the website Gaian Systems: Planetary Cognition Lab. More information is available at www.brunoclarke.net.

Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Buddhist teacher, anthropologist and author. She is co-founder of the Mind & Life Institute, founded the Ojai Foundation, the Prajna Mountain Buddhist Order, is Abbot and Head Teacher of Upaya Zen Center, and co-founder of the Zen Peacemaker Order. She is a pioneer in the end-of-life care field, and is well known internationally for her work in engaged Buddhism. She was an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress.

Dr Raphaële Jeune holds a PhD in aesthetics. Inspired by Francisco Varela's enactive thinking, her thesis focused on event ontology from an aesthetic perspective, through the study of recent artistic works that invite the viewer to an intensified experience of presence. She currently teaches art history and theory at EESAB - Rennes (European School of Art in Brittany), covering topics ranging from the political dimension of art to the analysis of exhibitions and their recent history, including an approach to human-nonhuman relations through philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics. She often uses mindfulness practices in her teaching. Also an exhibition curator, she has carried out numerous projects, including the contemporary art biennial Les Ateliers de Rennes in 2008 (Crossing Values) and 2010 (What comes); then, in 2011, the trilogy Plutôt que rien (Maison populaire de Montreuil, #1: “Démontages”; #2: “Formation(s)”; #3: “Plutôt que tout”), En attendant la montée des eaux (Espace Art contemporain, La Rochelle, ESBA TALM); in 2014-2015 Des mers non répertoriées (Mains d’œuvres, Saint-Ouen); in 2015, L’événement ou la plasticité des situations, a cycle of three projects with Nico Dockx, François Deck, and Adva Zakai (Phakt, Rennes); in 2021, Recompositions (Atelier blanc, Villefranche-de-Rouergue). She writes about artists, contributes to magazines (Multitudes, Critique d’art, Optical Sound, etc.) and gives lectures and workshops as part of her research, which currently focuses on new ontologies of the subject in relation to other modes of existence, both biotic and abiotic. She is an administrative member of C-E-A / French Association of Exhibition Curators and a member of the Scientific and Cultural Council of the Archives de la critique d’art de Rennes.

Dr Laura Mojica is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science working within the enactive approach. Her research focuses on normativity, the sociomaterial constitution of agency, and their ethical and social implications. She develops an embodied account of normativity that shows how norms are lived through action, affectivity, and shared practices rather than treated as abstract rules detached from experience.

Her recent work examines how tools and material environments take part in the formation of agency. Through philosophical accounts of incorporation, developed together with Ezequiel Di Paolo, and of how tools and artifacts are constituted, she shows how our capacities to act, perceive, and make sense of the world become ingrained in the sociohistorically shaped material environments we share with others. Building on this work, her current research turns to broader ethical and social questions, including recognition, responsibility, and normative conflict, with a focus on how embodied practices and material conditions can both stabilize existing social norms and open possibilities for critique and change.

She is currently a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Fellow at the IAS Research Center for Life, Mind, and Society at the University of the Basque Country.

John Protevi is emeritus professor in French Studies and in Philosophy at Louisiana State University. His books are published by University of Minnesota Press; the two most recent are Edges of the State (2019) and Regimes of Violence (2025). His work combines concepts, methods, and themes from enaction, dynamic systems theory, French post-structuralism (primarily Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), plus critical social theory (Clastres, Foucault, James C Scott). In addition to all that, Regimes of Violence wove in work by anthropologists who question the ubiquity of warfare in early human life.

Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology (Cognitive Science). His most recent book, co-authored with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, is The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024). He is also the author Why I Am Not a Buddhist (Yale University Press, 2020); Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (Columbia University Press 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991; revised edition 2016). Thompson is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a former President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialized in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early '80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the University of Paris 7, with a specialty in psychodynamic theory and practice, and in parallel, completed psychoanalytic training.

Johanna Magin is MLE's Community and Programs Manager. Originally American and based in Paris, Johanna holds a PhD in French literature from Columbia University (New York) and a BA in French from the University of Chicago. Her research has focused on the medico-philosophical practices of several early-modern French authors in an attempt to understand the relationship between mind and body, and more broadly between science and spirituality, in that time period. Always keen to understand mind-body processes from an experiential perspective, she has also practiced Buddhism intensively since 2008 (Zen and Dzogchen), practiced improvisational dance and theatre since 2009, and is currently training to become a Rosen Method bodywork therapist. Before joining MLE, she worked as an academic program manager and adjunct faculty member at Sciences Po in France, where she taught on a wide number of subjects, from philosophy as a way of life to the politics of poetry.