MLE Friends Talk with Marion Chaygneaud-Dupuy

“Coexisting on the Tibetan Plateau: Deep Listening, Power, and Care in Action”

If you would like to attend, please join MLE Friends Here!

Join us this Thursday for an exciting MLE Friends talk with world-renowned alpinist, Marion Chaygneaud-Dupuy. This will be the occasion to celebrate the recent release of her beautiful book of photographs and text, L’Himalaya et la vie du plateau tibétain (Favre, 2025), and discuss the essential work she has been carrying out on behalf of Tibetan communities and the Tibetan ecosystem for over 20 years. In a year in which we are exploring themes of power and care, this event will usefully shed light on the power of individual agency when faced with large-scale environmental and cultural devastation.

This MLE Friends Talk will open a dialogue about the Tibetan Plateau as a living field of relation, transmission, and transformation. Drawing from years of experience, encounters, and collaboration with Tibetan nomadic communities, the conversation will explore how human beings may learn to inhabit the living world without reducing it to a resource, a landscape, or an object of knowledge. At the heart of the discussion is the idea of co-emergence. Knowledge does not simply pass from one world to another, nor from a preserved past into the present. It arises through encounter, through attentive presence, through the dialogue between different forms of experience. Nomadic knowledge, scientific inquiry, ecological practice, photography, and embodied attention can meet in a shared space where none remains unchanged. In this sense, transmission becomes a living process of mutual transformation.

The Tibetan Plateau offers a powerful context for this reflection. Its glaciers, rivers, animals, pastures, and communities are not separate elements, but part of a fragile and interdependent world. The wisdom of nomadic life does not provide a model to idealise or reproduce. Rather, it invites us to rethink how knowledge, care, responsibility, and action may emerge from a long-term relationship with a place. Marion Chaygneaud-Dupuy will reflect on how attending to co-emergence can become a practice of presence, tenderness, and shared responsibility. This talk will ask how we may remain connected in times of rupture, how we may listen to what the living world asks of us, and how co-emergence can help us imagine more careful ways of knowing, transmitting, and acting.