Willis Jenkins
John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics | Associate Dean for Arts & Humanities
I study intersections of ethics, religion, and ecological change. Author of two award-winning books, Ecologies of Grace (Oxford 2008) and The Future of Ethics (Georgetown 2013), and co-editor of several volumes, including the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, my writing explores environmental change from approaches in religious studies and environmental humanities. In recent essays I have focused on religion and climate change, about which I have advised UNFCC reports and have collaborated with a transnational network of scholars; on climate ethics, including about shifting conceptions of virtue in the Anthropocene, shifting conceptions of dominion in the Vatican, and shifting conceptions of justice from pipeline protests; and on religious value formation amidst mass extinctions, about which I have advised the IPBES.
My research often emerges from efforts to develop transdisciplinary collaborations of sciences and humanities. One example of that is the Coastal Futures Conservatory, which I co-direct with Matthew Burtner (Music) and Karen McGlathery (Environmental Sciences). Since 2017 the Conservatory has worked to integrate arts and humanities into the NSF-funded Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research, as shown in this Mellon Foundation video. Reflecting on the Conservatory lab, I wrote "Listening as a Model for Integrating Arts and Humanities into Environmental Change Research” (Environmental Humanities 2021), which begins to explore reason for including contemplative practices in research. Our 2023 album Soundscapes of Restoration, was produced with VCR scientists, award-winning international musicians, and prose reflections from me in the liner notes.
I work with UVA's Environment Institute to create possibilities of research on "human dimensions" that engage culture, meaning-making, and values. Using Conservatory techniques I offer resources to the community-led Eastern Shore Climate Equity Project, including regular community-engaged workshops and festivals on the Eastern Shore. Other science-humanities collaborations include Sanctuary Lab, a project co-directed with Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schaeffer that convenes researchers from arts, sciences, and humanities to investigate how planetary stresses bear on places marked as sacred. That project has led to the articles "Sacred Places and Planetary Stresses: Sanctuaries as Laboratories of Religious and Ecological Change” and "Listening to the Hidden Land Tradition in Bhutan."
In previous work for the Environment Institute I co-led a water justice project with hydrologist Paolo D’Odorico (UC-Berkeley), collaborating with faculty from law, environmental science, and engineering to develop a more inclusive and pluralist approach to cultural values in water security assessments. That led to the article "Values-Based Scenarios of Water Security” Bioscience (2021), discussed in this podcast.
All those projects inform a book tentatively titled Ethics After Humanity, on religion, ethics, and culture amidst Anthropocene pressures. Some central conceptual claims organizing the book are ventured in the essay "Ethics After Humanity" Journal of Religious Ethics (2023).