Soil, soul, society: Regeneration from the vital-core

My talk will focus on examining the ontological and epistemological basis for our major cultural practices, such as child-rearing, schooling, and work life. The focus of my examination is to reveal the corrupt and bankrupt state of these cultural practices that manifest what I will frame as phenomenology of dehumanization that includes “Vampire Operation,” “Hungry Ghosts Roaming,” “Machine Impersonation” and so on. My examination will incorporate a reflection on my personal experience of growing up and being schooled in Korea, immigrating to Canada, struggling to raise a family and have a university teaching career, and now witnessing around me growing panic as well as denial about the state of the world. Out of all this, I will propose and illustrate a regeneration project for the endangered “soil, soul, and society” through re-animating the (for lack of better word) “vital-core” to our humanity. It is my credo that this core, if rightly understood and sufficiently cultivated, nourished, and empowered, could resist the exclusionary, atomistic, homocentric, egocentric, dualistic, moralistic, instrumentalist, and measurement-oriented ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting that currently dominate the world, including the academy. I emphasize that the first-order responsibility of the educators, akin to that of Hippocratic Oath, is to regenerate and nourish, not maim, starve, or numb this core in everyone whom we meet and teach. I will explore with you a few practical ways of going about recovering and nourishing the vital-core.