Clemens Driessen
Room K4L.04
Department of Geography
King’s College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS
clemens.driessen@kcl.ac.uk
Biography
Before coming to King’s Clemens has spent most of his time in the Netherlands, where he earned an MSc in Systems Engineering and Policy Analysis from Delft University of Technology, as well as an MA in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2010 he was employed as a PhD candidate with the Applied Philosophy group of Wageningen University, where he will publicly defend his dissertation on Ethics and Animal Farming in 2011.
In his PhD project, Clemens has found a way to study ethics by doing Science & Technology Studies, and he has done ethnographic fieldwork visiting a number of farms throughout the Netherlands. This led him to take a practical training course for becoming a dairy farmer, describe in detail the making of a mobile milking robot for dairy cows, and initiate a design project to develop a web based computer game for farmed pigs to playfully interact with humans.
Clemens has taught in undergraduate and MSc courses on the ethics of nature conservation, animals, food, environment, disasters and aid. Furthermore he has had a variety of public speaking engagements on issues in farming and animal ethics, and has been engaged in writing on art and architecture.
Publications
Journal articles
DRIESSEN, C., Farmers Engaged in Deliberative Practices; An Ethnographic Exploration of the Mosaic of Concerns in Livestock Agriculture, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10806-010-9293-z
Conference papers selection
DRIESSEN, C., Bracke, M.B.M., Copier, M., Designing a computer game for pigs; to create a playful interface between animals, science and ethics. Paper for: ‘Practicing science and technology, performing the social’, the EASST_010 conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, 2-4 Sept. 2010, Trento, Italy.
DRIESSEN, C.P.G., Beekman, V., Ethics in transition; what system innovators could learn from the abolition of slavery and the emergence of fair trade, paper for the conference ‘Dynamics & Governance of Transitions to Sustainability’, June 2009 Amsterdam.
DRIESSEN, C.P.G., L.F.M. Heutinck, Cows Desiring to be Milked: Dairy Farming Ethics and the Development of Automated Milking Systems, abstract in: Acting with science, technology and medicine, 4S/EASST, Rotterdam, August 2008, p.263
DRIESSEN, C.P.G., Ethics in the Barn; The importance of practice for agricultural ethics, Eursafe Newsletter, Vol. 10, No.4, December 2008, pp.5-8
DRIESSEN, C., Stacking pigs: Dutch pig tower debates and the changing nature of ethical livestock production, In: Zollitsch, W., Winckler, C., Waiblinger, S. & Haslberger, A. (ed.), Sustainable food production and ethics. Wageningen, Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2007. pp. 219-223.
Heutinck, L., DRIESSEN, C., The ethics of automatic milking systems and grazing in dairy cattle, In: Zollitsch, W., Winckler, C., Waiblinger, S. & Haslberger, A. (ed.), Sustainable food production and ethics. Wageningen, Wageningen Academic Publishers, 2007. pp. 249-255.
DRIESSEN, C., Participation or demarcation? Animal science and animal ethics in action, paper for the First Biennial Conference of the Society for the Philosophy of Science in Practice, Twente University, 2007
Research
Clemens has been working on intersections of philosophy of technology, ethics, animal studies and system innovation. By describing the ways in which ethical thought can be seen to co-evolve with technological change and the emergence of multiple forms of knowledge, he believes openings can be forged to reengage with societal concerns in fresh and meaningful ways, such as through visual interpretation or interactive design projects.
At King’s Clemens works on a project called ‘Return to the wild? The biogeographies of European rewilding and the de-domestication of cattle’ . The past decades saw an increasing use of large herbivores as part of landscape and ecosystem conservation efforts. This interdisciplinary research project looks into the cultural, political and ethical dimensions of a ‘return to the wild’. It consists of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork on the practice of rewilding in conservation areas in several European countries, as well as analysis of policy documents, public media debates and archive research into the history of rewilding efforts.