About

Thanks for visiting my website. My name is David Tyfield, and I have been honoured with the Buddhist ordination name Ketumati (which means ‘he whose mind is like a comet’!). ‘Ketumati’ is also the name of the city of the Buddha Maitreya, traditionally the ‘next’ Buddha in our world.

I am Professor of Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at the Lancaster Environment Centre of Lancaster University, UK. And my research and teaching (which I consider equally important!) is on the broad field of how society and technoscience are changing in parallel with the unprecedented changes and challenges to our planet that we are now living through, which are sometimes summarized as ‘the Anthropocene’.

Specifically, I am interested in the overlapping of several major themes of extraordinary social change regarding our current ‘metacrisis’, all of which come together under the richly suggestive terminology of ‘Ecological Civilisation’.

This website will seek to offer material on these issues, namely:

• The birth pangs of a new stage of human planetary (or ‘tertiary’) civilisation and the evolution of consciousness, now into levels of self-conscious and/or ‘higher’ evolution;
• The ongoing revitalization and growing global influence of Chinese civilisation (which is very much NOT limited to the specific state form of the People’s Republic of China) in the construction of a new ‘Sino-globalism’;
• The transformation of ‘liberalism’, as the post-WW2 world order going by this name collapses and is replaced by a new one, which I call ‘Liberalism 2.0’ and/or ‘post-secular liberality’;
• The key locus for these world-historical developments that is ongoing (green, digital) transformation and/or ‘transition’ of cities, urban mobilities and infrastructures; and, last but by no means least,
• The profound transformation of science, research and (higher) education – their goals, substantive focus, practices and institutions – that is necessary for these changes to come about with minimum destruction and maximum flourishing.

I hope you find the materials, ideas and discussions shared here interesting and useful for your own work in these momentous times.

‘With metta to all living beings’,

Ketumati