In academic year 2025-2026, History of Consciousness welcomes two new students to the department: Ispo Cantong & Nick Denning. Read about their proposed research foci below.
Ipso Cantong (they/them)
Ipso Cantong is a PhD student in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz. Prior to UCSC, they conducted social research at institutes across both UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California, and have studied in the human sciences and humanities across Los Angeles and London—focusing principally on the conjectures and phenomena of ‘housing’ and the nexus of relations, drives, and abstract/material constituents that constitute the domain. At the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, they published digito-interactive cartography, co-facilitated the collection of spatial and tabular land use data across the state of California, and wrote exploratory theoretical essays. Directly before the start of the PhD, Ipso studied for the MA in Philosophy at King’s College London, and a bit before then, in the MPP in the Sol Price School at the University of Southern California, where they concentrated in urban spatial analysis. At King’s College London they have written a thesis, through a reading of Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie and Phänomenologie, on the conditions of possibility of subjective introjection in matter (i.e., that mechanism of possessing matter as a self-affiliate), and of its representative schema in edificial matter—along with the ontological inconsistencies entailed in either of these general or particular phenomena. At UCSC, they plan to pursue a project at the intersection of the history of thought, especially German, French, and Afro-diasporic philosophy, and the historical a posteriori as it involves the variegated instances of landed tenure, particularly the intersubjective and mediative constituents of urban-edificial property.
Nick Denning (he/him)
Nicholas Denning operates at the intersection of care work, environmental philosophy, and experimental pedagogy. As a Ph.D Student in the History of Consciousness his research is threefold: he aims to describe, through photographic and theoretical representation, the life-sustaining reciprocities which always already entangle human and environmental ecologies; attend to how these human-ecological assemblages are complicated by the normative commitments of care ethics; and theorize circumstantially adaptive pedagogies within which “subjects” are provided the conditions to desubjectivate, entering into more communicative “becomings” with-in their surroundings.
Over the course of receiving his MA in philosophy from the University of Oregon, Nicholas conferenced mainly on epistemological limits, especially the dangers of formalizing our world according to a naive sense of the epistemologically given, the a priori — as when gender is regarded as ontologically “clear” (ICNP, Indonesia), environmental waste as ontologically “nondurable” (APL, Germany), or scientific taxonomy as ontologically “real” (PSA, USA), topics informed in part by his time teaching for U Oregon’s interdisciplinary environmental studies department. In learning about “care,” Nicholas is careful to draw not only from the work of prominent ethicists, especially Held and Noddings, but also from his own complicated, a posteriori experience as a private care worker in Eugene, Oregon. His upcoming publication in Culture and Dialogue on the empirical benefits of an “adaptive” pedagogy of student-teacher “becomings,” something inspired by Deweyan and Deleuzian techniques, embodies his working belief that learning, including how to care for, about, and with other ecologies, is realized through inter-ontological dialogue.