Andrea Wheeler PhD

Bio

Research Interests

I care about the actual performance of buildings, and the social science lifestyle change.

Projects/Research

• What do you research/what kind of projects are you working on?

My past projects have focused on the design of educational buildings. I have been interested in both the sustainable architecture of schools and assessing how different pedagogies and teaching practices embodied in design affect students' performance. Figuring out this assessment and its methodology is a complex task, and I have worked to develop methods including children's participation. During my time at Iowa State University, I have been awarded seed research grants from the Iowa Energy Centre and the Iowa NSF/ESPSCoR Energy Utilization Platform from the Provost's Office as additional start-up funds and the ISU Centre for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities. 

I have been awarded several fellowships throughout my career at the University of Bath in the UK, the Sir Edmund Happold Senior Research Fellowship (2013), the Big XII Fellow at The University of Austin at Texas (2014) and the University of Cambridge. My current research returns to the philosophy and environmental ethics of the French thinker Luce Irigaray who was the focus of my Ph.D. thesis and who calls for the birth of new notions of what it means to be human upon the earth. Luce Irigaray is a pivotal philosopher whose work has influenced a generation of feminist theorists. 

• How does your research make a difference?

I have characterized my scholarship over the past 15 years as having a foundational idea, the idea studied in my Ph.D. thesis, which is an idea about love. My scholarship is marked by a concern for relationships, for ways of being in the world and ways of being upon the earth together. It explores ethical modes for how we can relate to the built and natural environment and other living beings in our social environments. Fall 2022 will see a reconnection with the fundamental idea and a moving forward with its significance in the academic discourse of sustainability in architectural design. It is my mission for this research to make a difference.

Current Projects

My work engages with environmental philosophy and with, ethics and aesthetics. Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 will see a deepening of those engagements.

• Briefly describe one of your projects.

Over the past four years, I have been invited to present research work at conferences and seminars organized and hosted by Luce Irigaray, and these have included most recently: "Thinking Love" at the University of Bristol in June 2016 and "To Be Born: Genesis of a New Human Being" at the Department of Philosophy. The University of Sussex. I was awarded a research fellow at the Centre for Research in Advanced Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge in 2018. I am a member of a Faculty Learning Community here at ISU which is a group of professors, about eight of us, who have been working together on the notion of sustainable peace. We all come from different disciplines across campus - engineering sciences, humanities, social sciences, education, and design. We all have different disciplinary perspectives on methods and how to work towards peaceful and sustainable environments. We have an edited book manuscript in preparation where we have all contributed chapters. We have been running a very successful class for Honors students that we all teach. Next year we will be hosting a National peace conference on campus.

• How do you involve students in your projects?

I mentor Master of Science in Architecture students and graduate and undergraduate research assistants. I have encouraged those students to attend international masterclasses, conferences, and seminars, engage in fieldwork and publish their work. I happily accept proposals to mentor Master's level research projects in sustainable design.

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