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Varun RavikumarPhD Student and Rotman Institute Member
I am a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Western University, where I am a member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and its EMRG Lab. I study organism-environment systems, focusing on how humans navigate and perceive their social environments. Drawing largely upon 4E approaches to cognition and social theory, I investigate the dynamics between human practices, sociomaterial structures, and the possibilities for action available to situated agents. Prior to joining Western, I earned an MA in Philosophy from Northern Illinois University and a M.Eng. in Engineering Mechanics from The Pennsylvania State University. I completed my bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Shiv Nadar University. My dissertation synthesizes ecological psychology with Bourdieusian social theory to advance a practice-based account of affordances within social niches. Developed under the supervision of Profs. Michael L. Anderson and Scott Schaffer, this project resolves a mutual theoretical blind spot: ecological psychology's struggle to scale perception-action dynamics into complex social structures, and Bourdieu's oversight of the evolutionary underpinnings of human agency. More broadly, my work reconciles the cognitive and social sciences, providing an interdisciplinary framework to study human cognition and action in volatile social contexts, specifically migration and sustainability. My research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), MITACS, and the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. Recent publications
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