The term "cosmology" implies multiplicity, as it accounts for a diversity of worldviews contingent on the cultural, historical, and environmental frameworks through which they are articulated; or, in the words of Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, cosmology constitutes a series of "heterogeneous worldlings coming together as a political ecology of practices, negotiating their difficult being together in heterogeneity” (de la Cadena and Blasser, 2018, 4). Despite the plurality resident within cosmology, cultural traditions outside the Western paradigm—such as Indigenous epistemologies and other localized worldviews—have historically been marginalized as primitive, unscientific, or incompatible with knowledge systems whose predictions bear on the outcome of experimental and technical interventions. For example, biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a column in 2023 condemning the inclusion of Mātauranga Māori in Aotearoa’s environmental curricula, dismissing it as "pernicious nonsense," a view later echoed by Elon Musk on Twitter (Dawkins qtd. in Leask, 2023). The case evidenced two non-experts (in their racism masquerading as adherence to scientific rigor) hierarchizing cosmological systems they perceived as fundamentally irreconcilable.
Musk and Dawkins are examples of parties who benefit from hierarchizing and delegitimizing localized cosmological frameworks—often with the aim of exploiting vulnerable communities for whom these frameworks stabilize a sense of identity and belonging. The authority individuals like Musk wield in international politics necessitates urgent counterimaginaries, evidenced in a recent shift towards taking seriously the "family resemblances" between diverse cosmological frameworks. Recent scholarship attentive to these convergences includes: the aforecited A World of Many Worlds, edited by de la Cadena and Blaser; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s renowned Braiding Sweetgrass; Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's The Ends of the World; and even new media projects like the video games designed by Elizabeth LaPensée. As LaPensée affirms, "Indigenous languages, stories, art, and other forms of expression carry with them scientific teachings" (LaPensée, 2017). The participants of this session aim to deepen and amplify this ongoing conversation.
The panelists represent a diverse group of disciplinary expertise (including the environmental humanities, comparative literature, art history, and Latine/x studies), stages of academic development, and knowledge-making experiences beyond academe, such as wildland firefighting. For this session, Tyler Sirovny will read Keri Hulme's Stonefish by drawing upon Lagrangian and Eulerian fluid dynamics to map the relational movements in Hulme’s work: blueprints, Sirovny argues, for surviving rising sea levels. Sheila Scoville will position Mexican artist Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s kinetic sculptures as vehicles that address issues of language revitalization, food sovereignty, and environmental collapse. Isabelle Meyer-Ensass will offer a "poetics of Endarkenment," rejecting French Enlightenment ideals and embracing communication with the ancestral realm, as exemplified in Haitian Vodou's internal practices. Finally, Stephanie Fetta will explore how art and performance, responding to the crisis of Indofeminicide, utilize plural cosmologies to envision new forms of communal power, particularly through the works of Indigenous women across the Americas. Along with a brief introduction by the presider, each speaker will be allocated 12 minutes for their presentation: this constraint is designed to leave space for dialogue and audience insight, emphasizing the importance of multiplicity in conceiving of plural cosmological frameworks.
Resident within all proposals is the way plural cosmologies may foment resistance to colonialism’s epistemic and cultural impositions, scaffolding efforts at restoring traditional knowledges and worldviews in the face of cultural suppression, environmental exigency, femicide, and genocide. Affirming and strengthening these conceptual throughlines are the session's disciplinary breadth, archival richness, and the diverse cosmologies with which the participants engage. The pressing nature of this dialogue lies not only in the timeliness of the topics being addressed—the cross pollination of colonial histories and neocolonial ventures, late-stage capitalism, environmental crises, social injustices, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of the rights of our most vulnerable communities—but also in the ways that these plural cosmologies offer crucial alternatives and actionable solutions at the intersections of scientific knowledge and Indigenous thought (e.g., in Hulme’s work); in the blending of visual arts and social activism (as in Palma Rodríguez’s practice or creative responses to Indofeminicide in the work of Indigenous women artists); and through the repudiation of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous imperial thought (as seen in Haitian anthropologist Mimerose Beaubrun’s auto-ethnography Nan Dòmi).
In this session, our exploration of plural cosmologies seeks not only to challenge dominant structures of power but also illuminate transformative pathways for healing, resistance, and the reclamation of sovereignty in a world deeply marked by colonial legacies.