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Volume 34, Issue 68, 2023
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Introduction: Making Worlds in the Pluriverse
Authors: Patricio Dávila, Ganaele Langlois, Renata Leitão and Renata LeitãoIn 1996, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas (Mexico), formed by peoples of Mayan descent, declared that in “the world we want, everybody fits. The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.” Since then, their vision of “a world where many worlds fit” has given rise to the concepts of the pluriverse and pluriversality. The concept of the pluriverse has gained interest worldwide with texts such as Design for the Pluriverse, Constructing the Pluriverse, A World of Many Worlds, and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, bringing broader attention to the work done by many activists, peasant, and Indigenous groups in Latin America and beyond. It is no surprise that the concept of the pluriverse has been embraced in non-Western parts of the world. In turn, our special issue asks: What is the pluriverse in North America, arguably one of the centres of Western, Eurocentric power? The artistic and scholarly contributions that make up this special issue investigate the crossroads, the encounters, the divergences and convergences that build new possible worlds, and the friction of incommensurabilities, in a North American context, and illustrate the potential worlds that we, as humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans alike, could share.
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Thinking Across Worlds: Pluriversal Potentiality
Authors: Mary Bunch and Dolleen Tisawii’ashii ManningReflecting on the epistemological history of the microscope alongside theories of pluriversality and Anishinaabe mnidoo ontology, “Thinking Across Worlds” addresses the microscope as an instrument of decolonial worlding through two artworks created by the authors. We ask, “How can we think across worlds—microscopic and macroscopic, western and Indigenous, scientific and creative—to transform the present and the future, from ecological devastation and colonial violence to sustainability and decolonial justice?” The art works, titled Gathering and Resonance, are experiments in political ontology, through immersion in other worlds, other versions of reality. In these microscopic hydrospheres, Anishinaabe mnidoo reality prevails. Human viewers are dwarfed by the microscopic mnidoo that surround them. The place of humans is revealed to be a mere part within a multiplicity of relations. Our own interests are eclipsed by the dramas that play out among these minute forms of consciousness.
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“Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” Panel, at Congress, January 12, 2023
Authors: Patricio Dávila, Ganaele Langlois and Renata LeitãoThis summary introduces a series of excerpts that appear intermittently throughout the issue. These excerpts are transcriptions from a moderated panel on the topic of the pluriverse, held on 31 May 2023 at Congress, Canada’s largest annual conference of humanities and social science scholars.
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- Articles
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Negotiating Pluriversality
More LessIn this essay, I examine opportunities for re-viewing what I call, after John Law, examples of “one-world world” arguments through the lens of negotiating pluriversality. Specifically, I look at examples of arguments that placed side-by-side suggest that life will not return to what life was like in the recent past due to accumulating social crises and ecological disasters that have been increasing in both amount and intensity. What links these arguments is a one-world world presumption that we are all in this together. My approach is to disentangle and re-view the arguments separately as accounts of experiences of conjugated power relations and gray space. I propose that re-viewing one-world world arguments for purposes of negotiating pluriversality benefits from, following Achille Mbembe, “the analyst [revealing] the myriad ways ordinary people guide, deceive, and toy with power instead of confronting it directly” and, following Ariella Azoulay, remaking a “never-ending series of [constitutive] moments … into a never-ending project.” Ultimately, I argue negotiating pluriversality involves ascertaining ways communities in transformation can, as Azoulay puts it, reinvent the ways they “tie themselves together.”
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Reimagining Archives: Radically Rethinking Design, Identity, and Multiplicity
By Natasha ChukThe ever-expanding accessibility and integration of digital technologies in everyday life offers artists the chance to forge new paths of creativity, expression, and engagement between themselves and participants. Digital artists Stephanie Dinkins, Morehshin Allahyari, Adrian Aguilera, and Skawennati demonstrate these affordances by reclaiming forgotten, untold, and silenced identities, stories, spaces, and cultures toward the design and creation of mutable, participatory, archival art projects focused on indigenous, marginalized, and non-western worldviews. Through design principles that foster collective teaching, learning, and creating, their work reflects the world as relational, unfixed, and multiple, wherein many perspectives and knowledges converge and materialize. This essay analyzes these artists’ works to illustrate the possibility for the existence of multiple worlds, the value of participatory design, and the sociopolitical significance of the archive to argue that digital technologies and networks can be creatively and thoughtfully deployed to decenter the dominant worldview of modernity by re-imagining ways of uncovering, preserving, organizing, and accessing cultural knowledge. By doing this, the institutional logics derived from colonial ideologies are disrupted and reflect a new ontology of knowledge acquisition in the form of collaboration, participation, and distributed agency, enabling the co-creation and engagement with multiple realities toward the making of a digital pluriverse.
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Making Worlds in the Pluriverse Panel at Congress: “On the colonialism…”
By Mario BlaserThese are select transcripts from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.
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Making Worlds in the Pluriverse Panel at Congress: “Dolleen on the Pluriverse”
More LessThis is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.
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The Other World: Diasporas and Their Memories of War
By Azra RashidSurvivors of genocide living in diaspora face a discontinuity of history and memory that is forced upon them. Theirs is a history that hardly registers in the dominant discourses of history, trauma, and migration in the countries at either end of their journeys. It is not registered in their countries of origin because they left and it fails to make a mark in their countries of arrival because it is a past that is not shared by others. For women survivors of war living in diaspora, the politics of marginalization and an absence of representation of their losses complicate their ability to mourn. This paper offers a brief meditation on representations and framing of the trauma of women survivors of war living in diaspora, and the utility of academic and creative methods, namely Research-Creation, that allow us a re-framing of the narrative by creating a space for feminist solidarity and remembering.
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Making Worlds in the Pluriverse Panel at Congress: “Mary Bunch, on world-building”
By Mary BunchThis is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.
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Belle Park Pluriverses
More LessBelle Park was established in 1973 in Kingston, Ontario, on a former landfill built on a wetland. Over the past three years, the SSHRC-funded Belle Park Project has been employing Research-Creation and community and interdisciplinary collaboration to engage with this small but highly complex space, whose most prominent feature is a totem pole carved by incarcerated Indigenous men in a local prison. The land is contaminated, but despite this the park is a rich natural habitat, and it is also the location of an encampment of unhoused people. Many existing models of harm and resistance do not capture the frictions and possibilities we experience in this site. “Belle Park Pluriverses” offers poetry and found poetry, along with photographs, to reveal and trouble binaries such as wild v. domestic, dry v. wet, beautiful v. ugly, care v. neglect, garbage v. means of life.
Photos by Dorit Naaman and Laura J. Murray.
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New Canadian Experimental Eco-Cinema: Placemaking, Immersiveness, and Alternate Ecologies of Relationality
More LessThis article explores the sensory and experimental practice of three recent eco-films, Geographies of Solitude, vulture, and Lichen, all of whose formal strategies are oriented around a desire to recalibrate perception of the natural world and to attune spectators to the diversity and proliferating life of “other-than-human relatives.”
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The Multiscalar Worlds of Remediation: Sitting Halfway Down a Meandering Path
More LessThis hybrid environmental creative nonfiction invites the reader to consider a small, contaminated patch of land tucked inside an industrial neighborhood in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). By exploring the multiscalar geographies and histories of this site—now a municipal phytoremediation testbed—I seek to reframe the notion of remediation against the extractive and colonial logics that underpin Western technoscientific imaginaries and practices of healing. Thus, I will address the “pluriverse” as a coalescing of multiple and incommensurable scales of living and non-living, political and affective, and social and economic processes that define a seemingly desolate urban wasteland (Povinelli 2016). Through photography and repeated visits, I consider ancient Carboniferous worlds and persistent toxicants (Hird 2013); Suncor refineries and a neighborhood; soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015), trees, bacteria (Hird and Yusoff 2019), and those who inhabit and continue to care for this place.
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Worlds Meeting Worlds: Murmuration, Aesthetics, and Odeimin Runners
Authors: Adrian Kahgee and Debbie Ebanks SchlumsThe Odeimin Runners art collective seek paths to create work outside of colonial institutions and systems and instead think about what it would mean to mutually nurture communities and relationships. In our practice, we think through and weave together Indigenous and Black/Caribbean philosophies such as the teachings of the odeimin (strawberry) plant, Dolleen Manning’s Mnidoo—worlding, and the relational thinking of Glissant. Through community engagement and the development of an online story map incorporating process cinema methods, Odeimin Runners reflect an Indigenous worldview of All Our Relations which intuits a pluriversal world. Bringing together stories from different cultures and ways of being and experiencing the world, we make connections across time and dimensions. The hope in this “acolonial” work, on the outskirts of colonial frameworks, lies in producing nourishment that contributes to the flourishing of the multiple, interconnected worlds.
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Making Worlds in the Pluriverse Panel at Congress: “Challenges in the Pluriverse”
By Mario BlaserThese are select transcripts from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.
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From Abiyala to Turtle Island
More LessThis hybrid article offers a glimpse into a plurality of Indigenous worldviews in the context of the contemporary art exhibition Arctic/ Amazon that took place at the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada in 2022. The article highlights the important connections between knowledge and culture in artworks by artists who translate practice, materiality, and knowledgeways into contemporary interventions.
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Making Worlds in the Pluriverse Panel at Congress: “Survival through the Pluriverse”
By Julio HongThis is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.
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The Pluriverse, Beyond the Concept of Practice: On the Reality of Occurrence, Utopianism, and Prison Abolition
More LessThe concept of practice frequently occupies a central explanatory role in pluriversal theorists’ accounts of what constitutes a world or reality. Often, the many worlds that populate the pluriverse are described as immanent creations of practice, the pluriverse’s multiple realities as products of interrelated social and material practices. Although liberating in many ways, pluralizing reality through the concept of practice also risks perpetuating certain limitations on reality’s expansibility. As a result, the theme of practice in pluriversal theory risks obscuring the potential and the urgency of the pluriverse’s inclusion of worlds that would benefit greatly from its redistribution of the real and yet are not best understood strictly in terms of practice. This article considers the world of prison abolition in this light, connecting not only the importance of, but also the reality and ontological weight attributed to, imagination in prison abolitionist work with the ontological expansiveness of pluriversal theory.
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A Message From the Pluriverse: The Spiritually Fluid Gift of Philip Cote’s Walls of Welcome
More LessCalled Walls of Welcome, Philip Cote—an Anishinaabe-Algonquin artist and spiritual elder—created a large-scale panorama inside the interior walls of the Roncesvalles United Church’s sanctuary in late 2021. Located in the west end of Tkaronto/Toronto—and believed to be the first Indigenous art mural inside a church in Turtle Island/North America (if not globally)—the wall painting visually narrates the Ojibway creation story and alludes to “The Eighth Fire.” The latter stems from an Anishinaabe prophecy that we (human beings) can unite in our shared humanity. Walls of Welcome gives us all a message from the pluriverse and a spiritually fluid lens for seeing our foundational stories. My paper explores how this mural brings communities together through the power of art and builds a new world for trust-building and healing that epitomizes truth and reconciliation.
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Plurality, Data, and the Necessity of “Internets”
More LessToday, the internet is often understood as a monolithic entity. This depiction is increasingly inaccurate and needs to be radically re-examined. The pluriverse concept of the internet examines local and international models of community building in interdependent but separated digital contexts. Drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems some articulations of the pluriverse describe a universe of separate, but connected and interdependent worlds, understood with reference to the concept of communities. Unlike today’s internet-based communities, organized in specific siloed venues and forums where users with specific interests rarely face opposition or differences of opinion and where these interests are constantly reinforced by recirculated data and opinions, the pluriverse offers an imaginative frame where we can imagine a series of ‘internets’, made up of localized networks, community-driven social spaces, open source data sharing, and truly collaborative production at a replicable scale. This paper presents an exploration of the potential for pluriversal “internets.”
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(Re)Entering Many Worlds: Teaching and Collaborating to Design the Pluriverse
Authors: Robyn Adams, Aliyah Baerg, Shawn Bailey, Honoure Black, Lancelot Coar and Danton DerksenIn this article we share stories that are still developing out of our design studio.
By designing for the pluriverse we were inspired to create alternative and future imaginaries to counter the humancentric one-world notion. Learning that there was not just one story, but instead the stories were infinite and eternal, we sought to counter the frictions of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism that have shaped the world we now reside in. We explored this by examining how Indigenous ways of knowing, land connectivity, and decoloniality empower the poetics of experimentation and design. As instructors we share our journey with our students. Three stories by students highlight this journey into the pluriverse.
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NIGHTSENSE
Authors: Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick
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