Doing Cosmopolitics: Exploring Everyday Potentials Within STS Research

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

In recent years, ‘Cosmopolitics’ has experienced a renaissance within STS and anthropological scholarship. Beginning to question cosmopolitan politics as a straightforwardly desirable democratic ideal, new forms of relational analysis engaging disparate world-making practices are gaining prominence. Isabelle Stengers has proposed slowing down in the face of proliferating global social and environmental challenges. Bruno Latour has suggested that a common world must not be assumed, but is something to be slowly and carefully composed. While Mario Blaser and others have taken issue with assumed Western visions of both ‘cosmos’ and ‘politics’, to raise questions about how disparate entities and interests may work together without requiring consensus as an outcome. In this session, we are interested in ‘doing Cosmopolitics’ as a mundane and everyday activity involving disparate practices of knowing and governing. Drawing together four presentations and two commentaries (de la Cadena and Verran), we present papers which explore the experiential grounds of cosmopolitical inquiry; working through these investigations we seek to explore new possibilities for Cosmopolitics in STS research.

Sub Unit

• Closed Panels

Discussant

• Helen Verran, Charles Darwin University, Casurina, NT

Individual Presentations

• Karrabing Filmmaking and the Aesthetic of Survivance - Elizabeth Povinelli, Colombia Univeristy

• The cosmopolitical of Indigenous Artistic intervention - Britt Kramvig, University of Tromsø

• Surrendering to the pull, inhabiting subterranean water worlds - Andrea Ballestero, Rice University

• Feeling our way: Experiential practices of Cosmopolitical inquiry - Endre Dányi, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main; Michaela Spencer, Charles Darwin University

Session Organizer

• Michaela Spencer, Charles Darwin University