Debating Pluralism in a World of Many Worlds

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The proposed panel invites reflections on pluralism that draw upon feminist new materialisms & posthumanism, disability studies, relational theory, and Indigenous ontologies & decolonial scholarship, among other approaches that are critical of dominant notions of both ‘the human’ and ‘the environment’. More specifically, we are interested in starting a conversation about the political implications of a truly radical conception of plurality and diversity—one that seeks to destabilize nature/culture, ability/disability, body/world, and human/nonhuman binaries. Our aim in this panel is to open up possibilities for relating to and understanding difference in ways that can help us realize more just and better modes of living together. We will engage with what Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (echoing the Zapatistas) have called “pluriversal” thinking, which refers to the plurality of ontologies that compose reality. We will also challenge the prevalent state-centric understanding of the sources and nature of political authority and provide instead a relational framework, which is better suited to grasp the democratic and decolonial potential of pluralism. Moreover, our goal will be to move the conversation beyond the rationalist view of personhood, which reduces agency and intentionality to a set of stringent capacities and abilities that are considered to form the basis of political decision-making. The kind of reflections we hope to give rise to will address questions about the negotiating coming together of different ways of inhabiting the world, their possibilities of coexistence, and the conditions for communicating, understanding, and caring between and among forms of life.

Sub Unit

• Division 3: Normative Theory

Individual Presentations

• Ontological Pluralism and the Possibility of Conversing Across Worlds - Didier Zúñiga, McGill University

• Intellectual Disability and Political Community: A Politics of Unknow - Rachael Desborough, University of Toronto

• Pluralism at the Margins - Avigail Eisenberg, University of Victoria

• The Politics of Air: Towards a Political Theory of Elemental Materialism - Rachel Forgash, UCLA

Chair

• Stefan P. Dolgert Brock University

Discussant

• Yann Allard-Tremblay McGill University