Mapping Relationality

Mapping our Project

We  came to this project– and to an understanding of the importance of relationality–  after years of working in the academy on, and with, social movements. We found that there were a number of PROBLEMS that contemporary frameworks of social theory and activist practices were failing to adequately or satisfactorily address. These included the problems of dealing with difference or diversity; figurations of power; the unchallenged belief in the indisputable truth/existence of the  individual, science, the economy, progress, and a forward moving temporality; the hegemony of secular rationality and pervading all of these, the problem of what counts as knowledge. 

While inspired by many important moves and traditions in both the academy and within social movements– what we describe as the PREHISTORIES of our project– including post-structuralism, certain versions of feminism, critical race theory,  post-Development/Illich, Post-Colonialism and decoloniality, Social movements as knowledge producers,– it was not until the emergence of the “ontological turn,” as well as the coming into visibility of projects for autonomy (mostly in Latin America, but with worldwide echoes) that we started to articulate the onto-epistemological framework of relationality.  Importantly then, The SOURCES for this framework range from disparate scholarly threads; these include trends in the human and social sciences (e.g., phenomenology-inspired approaches of cognition and embodiment, new materialisms, vitalism, process thought, theories of networks and assemblages, among others); theories of complexity in the natural sciences;  indigenous and other social movements; healing traditions; ontological design and transition studies; philosophies of digital worlds; and wisdom tradition and strands of spirituality, in particular Buddhism. From these sources we have begun to identify various POLITICS, PRACTICES and APPLICATIONs that we have previously described as the political activation of relationality,  or projects to design worlds and knowledges otherwise.