What’s Next?

Towards Relationality: Facing the Planetary Crisis with New Tools and Insights

Two-day workshop March 25-27, 2020

(Theory and Politics of Relationality, a Carolina Seminar)

Since 2011, the seminar on the Theory and Politics of Relationality has been convening an engaging multi-disciplinary conversation on the notion of relationality and the politics and futures it engenders. This year our annual symposium becomes an opportunity to engage with applications or activations of relationality from a variety of disciplines and genres. Primarily organized around two events, a book project and the launching of an interactive website, we invite participants to join us in the conversation.  

We believe that a key to constructing livable futures and addressing numerous crises of our times lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists, or relationality. Relationality—or non-dualism—we suggest, is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large.  Some might even say that what is at stake is a veritable new mode of existence, or ontology, what some call a new paradigm of reality. Importantly, this insight is emerging in numerous fields from the natural to the social sciences, and among various social movements and practices, as well as a diversity of projects for social change and future making. 

(Photo Source: “Endosymbiosis. Homage to Lynn Margulis, by Shoshanah Dubiner.)

Make Ourselves Anew: Transforming the Story of Self through Black Feminist Poetry and Biology”, with Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Kriti Sharma.

March 25, 12 pm. Fedex GEC 1009. 

Beyond the story of our intrinsic separateness from one another and from the natural world are modes of speaking, writing, thinking, and being that open up much-needed possibilities for a livable future.  Join Black feminist poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs and biologist Kriti Sharma for a conversation on their interconnected poetic and experimental work to re-tell and thus transform the dominant story of who we are, what life is, and (therefore) what futures are possible.

Relationality: Designing as a Transformative Praxis of Inter-existence, a workshop with Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil, Kriti Sharma, & Clive Dilnot.

March 27, 1-5 pm. Fedex GEC 1005.

We invite participants to join in a conversation on the book project — Relationality: Designing as a Transformative Praxis of Inter-existence, currently being written by Michal, Kriti and Arturo.  In this book, we argue that a shift in paradigm towards the presupposition of non-separateness as the foundation of reality is necessary for addressing effectively multi-faceted crisis of climate, inequality, poverty, and meaning.

email osterwei@email.unc.edu for any questions or to RSVP