"Designing for the Pluriverse: Restor(y)ing Life, Remaking Worlds" by Arturo Escobar, LACS Public Issues Forum-Polson Institute Speaker

Sponsored by the Polson Institute with LACS

Co-sponsored by: City and Regional Planning Department (CRP) & Africana Studies and Research Center

This talk examines emerging narratives of life that differ significantly from the dominant anthropocentric perspective of the world and its extractive mode of global development. Based on the notion of radical interdependence, such narratives constitute a new foundation for social life and for designing worlds relationally that is indispensable for facing the terracide produced by mono-humanism. One such narrative – centered on the notions of territoriality, communality, autonomy, re-existence, and pluriversality – is discussed in detail. 

Arturo Escobar is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism; postdevelopmentalist and post-capitalist transitions; and ontological design. He was professor of anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until 2018, and is currently affiliated with the PhD Program in Design and Creation, Universidad de Caldas, Manizales, Colombia, and the PhD Program in Environmental Sciences, Universidad del Valle, Cali. Over the past twenty-five years, he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian, environmental and feminist organizations on these issues.  His most well-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995, 2^nd Ed. 2011).  His most recent books are: Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018), and Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (2020).  He is currently working on a book on relationality (Designing Relationally: Making and Restor(y)ing Life) with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma.