Book Celebration with Kriti Sharma Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human
Thursday, April 30th in Humanities 2-259 for a talk with Kriti Sharma, Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies at UCSC and co-author of Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (Bloomsbury UK, 2024) with co-authors Michal Osterweil and Arturo Escobar.
About the Book
This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design: the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things.
The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality. This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large.
The book follows two interwoven threads of argumentation: on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life.
The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable ‘toxic loops’ of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within ‘relational weaves’ which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.
Get the Book
About the Authors
Arturo Escobar is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. His main interests are political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of globalization, social movements, and technoscience. He is the author of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), and several other books including Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1995), a seminal text in post-development studies. He is an activist-researcher from Cali, Colombia, working on territorial struggles against extractivism, postdevelopmentalist and post-capitalist transitions, and ontological design. Over the past three decades he has worked closely with several Afro-Colombian, environmental and feminist organizations on these issues.
Michal Osterweil is Teaching Associate Professor in Global Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. She is also a radical homemaker and community actionist. Her main areas of interest are social movements, new theories/imaginaries of social change and the intersection of knowledge production, epistemology and change work.
Kriti Sharma is a microbial ecologist and philosopher whose work bridges biology, philosophy, and art to re-tell “the story of life” not as struggle and scarcity, but as radical interdependence. She is Associate Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies in CRES at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of Interdependence: Biology and Beyond (Fordham University Press, 2015).