The world is at stake. Pandemics, climate change, species extinctions, and toxic waste confront policy-makers, scientists, artists, activists, and citizens from around the planet.

But what does it mean to be in a world? Are there many worlds or just one? And what kinds of worlds do we want to make? If worlds, as Donna Haraway writes, are not given so much as made, then what other worlds are possible? And how can they be brought into being? “Worlds” and “worlding” have emerged as productive theoretical and practical concepts in science studies as well as other fields. “World” is a seductive concept because of its expansiveness, drawing attention to the relationships between the global, the planetary, and the (other)worldly. Following Jakob Von Uexküll, “world” can make inroads into nonhuman or multispecies domains. “Worlding” inspires flights of imagination, as in the world-building stories of speculative fiction. “World” is helpful in thinking about incommensurabilities and alterities. Scholars have mobilized “world” to think of culture and context differently, as an alternative to fraught analytics such as the “global” or “scalability” and their imperial and universalizing ambitions.

In this session, we invite presentations that critically reflect on the ordering concept of “world” and to consider new directions for investigating the world or worlds in science studies. What does this concept afford us? How might worlds serve epistemically, ontologically, or politically? What are the ethical stakes of worlds or worlding? We welcome traditional or multimodal presentations that explore these questions.