179. Cultivating global and place-based solidarities with decolonial concepts of spacetime and environmental relationality
Karin Louise Hermes, Leibniz University Hannover; Caleb Lázaro Moreno, University of Kansas; Niko Patu;
This panel invites pluralistic engagement with Indigenous and 'global South' frameworks for culturally-specific place-based human-environment relations. With kaona (metaphors) of Hawaiian Aloha 'Āina ('love of the land') in ocean, land, and sky, the panel forwards the space/time of the muliwai or 'estuary' as symbiotic and synergistic waters for solidarities and relationality. Andean pacha spacetime and the Oceanian spatiotemporal expanse of tā/vā/wā (Ka'ili 2018) offer cosmologies of solidarity that are simultaneously philosophy, physics, and relationality in action. Relational systems-thinking of hydrology, astronomy, geography, and botany in Hawai'i, and the Andean complementary dualities in spacetime, emphasize the need to 'translate' across languages, disciplines, and borders for environmental ethics and climate communications. Narrative cosmologies and decolonial philosophies offer perspectives of sustainability and atmospheric sciences, relativity, and perhaps also quantum theories of change, in overturning binary dialectics of past vs. progress, spirit/energy vs. matter. The metaphor of Kamay from the Indigenous name of Botany Bay, the Tagalog word for 'hand,' and an Andean/Quechua word for 'vital energy' embraces these confluences (Barker 2019) in convergences of the estuary as a decolonial spacetime of solidarity. The panel seeks to dialogue research grounded in Indigenous Studies (Meyer 2003; Watts 2013; Wilson-Hokowhitu 2019) and Pacific Islands Studies canons within STS. A sustainability science and environmental philosophy lens is encouraged in particular, as well as scholarship practices and multimedia from Indigenous and Spanish-language cosmovisions. Non-Anglophone methods of interdisciplinary social sciences from all regions are welcome, including 'Naturphilosophie' or 'Geisteswissenschaften' as humanities 'sciences of the Spirit/Mind' to bridge disciplinary splits.
