Pluriversal feminisms and multispecies justice: Thinking with/from the Global South is an interdisciplinary project led by Dr Niharika Pandit (School of Politics and International Relations) and Dr Swati Arora (School of the Arts)
Funded by the IHSS Early Career Workshop Funding Scheme 2023-24, the first part of the project engaged with transnational conversations on pluriversality, feminist theory, and multispecies justice by centring anti/decolonial and Indigenous scholarship and coalitional thinking from the Global South. These key theoretical concerns were explored through three workshops on Land, Pedagogy and Solidarity held during Spring and Summer 2024 at Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End campus.
Insistently interdisciplinary and transnational, the project experimented with methodologies that de-centre dominant Western feminisms and academic agendas that have often perpetuated colonial hierarchies. These hierarchies manifest both in theory – such as some knowledges deemed permissible and reliable versus other considered as anecdotal, or positioning the Global North as the centre of knowledge production with the Global South merely providing ‘empirical data’ – and in praxis where feminist struggles are simplistically reduced to the single axis of sex/gender. The first iteration of the project was a three-part workshop series, bringing together artists, activists, PhD and early career researchers as well as charities and arts organisations based in London. The following ideas guide the project:
The concept of pluriversality rooted in decolonial scholarship critiques what Santiago Castro-Gómez has framed as ‘zeropoint hubris’. Zero-point hubris is the colonial episteme of Western modernity that establishes an implicit hierarchy of knowledge, positioning its own perspective as the ‘self-evident’ apex of history. The concepts of pluriverse and pluriversality, pluriversal politics, pluriversal feminisms, and pluriversal hermeneutics form a critical-affirmative cluster, aimed at addressing and making visible alternative epistemes that emerge from subjugated or ‘submerged’ perspectives in the Global South.
Working with the pluriverse allows for building what scholars Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser call ‘a world of many worlds’. This project centres diverse geopolitically situated perspectives, to highlight ‘that other truths also exist and have the right to exist, but [that] their visibility is reduced by the continuing power asymmetry, which is based on coloniality of knowledge, power, being and gender’.
Multispecies justice invites us to rethink the idea of justice in our time. In a world where extractivism and relentless pursuit of fossil fuel and profit is leading to climate change, mass killing, and destruction of other animals, forests, rivers and ecosystems, multispecies justice suggests that justice for humans is impossible without taking seriously the need for a healthy environment and the flourishing of other species. Engaging with anticolonial and Indigenous scholarship allows us to examine the role of settler colonialism and occupation in resource exploitation while historicising the climate crisis through the lens of empire's histories. It also interrogates ongoing extractivism by imperial, capitalist, and (post)colonial states that treat land as mere ‘territory’ for profit. The project fosters reflections on these critical issues, offering a space to re-envision collective multispecies justice.
The term ‘Global South’ evokes both a reflection on persistent geopolitical inequalities and resistance to the dominant relations that form the imperial core, the Global North. However, the Global South is not a uniform or seamless space; it is marked by diverse translocal struggles against neoliberalism, coloniality, borders, and more. In thinking with/from the Global South, we engage with these complexities. By centring Global South thinking, we aim to explore its possibilities, particularly in relation to pluriversal feminist theory and praxis emerging from this region. We also interrogate the concept of the ‘Global South’, considering its internal marginalities and ongoing struggles. With this two-fold critical and praxis-oriented work, our aim has been to foster meaningful and reciprocal exchange of ideas and to build solidarities across geographies and struggles.
Photo from the workshop 'Land,' held in spring 2024.
Based on these guiding ideas, the key questions for the three-part workshop series were:
These questions guided us throughout the three workshops organised in March-May 2024 around the following core ideas:
While much has been written about feminism and pluriversality in relation to humans, our first workshop aimed to de-centre the normative human subject of the Anthropocene, and, instead, centred Indigenous and decolonial conceptualisations of Land (Simpson 2014;Tuck and McKenzie 2015) which encompass land, water, air, and earth. Participants were sent the following prompt and asked to reflect, in two roundtable sessions, on the forms of justice that can be envisioned, the dominant powers that can be interrogated, and the stories that can be told differently when we centre Land in our thinking. The workshop concluded with a zine-making session exploring the workshop’s themes led by Jo Krishnakumar.
How can we think together about how ‘Land’ as a method, life force, an ethic, a site of political struggle can orient us toward a different relation with each other. When we centre feminist theory and praxis from the Global South, what dreams for the future, speculative possibilities of another horizon emerge? What does an ethical, spiritual relation between humans, air, water, and earth look like on our journey toward epistemic and political freedom?
When we meander together for justice-to-come, what form might abundance take?
This workshop engaged with the Global South not simply as an ‘empirical’ stance but as a site of theory-making, concept-building and knowledge production. The focus was on mapping the epistemic potentialities of the ‘Global South’: what imaginaries of violence, justice and liberation emerge from this space? How can our work in the classrooms begin to dismantle the epistemic and political hierarchies shaped by global geopolitics? And how can we draw up a transnational feminist syllabus that undoes the marginalisation of the Global South? The participants were sent the following prompts:
How can feminist pedagogical practices inside and outside the classroom grapple with this moment of suspension and interregnum that we find ourselves in? How do we manifest critical hope for a possible future where all forms of life co-exist in an ethical relation to each other? What does hope mean for you? Why is the work of political education important for you? What methods of pedagogy do we adopt to address, sit with, and work through grief, exhaustion, rage, despair, and move toward love, mutuality, intimacy, and justice-to-come?
What is your dream for tomorrow?
The workshop began with an arts-based pedagogy session led by A Particular Reality with Ali Eisa, Laiba Raja and Akanksha Mehta. The day ended with a poetry-writing workshop led by Sarah Lasoye.
Our final workshop created space for mapping potential solidarities across borders and transnational struggles. Through the screening of Land of My Dreams and a post-show discussion with award-winning filmmaker Nausheen Khan, the session focused on feminist and anticolonial ethics, politics of location, and reflexive thinking, emphasising solidarity as the foundation of any collective liberatory praxis. We engaged with the community-driven work of participants to raise critical methodological and ethical questions around solidarities: when and why they fail, how they can be sustained, and how we can listen and work across diverse struggles and positionalities.
Photo from the workshop 'Pedagogy', held in summer 2024.