A political-ontological perspective on pluriversal time

Abstract

This article outlines a framework for understanding the relation between pluriversality and the temporalities of just transitions. We draw on political ontology, a field that examines conflicts between the modern ontology – grounded in the separation of humans from nature – and other ways of understanding and inhabiting the world that conceive of the planet as a living whole and humans as integral to an intelligent cosmos and the living Earth. We begin by introducing our definitions of ontology and pluriversality through ethnographic cases. To make the pluriverse tangible, we then engage the power of metaphors and visual storytelling through the image of ‘the Titanic’. The metaphor helps us convey both the consequences of modern monoversal worldmaking and the potential of pluriversal struggles to challenge dominant narratives and assumptions about reality. We propose the pluriversal framework as a pair of corrective glasses that enables us, ‘moderns’, to perceive radical differences in ways of being, knowing, and doing. Such differences are not confined to Indigenous peoples; they are also enacted by diasporic and land-based communities living within – and often deeply entangled with – modern technological and infrastructural systems. Finally, we bring this pluriversal perspective to debates on just transitions, examining how different ways of inhabiting the world also entail different relations to time, change, and the future. We present transition designing as an open-ended process of shifting away from the toxic loops of modern existence and towards healing loops of life centred on the care of the entire web of life.