Learning Objectives:

Completion of the course should enable students to:

• understand and apply a pluriversal perspective to technological and social considerations in their field of study

• describe the social and environmental consequences of the current economic models of the Global North in the 21^st century

• facilitate meaningful conversations/encounters that allow for multiple ways of knowing and seeing the world to be expressed and valued

• identify the assumptions and hidden context that are associated with technology and the decisions made about its use, application, and dispersion in an increasingly globalized world

Resources:

• Designs for the Pluriverse - Escobar

  • https://www.dukeupress.edu/designs-for-the-pluriverse

    • In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.

• Ideas to Postpone the End of the World - Krenak

  • https://houseofanansi.com/products/ideas-to-postpone-the-end-of-the-world

    • Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene. From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please. To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way.

• Life is not Useful - Krenak

  • https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Life+Is+Not+Useful-p-9781509554065

    • Indigenous leader and activist Ailton Krenak reminds us that we must awaken from the comatose senselessness we have been immersed in since the beginning of the modern colonial project, where order, progress, development, consumerism, and capitalism have taken over our entire existence, leaving us only very partially alive, and, in fact, almost dead. To awaken from the coma of modernity is, for Krenak, to awaken to the possibility of becoming attuned to “the cosmic sense of life.” He points out that the COVID-19 pandemic affects all so-called “human” lives and that the time is ripe for us all to reflect on and undo the exclusivity and distinction that have characterized the concept of humanity throughout Western modernity.