The world is currently facing multiple emergencies: social, humanitarian, and environmental. How these are perceived affects how they are studied and therefore how they are addressed with possible solutions in mind. Indeed, particular perceptions of the world also shaped how such current crises came about in the first place. This is because the different ways humans perceive the world play a pivotal role in what action is taken. There has been a gradual shift across various academic disciplines towards perceiving the world as constituted by emergent relations rather than fixed laws. For instance, the physicist David Bohm in the 1980s described two world views: explicate and implicate. In the mainstream scientific view of reality, all things are envisaged as having discreet boundaries. This is what Bohm describes as an explicate order. In an explicate order relationships do not affect an entity’s fundamental constitution, whereas, in an implicate order, everything is constituted through multiple, ongoing and always changing relations. Based on their cosmologies and in light of their historical experience of violent oppression, numerous Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, such as Gregory Cajete, Manulani Aluli-Meyer, Joy Harjo, Bispos dos Santos, and Kyle Whyte, have become increasingly visible in showing how their ancestral onto/epistemologies envisage the world as relational in different ways. In other contexts, environmental activists and ecologists have long argued for relational understandings of the world. Processual and relational perspectives have been thoroughly theorized in philosophy (e.g., Deleuze, Guattari, and Haraway) and in contemporary music (e.g., John Cage; Raven Chacon). In biology, attention to ontogenetic development has led to increasing studies in epigenetics and the ways in which evolutionary processes are affected by experiences and behaviour of beings during their lives, not only in reproductive processes. Most recently, biologists and medical researchers are increasingly finding evidence of the relationship between gut microbiomes, soil and food microbiomes and how these can work towards the prevention of biodiversity loss and the improvement of neurological conditions. As these examples demonstrate, historically as well as today, scholars have argued that perception itself can be understood as a relational process of mutual constitution between the thing perceived and the perceiver (e.g., Ingold and Goethe). In other words, the relationship between knower and known shapes both. What these approaches show is that understanding the world from such relational perspectives can have far-reaching consequences for understanding how to address contemporary issues.
Further information about the conference can be found here: https://intermediality-centre.uni-graz.at/de/relational-world/
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We are looking forward to welcoming you in October!