Next week, I will co-host a panel with Christian Ritter at the 2025 meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). The panel, called “Towards Pluriversal Urbanisms: Reimagining Postcolonial and More-than-human Futures,” brings together STS scholars from diverse backgrounds and geographies to collaboratively explore the urban beyond the human and beyond the colonial. We convene designers, ethnographers, activists, and planners to think with infrastructures, atmospheres, and everyday practices that exceed standard models of governance, property, and growth. We aim to map emergent repertoires of care, accountability, and world-making while foregrounding voices and life forms often erased by dominant urban paradigms.
Our discussions will orbit around the following questions:
- What are the ethical and political alternatives to the dominant narratives of ownership, control, and exploitation in urban governance?
- What are the communitarian and non-human responses and adaptive strategies to environmental injustices?
- How can urban landscapes be transformed into sites for articulating more-than-human agency, reverberations, and care?
- How can the design of public open spaces and infrastructures facilitate more-than-human exchange and a harmonic cohabitation of humans and non-humans?
- How can ethnographic studies account for different cosmologies, perspectives, beliefs, strategies, practices, and knowledge systems that challenge Western and human-centered ways of knowing?
- How do invisible labor and non-human workers transform urbanity?
We invite proposals, provocations, and situated stories that respond to these prompts with empirical richness and conceptual experimentation. The session will interweave online and presential short presentations with conversation, encouraging cross-regional dialogue and collaborative sketching of methods—from multispecies ethnography and critical design to participatory mapping and archival reanimation. Whether your work explores citizen-led repair, non-human labor, decolonial governance, or the politics of open space, we hope this panel will become a site for practicing pluriversal urbanisms in the making.
Here, you can download our panel introduction.