Multispecies Thinking in Times of Crises: Ecologies of Care and Ethics in the Global South

Date/Time July 23-24, 2026 

Location Auerbach Library, MESH (Weyertal 59, third floor)

Organised in collaboration with the Global South Studies Center (GSSC)

For participation, registration in advance is required.

Please register here if you want to come in person.
Please register here if you want to participate online.

WORKSHOP
Interdisciplinary discussions of the effectiveness of the ethics of care and reciprocity, which are the foundational values of many Indigenous worldviews, are now emerging. The proposed workshop aims to accentuate this aspect of environmental and planetary thinking, specifically attempting to deliberate and comprehend how alternate modes of developmentalism have been prevalent in different communities of the Global South.

Some of the pertinent research questions that this workshop will address are how Indigenous knowledge acted as an exemplar of multispecies thinking and holistic living, in what ways can these knowledge forms be regarded as advocating mutuality and care for human and non-human forms? Why and how are the versions of multispecies care being represented in literary and other cultural documents? Can fiction from Indigenous communities in the Global South serve as representative narratives for imagining alternative possibilities of relating to the planet and reconceptualising pluriversal developmentalism and justice?

As planetary crises deepen, communities in the Global South continue to imagine and practice more just and livable worlds. This workshop brings together scholars and practitioners to explore multispecies thinking through the ethics of care, reciprocity, and Indigenous knowledges.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS
Pequi Trees and Multispecies Ecologies of Care in the Brazilian Cerrado: Colonial Frontiers, Resistance, and More-than-Human Histories
Claiton Marcio da Silva, Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul, Brazil

Tackling the Climate Crisis through Indigenous Livelihood Practices in Nigeria’s Oil-Extractive Communities
Abosede Omowumi Babatunde, University of Ilorin, Nigeria

Towards Pluriversal Imaginaries: Indigenous Knowledge, Ethics of Care, and Indian Literary Narratives
Payel Pal, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, India

Hope in the Anthropocene: Eco-Collectivism and Multispecies Entanglement in Contemporary South Asian Novels in English
Rakibul Hasan Khan, University of Otago, New Zealand

The Ethics of Cohabitation: Multispecies Belonging and Religious Environmentalism in the Indian Sundarbans Delta
Pritha Chakraborty, Amity University Bengaluru, India

The Severance of Elemental Relationality: China’s Compressed Modernity in The Waste Tide
Xiaohui Liang, University of Science and Technology Beijing, China

The Pluriverse as an Ontological-Epistemological Approach to Multispecies Relations in Times of Socio-Environmental Crisis
Pedro Pablo Achondo Moya, MESH, University of Cologne, Germany

Contact, registration and more information:
Goutam Karmakar (goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in)

Please register here if you want to come in person.
Please register here if you want to participate online.