This seminar invites interdisciplinary and comparative engagements with cosmologies of care and relationality. Centering on “cosmovisions” which perceives the Planet as a living, relational system constituted by both human and nonhuman agents, we investigate how often-marginalized Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, Asian, and/or other ancient knowledge systems reframe planetary ethics and justice as relational practices grounded in place, kinship, and interdependence.

Environmental humanities have sought to decenter Western frameworks by attending to situated knowledges, land-based practices, more-than-human relations, and cosmopolitical movements (Heise 2008; Adamson and Ruffin 2015; de la Cadena 2015; Monani and Adamson 2016). Yet work remains to be done in foregrounding cosmologies of care and relationality—narrative, spiritual, and ethical systems that center reciprocity, memory, and repair.

This seminar builds on the insight that cosmologies are sophisticated understandings of scientific literacies undergirding living systems. We explore how these cosmovisionary archives of knowledge are being updated and implemented today as they continue guiding human behavior in relation to land, water, ancestors, and future generations. We seek to illuminate how non-anthropocentric cosmologies offer alternatives to extractivist, nationalistic, and individualistic paradigms and advocate for frameworks guided by environmental justice, climate justice and reparations.

We are interested in how literary, oral, and visual forms function as repositories/archives of ecological knowledge and as affective technologies of resistance, healing, and transformation. We welcome papers that explore how care emerges as both an affective/ethical stance and political forces/actions capable of shaping new modes of relationality.

We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Representations of ecological care and/or cosmopolitical justice
• Environmental justice, climate justice, and reparations narratives
• Comparative studies of Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, Asian, Latin American, and other knowledge systems or indigenous scientific literacies
• Justice and stewardship frameworks centered and rooted in non-anthropocentric understandings of rights, justice and relationality
• Storytelling, ritual, or aesthetics as modes of activism and healing
• Critiques of extractivism and the ethics of interdependence
• Environmental temporalities: memory, ancestral time, and futurity in cosmological frameworks
• Theories that collocate environmental humanities and decolonial cosmologies
• Cross-cultural paradigms of sacred ecology, elemental relations, and worlding practices

We invite submissions that draw on knowledge systems and that bridge literary and cultural analysis with fields such as anthropology, ecocriticism, political ecology, philosophy, religious studies, critical geography and/or other fast-accelerating fields of the environmental humanities.