The 9th International Symposium of Jurnal Antropologi Indonesia

The 9th International Symposium of Jurnal Antropologi Indonesia

Pluriversal Futures in a Multipolarising World: Global South Perspectives

4-7 August 2026
FISIP Universitas Indonesia, Depok Campus

The early 21st century has seen a profound transformation in the global political landscape. The dominance of a single geopolitical order is giving way to a multipolarising world, shaped by shifting political-economic alliances, competing political projects, emergent regional powers, and new forms of South–South cooperation. These changes reshape international governance, economic flows, technological infrastructures, and environmental politics. For communities across the Global South, these geopolitical shifts are experienced not only through policy and diplomacy but also in the intimacy of everyday life—affecting livelihoods, aspirations, and imaginaries of the future.

Anthropology offers critical tools for understanding how these global realignments are lived, negotiated, and resisted. Instead of assuming a universal trajectory of modernity anchored in Western political and economic models, anthropologists increasingly draw on pluriversal perspectives (Blaser & de la Cadena 2018; Escobar 2020), which recognize that multiple, coexisting worlds—ontological, political, ecological—shape social life. A pluriversal lens rejects the notion of a single hegemonic global future and instead insists on the legitimacy of many futures, rooted in diverse histories, cosmologies, and social projects.

This symposium theme brings these strands together: the geopolitics of multipolarisation and the anthropological imperative to engage with pluriversality. It asks how new global configurations create cultural possibilities and frictions for alternative futures in the Global South, and how different communities mobilize relational, ethical, ecological, and historical resources to shape their place in a rapidly shifting world order. Anthropologists can ground these geopolitical transformations in their articulation to different patches of socio-cultural realities, revealing how global international order and planetary environmental shifts intersect with inequality, gender, kinship, livelihoods, land struggles, climate crises, and everyday hopes and uncertainties.

The idea of pluriversal futures foregrounds the existence of multiple, co-produced visions of what a good and livable life entails. In many parts of the Global South, futures are crafted through indigenous and spiritual ontologies, alternative economies and solidarities, ritual and moral worlds, provincialized modern scientific values and practices, multispecies relationality, community care, mutual aid, and social reproduction, local ecological knowledge and climate adaptation and political imagination from below. These futures often stand in tension with dominant geopolitical narratives—whether neoliberal, nationalist, developmentalist, or technocratic. A pluriversal approach highlights the creative and relational worlds that people build in the interstices of global structures.

Significance for the Global South

The Global South is not merely receiving the effects of multipolarisation—it is actively shaping emerging world orders. Across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Oceania, new forms of South–South cooperation, regional cultural politics, environmental negotiation, and technological partnerships are transforming how societies envision their future place in the world.

Indonesia, with its own diplomatic and cultural projects, is uniquely positioned to contribute. Its complex assemblage of Indigenous worlds, religious pluralities, ecological challenges, and political transformations makes it a critical site for exploring how pluriversal futures are crafted within a multipolarising global landscape.

This symposium positions the Global South as an epistemic center, not a periphery, offering conceptual innovations and grounded ethnographic insights.

Objectives of the Symposium

1. To illuminate how geopolitical multipolarisation is experienced, interpreted, and contested through everyday life, cultural practices, and local politics.
2. To foreground pluriversal approaches that highlight diverse ontologies, ethical worlds, and alternative visions of the future.
3. To promote anthropological scholarship that centers Global South perspectives in understanding global shifts.
4. To explore multispecies, ecological, spiritual, and relational forms of future-making in times of environmental crisis.
5. To create a space for interdisciplinary and multimodal dialogue on the intersection of geopolitics, ethics, care, and local world-building practices.

Call for panel proposals

We invite panel proposals that explore how pluriversal futures emerge, clash, or coexist within a rapidly evolving multipolar global landscape, and how Global South perspectives can deepen and reshape contemporary anthropological debates.

Panels may address, but are not limited to, the following areas:

1. Geopolitics, Multipolarisation & Everyday Life

• Local experiences of shifting global power configurations
• South–South cooperation and regional alliances
• Migration, labor, borders, and mobility in a multipolar world

2. Pluriversal Ontologies and Alternative Futures

• Indigenous cosmologies and world-making
• Ontological politics and decolonial epistemologies
• Conflicting or overlapping futures within communities

3. Environmental Politics, Justice and Climate Futures

• Climate diplomacy in a multipolarising world
• Community adaptation, slow violence, and ecological uncertainty
• Resource conflicts, environmental justice, and extractive zones

4. Reimagination of Economic Transformations and South–South Circuits

• Changing development models and alternative economies
• Digital infrastructures, technological dependencies, and platform geopolitics
• Global supply chains, precarity, and local livelihoods

5. Ethics, Care, and Social Reproduction in Precarious Times

• Gendered care labor amid global uncertainty
• Moral worlds of crisis, welfare, and everyday ethics
• Kinship, reciprocity, and intergenerational futures
• Migration, labour, and circuit of hopes.

6. Multispecies and More-Than-Human Futures

• Environmental spiritualities, sacred ecologies, and cosmopolitics
• Human–animal–land–spirit relations in shaping futures
• Multispecies responses to geopolitical and ecological change

7. Urban and Infrastructural Imaginaries

• Urban adaptation to climate change and shifting global flows
• Infrastructure, hope, and breakdown
• City-making and regional influence in a multipolar world

8. Post-Extractive Ecologies and the Ruins of Development

• Lives in extractive zones (mining, plantations, tourism)
• Ruins, abandonment, and regeneration
• Conflicts over land, water, and resource governance

9. Methods, Ethics, and Knowledge Production

• Decolonising anthropology in a multipolar world
• Collaborative, participatory, and community-based methodologies
• Rethinking the ethics of fieldwork under political precarity
• Multimodality as an ontological claim in the production of knowledge

Panels that cut across these themes or offer innovative theoretical, methodological, or decolonial approaches are strongly encouraged.

Each panel proposal should include:

1. Panel Title
2. Abstract (250–300 words)
   Clearly state the panel’s aim, scope, questions, and relevance to the symposium theme.
3. Panel Conveners
   Names, affiliations, emails of 1–2 conveners.
4. Format
   Proposed format (e.g., standard panel with 3–5 presenters; roundtable; workshop; experimental/creative panel).
5. List of Potential Contributors (Optional)
   Names or types of contributors the conveners expect to invite.
6. Keywords (4–6)