No doubt, the best part of serving as director of the PhD program is the privilege of leading the Doctoral Seminar with our incoming PhD students. In each session, we discuss a reading that one of them has selected as particularly inspiring.
Bold texts abound, and the energy students and texts bring is invigorating. These past two weeks, for instance, we have read and discussed “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography” by S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, and Ways of Being by James Bridle. These bold efforts to forge new epistemologies seem to signal a deep unease with our current ways of thinking. And perhaps the failure of previous bold attempts at epistemological shifts too. So it makes a lot of sense that new generations of scholars pick them up.
Yet today during the seminar, I found myself remembering the sentence attributed to a Uruguayan military officer: “We were at the edge of the cliff, and then we took a bold step forward.” I guess that was my awkward way of asking myself: Will these new epistemologies foster a more pluralistic and empathic world, or merely a more pluralistic yet atomized and fragmented one?
