Cosmologies, sciences, planetary politics: reflections on ‘knowledge’ in new registers

Important efforts to build more cross-disciplinary, and cross-science, approaches to knowledge construction have been at the forefront in many academic and policy initiatives. For example, those engaged in thinking through the implications of climate change and the Anthropocene, quantum sciences and complexity perspectives have challenged not only the borders between natural and social sciences but also the idea that we can have firm ‘knowledge’ of ‘a world’ around ‘us’. This chapter cheers and probes such paradigm shifts in relation to knowledge. I also explores the implications for how we might in this context encourage different ways of knowing, narrating and becoming in enmeshment with others (human and non-human). This chapter suggests that as part of exploring the widening array of perspectives on ‘knowledge’ (itself a difficult moniker these days) we benefit from embracing and understanding sciences in a more direct, communal, experiential sense. Instead of dismissing ‘Science’ as a positivist, singular, colonial or a ‘western’ edifice, I suggest it will help to observe ‘sciences’ as a messy living practice of being with, or communing; as a way of doing politics across disciplines and species. The result is a less ‘apolitical’ understanding of science, a less ‘social’ understanding of politics, and, hopefully, a more ‘planetary’ multispecies understanding of political possibility.