Cosmologies, Sciences, Planetary Politics: Reflections on ‘Knowledge’ in New Registers

Important efforts to build more cross-disciplinary approaches to knowledge construction have been at the forefront of 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. It 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). The chapter suggests that, as part of exploring the widening array of perspectives on ‘knowledge’, we benefit from embracing and understanding sciences in a more direct, communal, experiential sense. Instead of dismissing ‘Science’ as a positivist, singular, colonial, or ‘western’ edifice, it is suggested 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 a more ‘planetary’, multispecies understanding of political possibility.