Caring for caribou/killing atîku: The Common World and Radical Alterity, Noon Lecture with Lunch, Social Justice @UBC: Noted Scholars Lecture Series.  

Bruno Latour has advanced the concept of cosmopolitics (borrowed from Stengers) as a potentially more sturdy way to constitute a common world. In this version, cosmopolitics stands for a politics of worlding that differs from a politics based on the assumption of a world already existing ‘out there.’ In this presentation I discuss how a turn to ontological politics is extremely useful to address so called environmental conflicts but also, and through a case study from Labrador, how in the formulation of a common world some important issues still linger. These issues underscore the co-presence of complexly overlapped and stratified worldings and the urgency to re-center the problematic they entail for how we stage ontological politics.

 Mario Blaser is the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, the author of Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2010), and co-editor ofIndigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for the Global Age (UBC Press 2010) and In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalization (Zed/IDRC 2004). He has worked for over 20 years with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco and, since 2009, he has been conducting research in association with a group of Innu hunters and elders from Labrador.

Event details:
When: Wednesday the 25th, NOON
* FREE LUNCH will be provided to all those who RSVP to wynn.archibald@ubc.ca
Where: Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice
Directions to Office 028, Jack Bell Building: http://bit.ly/R5WyjE