Thinking Like a Multiverse: Embracing a Diverse World

One of life’s great paradoxes is that we all inhabit the same world, yet no single person, living being, or object within it is exactly like anything else. Thus, difference — the sheer diversity of the world’s countless inhabitants — is arguably the most immediate fact of our shared reality. 

This seminar style workshop asks: What does it take to properly apprehend the world’s diversity and respond to it with curiosity, open-heartedness, humor, and joy, rather than anxiety, fear, and violence? How can we combat rising xenophobia in our local communities and social spheres by productively engaging with, rather than denying or banishing, alternative perspectives and worldviews? In other words, how can each of us learn to “think like a multiverse”?

Drawing from literature, philosophy, and popular culture, we will consider diversity and heterogeneity not as a problem to be solved or a threat to be feared, but rather as a field of imaginative possibilities for the formation of new relationships across differences.

Each day, we will zoom in on a distinct framework for thinking about diversity and multiplicity. These include: 

• Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of “mestiza consciousness,” a feminist model for thinking about the cultivation of cross-racial and cross-gender bonds. 
• The Indigenous kinship worldview, a spiritual cosmology that conceives of human beings as having a relationship of mutual exchange and reciprocity with the planet.
• Cosmopolitanism and radical democracy, a political theory that centralizes the importance of negotiating vastly different points of view on the nature of the “good life.”
• Psychedelic experience, a millennia-spanning, global consciousness-raising practice intended to aid human beings in extending their imagination outward from the self to commune with a wider network of cosmic relationships. 

Throughout the week, we will combine the study of key texts in these various philosophies with recent popular media and experiential exercises to practice and integrate these ideas into our everyday lives. We will write about our encounters with non-human plant life on campus, imagine and describe different versions of ourselves across a fictional multiverse, and identify and respond to differences in temperament, personality, style, and tastes within the group.

This workshop will integrate elements of academic or intellectual learning with practical writing and group exercises, and participants are encouraged (though not required) to complete the recommended readings in advance. Much of our meetings will be grounded in facilitated discussion and dialogue about what we’re reading and watching. This discussion-based format will allow us time to process and synthesize new ways of apprehending differences collaboratively.

Recommended Reading:

• Gayle Rubin, “Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch and Gender” (1992): 11 pages.
• Gloria Anzaldúa, “Preface” and “Chapter 7: Towards a New Consciousness,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987): 14 pages. 
• Film Screening: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2022) [Available on Netflix]
• Michael Pollan, “The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics,” How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018): 15 pages.
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Skywoman Falling,” “The Gift of Strawberries,” and “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2015): 34 pages
• Jenny Slate, “Treat,” “Introduction/Explanation/Guildlines for Consumptions,” “My Mother,” and “Kathleen: Dog-Flower Face” in Little Weirds (2020): 20 pages.
• Film Screening: My Octopus Teacher (2020) [Available on Netflix]
• David Hollinger, “Preface” to Cosmopolitanism and the Problem of Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (2006): 8 pages.
• Sheldon Wolin, “Democracy, Difference, and Re-cognition,” in Fugitive Democracy: and Other Essays (2016): 16 pages.
• Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (2014)

With the exception of the novel Annihilation, all readings will be made available in pdf form in advance of the workshop.