Preface and Acknowl­edgments

The times they are a-­changin,’ chanted Bob Dylan in a prophetic song back in 1964, at the dawn of the North American counterculture movement. That was well before intensive globalization with its increasingly con­spic­u­ous collateral damage, including climate change, widespread extractivism, extensive conflict and social dislocation, and the inexpressible devastation of the Earth. T­oday we would have to say, with climate justice activist Naomi Klein (2014), that this changes every­thing. For both Dylan and Klein, as for so many visionaries and activists worldwide and some farsighted designers, all of whom will be among the protagonists of this book, Klein’s injunction is to be taken not only seriously but literally. What this means is that what is at stake is not just a given economic model (neoliberal capitalism), nor a set of cultural traits inimical to life on the planet (say, rampant individualism and consumerism), high-­level policy reform (e.g., more comprehensive climate change protocols), geopo­liti­cal power strug­gles for re-­and de-­Westernization, or the ever-­growing military-­industrial complex. As Latin American indigenous, black, and peasant activists are wont to say, the con­temporary crisis is a crisis of a par­tic­ul­ar modelo civilizatorio, or civilizational model, that of patriarchal Western cap­i­tal­ist modernity. This is a striking claim, but one that more and more social groups on the planet, in both the Global South and the Global North, are taking to heart in the defense of their places, territories, and cultures. As we shall see in the conclusion, the implication is none other than every­thing has to change. For ­those for whom the current conjuncture “changes every­thing,” what needs to change is an entire way of life and a ­whole style of world making. It goes deeper than capitalism.

This book is about this civilizational conjuncture, its implications for design theory and practice, and the practical potential of design to contribute to the profound cultural and ecological transitions seen as needed by a mounting cadre of intellectuals and activists if humanity is to face effectively the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning. The book is based on the belief that this potential is real, as suggested by some trends within the design profession as a ­whole, particularly among a small but perhaps growing subgroup of designers who are actually already embarked on the proj­ect of “design for transitions.” Some of t­hese designers claim that the crisis demands nothing less than a reinvention of the ­human. Bold claims indeed. The book finds its main epistemic and po­litical inspiration and force, however, in the po­liti­cal strugg­les of indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and marginalized urban groups in Latin Amer­i­ca who mobilize with the goal of defending not only their resources and territories but their entire ways of being-i­n-t­he-­world. Some of them do so in the name of their collective alternative “Life Proj­ects,” a concept that is also finding a propitious home in transition design circles. The second wellspring of inspiration and ideas is the discourses and practices of the visionaries and activists who, in so many places and spheres of life, are engaged in bringing about the transitions. That’s at least how many of them see it. A main goal of the book is to ask ­whether design can actually contribute to enabling the communal forms of autonomy that underlie ­these transition visions and Life Proj­ects. This is to say that one of the major goals of the book is to place cultural and po­litical autonomy, as defined by the mobilized grassroots communities in Latin Amer­i­ca, firmly within the scope of design, perhaps even at its center in the case of ­those wishing to work closely with communities in strug­gle.

To nourish design’s potential for the transitions, however, requires a significant re­orientation of design from the functionalist, rationalistic, and industrial traditions from which it emerged, and within which it still functions with ease, t­oward a type of rationality and set of practices attuned to the relational dimension of life. This is why the approach taken is ontological. Design is ontological in that all design-­led objects, tools, and even ser­vices bring about par­tic­ul­ar ways of being, knowing, and ­doing. This ontological dimension of design ­will be discussed at length in the book. Major sources for the re­orientation of the rationalistic tradition lie within the nondualist and relational forms of life effectively pres­ent among many of the peoples engaged in territorial strugg­les against extractive globalization. These struggles evince the strong communal foundations still pres­ent at the basis of t­hese ­people’s social life. Insights for thinking about relationality are also found within certain postdualist trends in academic circles of late, often described as the ontological turn. Relationality is also pres­ent, in the last instance, in the Earth itself, in the endless and ceaselessly changing weave of life on which all life depends. At some point in the book, we will speak about “the po­liti­cal activation of relationality” to signal the emergence of ­these vital knowledges and forces.

­These are the main themes of the book, then: cultural, civilizational, and ecological transitions; an ontological approach to design and design for transitions; and the relations among autonomy, design, and the po­liti­cal activation of relational and communal logics at the center of the transitions. Can design’s modernist tradition be re­oriented from its dependence on the life-­stifling dualist ontology of patriarchal cap­i­tal­ist modernity ­toward relational modes of knowing, being, and doing? Can it be creatively reappropriated by subaltern communities in support of their strugg­les to strengthen their autonomy and perform their life proj­ects? Can ontologically oriented design play a constructive role in transforming entrenched ways of being and d­oing t­oward philosophies of well-­being that fi­nally equip ­humans to live in mutually enhancing ways with each other and with the Earth? Such are the overall questions explored in this book.

Situating This Book’s Emergence within Epistemological and Pol­iti­cal Contexts

This book is the result of seven years of research and teaching on design, relationality, and transitions at the upper-­division and gradu­ate levels; the background, however, goes much farther back. Given that I am not a professional designer nor a theorist within a design school, I feel it is impor­tant to situate this work and to convey its emergent character within design and scholarly trends, as well as within my ongoing intellectual-p­olitical proj­ects. Making explicit the genealogy of my interest in design will also help me explain the ways in which my take on design is necessarily idiosyncratic and purposeful. I have worked around design themes for many de­cades. Chemical engineering (my undergraduate major) is about the design of production systems (chemical plants and operations) based on the thermodynamic analysis of the flows of ­matter and energy that go into t­hese systems.¹1 Paradoxically, the engineering professions have been a central agent in the creation of the structural unsustainability of the con­temporary world.

During my PhD years at Berkeley in the 1980s, I worked closely with one of the pioneers of systems thinking, C. West Churchman, who in the mid1950s had coauthored the first textbook of operations research with Russell Ackoff and with two systems planners and designers close to Churchman, the British planner Leonard Joy and the Finnish designer Ritva Kaje. West (as he was universally known) wrote a difficult book, entitled The Design of Inquiring Systems (Churchman 1971), and ever since I read it in the late 1970s the notion of the design of knowledge systems has stuck in my mind as one of the most fundamental aspects of intellectual work. Since then, I have been reading in a sustained fashion, albeit largely on my own, in the vast and heterogeneous area of systems thinking, including cybernetics, self-­organization, emergence, and complexity. Today, as we ­shall see, living-­systems theory figures prominently in transition visions and novel design frameworks. One highlight for me in this regard was my conversations with the late biologist of complexity Brian Goodwin on several occasions at Schumacher College, an ecological transitions think tank in southern ­England. The works of Goodwin and ­those of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on self-­organization, autopoiesis, and complexity have influenced my approach to design, as ­will be abundantly reflected in this book. I see this engineering and systems background as the first thread in the genealogy of my design concerns.

Between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, I collaborated with groups in Colombia working within the popu­lar communications field, by then a rising professional and activist space. One of the key concepts of this field was that of diseño de culturas (the design of cultures), applied to po­liti­cal and professional work with grassroots organi­zations concerning literacy, popul­ar art, and alternative development proj­ects, particularly with indigenous and Afrodescendant communities for whom oral traditions were still predominant.² The popul­ar education and popu­lar communications movements ­were strong among activists in many parts of Latin Amer­i­ca, and, inspired by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, Orlando Fals Borda’s participatory action research movement, and liberation theology, activists roamed the land engaging in cultural work with peasant and ethnic subaltern communities. My acquaintance with t­hese trends was decisive for the work I came to do with Afro-Colombian activists in southwestern Colombia beginning in the early 1990s, which continues to this day. Thinking about alternative economies and alternatives to development with t­hese activists, and contributing actively to the defense of their territories and life proj­ects, has been a primary space to think about design for me. This second thread informs my current research proj­ect (explained in chapter 6 of this book), centered on a transition imagination exercise for the Cauca River valley region (around the city of Cali), where I grew up and where I continue to collaborate with Afro-­Colombian, ­women’s, and environmental collectives.

This transition imagination exercise comes at the end of three de­cades of critical engagement with questions of development, which involved detailed analyses of the ways in which policy and planning, as design tools par excellence, deeply structure people’s realities and everyday lives. ­Today we would say (ontologically) that development policy and planning, as well as much of what goes on under the banner of design, are central po­liti­cal technologies of patriarchal cap­i­tal­ist modernity and key ele­ments in modernity’s constitution of a single globalized world. But I reached this realization only ­after a series of detours and nonlinear re­orientations of my work, as one might call them today, leaning on the language of complexity, including Heideggerian phenomenology and Foucauldian poststructuralism. ­These philosophical currents, among ­others, helped me to understand clearly how the so-­called underdevelopment of Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer­i­ca was actually the result of a complex discursive invention that took place in the early post-­World War II period, the consequences of which we are still currently living out. ­Today I would say that development has been one of the most portentous social experiments of the past seventy years—­a ­grand design gone sour.

Ecol­ogy provides a third thread. My interest in ecology started in the early 1980s at Berkeley, where I served for several years as a teaching assistant for the yearlong introductory course for the conservation and resource studies major, which gathered many of the students wishing to engage in environmental activism in the Bay Area and beyond. I continued my ecological learning with James O’Connor and the founding group of the Capitalism, Nature, Socialism journal in Santa Cruz in the second half of the 1980s, and with colleagues in the Anthropology Department at the University of Mas­sa­chusetts, Amherst, in the 1990s, who ­were by then pioneering a “biocultural synthesis” of biological and cultural approaches to the environment and to questions such as health, nutrition, and poverty.³ It branched into a substantial interest in po­litical ecology, still one of my main fields—afield often defined as the study of the interconnections among culture, nature, power, and politics. ­Today this thread feeds directly into the work that I, along with colleagues Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena, call po­liti­cal ontology. An impor­tant crystallization of these ecological interests was the codesign in 1998 of a weeklong workshop on ecological river basin design for river communities of the Pacific rain forest in Colombia, in which I applied a systems approach to the “territorial ordering” of river spaces. I designed the workshop and implemented it with activists of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Pro­cess of Black Communities). The workshop was the first statement of what I then started to call autonomous design, to be featured in the last chapter of this book.

­There is one more impor­tant line of work shaping my design concerns, also dating to my years at Berkeley, and directly connected with how I came to conceptualize the pres­ent work. In the early 1980s, I became acquainted with Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis, with Fernando Flores and his work on ontological coaching, and eventually with Flores and Terry Winograd’s concept of ontological design (Winograd and Flores 1986).⁴ ­These all marked significant influences on me. The notion of ontological design outlined in Flores and Winograd’s book stayed with me throughout the years, and I attempted to develop it in the first version of this book, completed in the spring of 2012. Since then, I have come across the work of a loosely connected network of scholars for whom this notion has also been impor­tant, although not necessarily in connection with Flores and Winograd’s work, and their work has come to inform the pres­ent version significantly. With the emergence of the ontological turn in social theory over the past de­cade, I have been cultivating the convergence, in my own thinking, of design ontologies and the ontological turn in the acad­emy, anchored in the notions of relational and nondualist ontologies. This book has thus also become an exploration of the design dimension of the ontological turn. My acquaintance with Buddhism and nondualist forms of spirituality over the same period has kindled my interest in relationality (through related concepts such as dependent coarising and interbeing), in turn enriching my understanding of the ontology of design. I should mention another ele­ment of importance that has also influenced my design concerns. Since the early 1990s, my interest in information and communication technologies put me in touch with the digital dimension of design through the work of thinkers like Brenda Laurel, Pierre Lévy, and Paul Virilio, particularly the last’s caustic yet lucid critique. Thinking about the digital from relational perspectives became part and parcel of the cultural studies of design I develop in this book.

I would be remiss if I did not mention, in ending, that one par­tic­u­lar attraction of design for me is that I feel design thinking describes my own scholarly work and writing proc­ess. True, t­here is a lot of hype about the somewhat mysterious abilities under­lying the creative work of (famous, mostly male) designers. ­There is nothing mysterious about it, however, as recent ethnographies of designers at work show (e.g., Cross 2011; Murphy 2015), although this does not mean that it is not complex. I find more compelling the description of how design works than, say, that of how Cartesian models explain scientific thinking as allegedly based on logical reasoning, induction and deduction, and so forth. This ­doesn’t mean that logical reasoning is not impor­tant—it is—­but that intuition, feelings, and emotions are often as impor­tant. Above all, the “abstract reasoning” account of knowledge leaves out of the picture a hugely impor­tant feature of knowledge production that design thinking does not: the fact that creation is always emergent, in the two registers of emergence: self-­organized and other-­organized, the latter qualifier meaning that the scholar/designer also lays down ele­ments and makes decisions that enable the self-­organizing dynamic to take off and do its thing. As I hope the previous account of my multiple locations shows, my scholarly and po­litical work has evolved in great part through self-­organizing emergence over the years, much more than as a result of any conscious research plan.

­There have been the proverbial moments of inspiration, but overall, from the early 1980s (if not before) u­ntil ­today, all the pieces that have come into the making of this book have coevolved through manifold “local” interactions that I could not have predicted in advance—f­rom my dissatisfaction at a young age in Cali with “catching up” with the West and becoming “modern” and the seemingly incongruous encounter with systems thinking, ecol­ogy, and social movements, to the engagement with, say, Maturana and Flores and, more recently, transition thinkers and designers and ontological turn theorists and ­things digital and the dire realities at play in the work with Afro-­Colombian activists and…All of t­hese threads are responsible for this book, which means that this book is itself a temporary crystallization of this emergence (in fact, this book was just supposed to be an input into the other book I was writing; in a way, it just happened). Perhaps one might call the composition of the emergent heterogeneous assemblage that is this book, design.⁵

I emphasize “making” above ­because, as designers would have it, intellectual work is about making. T­here is an embodied character to writing that is often disregarded, a tactility almost and a phenomenology of writing that partakes more of a makers’ culture than of the isolated “mind at work” celebrated in popu­lar accounts of scientists and innovators (the “Steve Jobs genius” phenomenon). Most of what we do as scholars is refashioning, often through bricolage, by making novel connections, reconfiguring, reframing, and rearticulating ideas that were already proposed by others or that just float in the historically accumulated noosphere, and with some luck this refashioning sets off emergent logics that end up in, say, a good book.⁶ The pro­cess evolves through composition, in Jacques Attali’s (1985) sense of this term—even more, this book has been designed or composed in this way. To put it differently, all creation is collective, emergent, and relational; it involves historically and epistemically situated persons (never autonomous individuals), and this ineluctable relationality is acknowledged now by designers in the age of “design, when every­body designs,” in Ezio Manzini’s (2015) skillful title. I suspect that many scholars would agree with the view just sketched of how intellectual making takes place.

To conclude, I can say, in retrospect, that my overriding concern is with difference, and how difference is effaced or normalized—­and, conversely, how it can be nourished. This concern embraces difference in the biological realm (hence, my interest in biodiversity), epistemic difference (coloniality), cultural difference, and—as one might say ­today—ontological difference, or the pluriverse. ­Today, difference is embodied for me most powerfully in the concept of the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatista put it with stunning clarity. This has been the central prob­lem that, largely intuitively, has reverberated throughout my intellectual life. It has also been about “living fearlessly with and within difference,” as feminists from the Global South often put it (e.g., Trinh 1989; Milczarek-­Desai 2002), that is, about an ethical and po­liti­cal practice of alterity that involves a deep concern for social justice, the radical equality of all beings, and nonhierarchy. It’s about the difference that all marginalized and subaltern groups have to live with day in and day out, and that only privileged groups can afford to overlook as they act as if the entire world ­were, or should be, as they see it.

­Here we find a power­ful design connection, as both design and difference are about the creation of form. They are about morphogenesis, in the broad sense of the term, which involves a broad range of pro­cesses, from how the leopard changed its spots or how the butterfly acquired its wings—a­nd so many instances of emergent natur­al order and “design,” such as the ubiquitous fractal and dendritic structures found even in the Amazon River basin taken as a whole—to the architect’s concern with form in the design of the built environment, to landscapes, cities, art, and so forth.⁷ Between “the life of form” and the “form of life” (Goodwin 1994, 2007) an entire design space opens up; it includes the “world-­within-t­he-­world” of ­human creation (Fry 2012) for sure, but it goes beyond, as intuited by cultural studies of design scholar Brenda Laurel: “When one steps back from the marketplace, ­things can be seen in a dif­fer­ent light. While time passes on the surface, we may dive down to a calmer, more fundamental place. ­There, the urgency of commerce is swept away by the rapture of the deep. Designers working at that depth choose to delve into the essence of design itself. Form, structure, ideas and materials become the object of study” (2003, 13; my emphasis). This “acquired disposition” of the designer is poetically described by Australian design theorist Susan Stewart as “the deep plea­sure experienced by the designer, in the blossoming or unfolding of felicitous material conjunctions and effects; in the embodied recognition of what is both transformative and fitting within the material context in question” (2015, 275).

We restate the question: can design be re­oriented from its dependence on the marketplace t­oward creative experimentation with forms, concepts, territories, and materials, especially when appropriated by subaltern communities struggling to redefine their life proj­ects in a mutually enhancing manner with the Earth?

Acknowl­edgments

Acknowledging the multiple influences on the ideas presented in this book is essential to explaining its writing in multiple geographic, epistemic, and social locations. As I have already suggested, my sources of inspiration are twofold: the cogent notions stemming from Latin American social struggles, on the one hand, and theoretical and po­liti­cal debates in the acad­emy in Latin Amer­i­ca, the United States, and elsewhere, on the other. To begin with the first category, my first debt of gratitude goes to the brilliant and committed group of Afro-Colombian activists belonging to the orga­nizational network Process of Black Communities, particularly Charo Mina Rojas, Marilyn Machado, Francia Márquez, Carlos Rosero, Yellen Aguilar, Danelly Estupiñan, Karin Banguero, Felix Banguero, María Ginés Quiñones, José Santos, and Libia Grueso, with most of whom I have maintained a friendship and collaboration that goes back to the early 1990s. My thanks also to ­those academics and intellectuals who are fellow travelers in the work with the Process of Black Communities, particularly Patricia Botero, Axel Rojas, Gladys Jimeno, Anthony Dest, Irene Vélez, Sheila Grunner, Viviane Weitzner, Hildebrando Velez, Jeanette Rojas, David López Matta, and Ulrich Oslender, and the entire Grupo de Académicos e Intelectuales en Defensa del Pacífico Colombiano, created in 2010 by academics and activists with the goal of advancing an international campaign, Otro Pazífico Posible (Another Pacific Is Pos­si­ble). My deep appreciation to Betty Ruth Lozano, María Mercedes Campo, and Natalia Ocoró, of the Cali-based Colectivo Cultural Afrodiaspórico (Afrodiasporic Cultural Collective), for their impor­tant work on the brutal impact of extractivism and patriarchal capitalism on black women in urban contexts. Comrades and activist intellectuals in Colombia and elsewhere from the field of social strug­gles who have been impor­tant to the ideas presented ­here include Manuel Rozental, Vilma Almendra, Gustavo Esteva, Xochitl Leyva, Patrick Bond, and Ashish Kothari.

Shifting to the academic domain, although the separation is hardly sharp, this book owes a first debt of gratitude to Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, Eduardo Gudynas, and Michal Osterweil, with whom I have maintained an active agenda of collaborative research and writing on relationality, po­liti­cal ontology, and the Latin American re­sis­tance to extractivism and transitions to postextractivism. The thinking space created by this group has been central to the book’s imagination, despite the healthy skepticism that some of them, and other friends, maintain regarding the idea of design. Also impor­tant in this regard have been my conversations over the years with Cristina Rojas, J. K. Gibson-­Graham, Herman Greene, Laura Ogden, John Law, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Sonia Alvarez, Wendy Harcourt, Philip McMichael, Enrique Leff, Walter Mignolo, and Catherine Walsh.

I have been fortunate to draw on conversations with a growing number of friends and colleagues working in design fields. Of crucial importance has been my acquaintance with Tony Fry and Anne-­Marie Willis in Australia, pioneers of ontological design, and their ideas are amply reflected in this book. Similarly impor­tant has been the group at Car­ne­gie Mellon School of Design (Terry Irwin, Cameron Tonkinwise, Gideon Kossoff, and Peter Scupelli), who kindly invited me to participate in their Transition Design Workshop in March 2015, with Ezio Manzini as a main speaker. I would also like to thank, in the United States, Juan Obando (Mas­sa­chu­setts College of Art and Design, Boston), Ignacio Valero and Lynda Grose (California College of the Arts, San Francisco), Elizabeth Chin (Art Center College of Design, Pasadena), Kenny Bailey (Design Studio for Social Intervention, Boston), Lucy Suchman (Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK), Damian White (Rhode Island School of Design, Providence), Silvia Austerlic (Santa Cruz), and Fernando Domínguez Rubio (Department of Communications, University of California, San Diego). Conversations with anthropology colleagues Peter Redfield, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Diane Nelson, and Anke Schwittay have been particularly relevant to understanding the growing fields linking anthropology and design, and so ­were the discussions held at the Innovent session “Design for the Real World. But Which World’? What Design’? What Real’?,” that I co-­organized with Eeva Berglund and Debbora Battaglia as part of the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco in 2012. My special thanks to the co-­organizers and to Brenda Laurel for accepting our invitation and for her inspiration. I have maintained a fruitful conversation on anthropology and design with Eeva Berglund in Helsinki. Also in Helsinki, Andrea Botero and Kari-­Hans Kommonen at the Media Lab, Aalto University, have been sporadic but impor­tant interlocutors for the past ten years. Thanks to Alison Clarke and Martina Grünewald (Department of Design Theory and History, University of Applied Arts, Vienna), for inviting me to participate in their anthology on the anthropology of design. Fi­nally, old and new acquaintances in Colombia are becoming newly meaningful for my design interests, including Alvaro Pedrosa, Andrés Burbano, Astrid Ulloa, Alfredo Gutiérrez, and Felipe C. Londoño y Adriana Gómez Alzate, from the Doctorado en Diseño y Creación (Design and Creation PhD program) at the Universidad de Caldas in Manizales.

Students in both the United States and vario­us parts of Latin Amer­i­ca have been a significant motivating force and a source of insight for many of the ideas presented ­here. I thank deeply the undergraduate and gradu­ate students who took my formal courses at Chapel Hill when many of the ideas presented ­here ­were half-­baked hypotheses at best, and the scores of Colombian and Latin American students who have attended lectures or short courses on aspects related to the book over the past eight years, particularly in Colombia and Argentina. I would like to acknowledge a number of outstanding former undergraduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Amy Zhang, Katie Cox-­Shrader, Kari Dahlgren, Tess Pendergrast, Karina Hernández, Laura Barros, Stephanie Najar, Courtney Shepard, Cameron Trimpey-­Warhaftig, Tess Maygatt, Luis Gonzales, and Ariana Lutterman—all of whom are pursuing their own remarkable intellectual-­political proj­ects. The gradu­ate students at Chapel Hill and in Latin Amer­i­ca have become too numerous to mention by name, but their engagement with earlier versions of this work was critical to its current shape. Friends elsewhere I’d like to thank include Claudia von Werlhof, Jeremy Gould, Thomas Wallgren, Marianne Lien, Janet Conway, Lee Cormie, Ariel Salleh, Federico Demaria, and Irène Bellier. Over the past six years, I have given numerous pre­sen­ta­tions at universities in Eur­ope and Latin and North Amer­i­ca on the various aspects of the po­liti­cal ontology of territorial strug­gles, transitions, relationality, and design, and I thank t­hose who invited me and the audiences, who often provided highly valuable feedback.

Joan Martínez-­Alier, Enrique Leff, Dianne Rocheleau, Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves, David Barkin, and Víctor Toledo have all enriched immensely my understanding of the ecological and territorial dimensions of neoliberal globalization and social strug­gles. Thanks to the Research & Degrowth group spearheaded by icta scholars in Barcelona (Institut de Ciència y Tecnologia Ambientals) for sharing their work on degrowth with me, to Marco Deriu for his timely invitation to the third International Degrowth Conference in Venice in September 2012, to Silke Helfrich and David Bollier for including me in their impor­tant work on commoning and the commons, and to Rob Hopkins for his inspirational work on the Transition Town Initiative, all to be discussed in chapter 5. The Latin American dimension of the book has benefited im­mensely from the work of many friends and colleagues, including María Lugones, Natalia Quiroga, Alberto Acosta, Verónica Gago, Diego Sztulwark, Colectivo Situaciones, Rita Segato, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, José Luis Coraggio, Raúl Zibechi, Julieta Paredes, Yuderkis Espinosa, Maristella Svampa, and Pablo Mamani. In Colombia, I would like to thank Eduardo Restrepo, Patricia Vargas, Aída Sofia Rivera, Darío Fajardo, María Victoria Uribe, Marta Cardona, Iván Vargas, Laura Gutiérrez, Diana Gómez, Eloísa Berman, Miguel Rocha, Irene Alejandra Cabrera, Chris Courtheyn, and the research group on Nation, Culture and Memory at Universidad del Valle in Cali (particularly Luis Carlos Arboleda). Thanks to Chris as well for his excellent assistance with the manuscript at vari­ous stages of writing. My deep thanks to the group of colleagues at the Universidad del Cauca in Popayán, who have crafted an incredibly vital interepistemic space where community and activist knowledges occupy a place of pride, for welcoming this work in their midst, including Olver Quijano Bolívar, Javier Tobar, Adolfo Albán Achinte, Olga Lucía Sanabria, Axel Rojas, Lorena Obando, and Cristóbal Gnecco.

My immediate scholarly environment in Chapel Hill has been nourished by a supportive and engaging group of colleagues, of whom I’d like to thank Larry Grossberg, Don Nonini, Michal Osterweil, Dottie Holland, Eunice Sahle, John Pickles, James Peacock, Peter Redfield, Mark Driscoll, Gabriela Valdivia, Federico Luisetti, Emilio del Valle Escalante, and Rudi Colloredo, as well as Orin Starn, Diane Nelson, and Michaeline Crichlow at Duke. Thanks to Larry for his insightful and useful comments on the manuscript. Pavithra Vasudevan, Cassandra Hartblay, Ahsan Kamal, Marwa Koheji, and Kathleen Kenny engaged with the manuscript from the perspective of their own work as PhD students in Chapel Hill in enriching and constructive ways. My gratitude in Chapel Hill also goes to Megan and Tim Toben, founde­rs of the Pickards Mountain Eco-­Institute, for cultivating the transition spirit in our immediate environment through their creative ecological work and their deep concern for the f­uture of life. My very special thanks to Gisela Fosado, my editor at Duke University Press, for her decided interest in this work, her constant encouragement, and her unfailingly wise and timely advice; to Maryam Arain for her proactive editorial assistance at the press; and to Kim Miller and Lisa Bintrim for their enormously careful copy editing of the manuscript, which made of this book a more accomplished work. At home, where most of t­hese ideas became crystallized in multiple handwritten notebooks and on the screen, my compañera Magda Corredor provided not only unfailing support but daily insights on so many aspects of life that helped me clarify what is at stake in the pages that follow. To her, my deepest love and gratitude. Fin­ally, as always, to the musicians, for keeping the pluriverse alive: to the haunted m­usics of Mali and Senegal and the ­musics of Africa, the continent that gave us the rhythm that dwells at the heart of all life; to the marimba ­music of the Colombian Pacific; and to so many vibrant hybrid m­usics that day and night unfailingly keep so many worlds in movement with the indubitable conviction that there is still much in life that refuses to yield to the ontology of devastation that has become so pervasive with neoliberal globalization and its vacuous notion of pro­gress.

Preface and Acknowl­edgments