This workshop brings together scholars and critical thinker-doers whose works derive their force from the categories and concepts of African and black diasporas, Asian, Pasifika, indigenous (North and South America), and Middle Eastern peoples and cultures. The purpose of gathering in one room is to have a conversation about how ways of looking from those specific places and cultures (cosmologies) shape the production of knowledge (epistemologies).

We will be taking seriously the meanings that peoples of the various cultures represented at this workshop assign to specific phenomena in their own terms. We are thinking of things that people share, regardless of where they are in the world, for example: the sun, the moon, the stars (specific and general), water, rain, air, fire, wind, light, dark, earth, sky, rivers, valleys, mountains, trees, environment, life, and death.

Our interest lies in each of us bringing to the workshop the vocabularies we use as scholars and practitioners or people-designate for these entities, or any other things we may feel are important, and to proceed from the surface meanings of words denoting such to deeper layers of meaning and the worlds, worldviews, and realities they map.

We hope that each of us will approach such shared forces from our different cultures, and the context-specific meanings they attach to it. The convener insists on one thing only: that, on the days of the conversation, none of us must cite a Western referent or authority to explain these ways of seeing; rather, that the force of argument and conceptualization must be organic to the context within which it is born and operative.

The agenda items for the workshop have been set democratically. The format is a conversation—the primary motive for having no pre-circulated papers or convening a relay format. The aim of the conversation is to enunciate cosmologies or ways of looking from the regions of the world where we are thinking and writing from, to use them as lenses onto epistemologies. The working of English is recognized as an imperfect but unavoidable communicational device at the borders of cosmologies and the thinking/writing/making/doing emanating from them. In such a conversation no cosmology or epistemology is hegemonic.