24 June 2021
Speaker: Walter Mignolo
Online Panel: University of Göttingen, Germany
From June 24-25, 2021, two public panels moderated by Professor Dominic Sachsenmaier of the University of Göttingen (Germany) discussed the topic of Conceptualizing Planetary Humanities. The way knowledge is produced, managed, applied and disseminated on a global scale today is damaging to the environment and to social relations, threatening to destroy the well-being of the vast majority of humans in the near future. What needs to be done in order to change this? Many scholars working on humanities questions agree that there is a need for a radically new interpretative framework of the world. What would a new narrative on globalization, a planetary narrative, look like?
The first of two public sessions on Conceptualizing Planetary Humanities, part of a workshop hosted by Bo Strath, John Noyes, and Dominic Sachsenmaier, is available on YouTube. Participants discuss some of the major themes, contours, contexts, interventions, challenges, or potential pitfalls of the humanities understood as a planetary endeavor.
Panelists Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar (University of Chicago), Henning Trüper (Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Studies), Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand) and Walter Mignolo of Duke University joined Panel Chair Selcuk Esenbel of Bogazici University on June 24, 2021, 16:00-17:15 Central European Time (CET).
A second public panel followed the next day, June 25, 9:00-10:15 CET with continued discussion. Professor Sachsenmaier served as Panel Chair for speakers Selcuk Esenbel (Bogazici University), Nkatha Kabira (University of Nairobi), Hsiung Ping-Chen (Academia Sinica), Premesh Lalu (University of the Western Cape), and Wang Hui (Tsinghua University).