Shannon Mattern - multispecies worldbuilding lab

the question of transdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary connects back to earlier in the conversation, the urbanist and technologist perspectives. I don’t want either one of those to “win the future of the city,” we have to find a way to operate in a space between them.

multi-species anthropologist Anne Galloway’s work, who was simply asking “What if we deny that human beings are exceptional? What if we stop speaking and listening only to ourselves?

As Verses’ ‘Toward a Digital Pluriverse’ elaborates, “These advocates aimed to counter the universal–not with a disregard of all things universal, but with an embrace of ‘many universals’. This is not a rejection of the necessity of scale; instead, it embraces federation and branching and requires many worlds to exist ‘at scale’—pluricultures over ... See more

So much of the way knowledge is produced within an academy is very exclusive and inaccessible to so many people with not just different senses, but just to different walks of life. And that’s across every field. It’s such a loss, I think, about our understanding of the natural world.

Public libraries are often seen as “opportunity institutions,” opening doors to, and for, the disenfranchised.