The 9th ISJAI will bring together academics, activists, students, practitioners and community members from across disciplines with shared interest in Indonesia and globally. We will be hosting a variety of panel sessions, workshops, and networking events in-person at Universitas Indonesia, Depok, West Java. The symposium format will be in-person. The full and equitable running of the panel is a convenor responsibility.
***
The early 21st century is marked by a profound transformation of the global political landscape. The fading dominance of a single global power and the rise of new regional actors signal the emergence of a multipolarising world, shaped by shifting political–economic alliances, competing ideological projects, and expanding forms of South–South cooperation. These shifts reverberate across international governance, development pathways, technological infrastructures, environmental negotiations, and cultural politics. For communities across the Global South, multipolarisation is not an abstract geopolitical process—it is experienced intimately in everyday life, affecting livelihoods, mobility, aspirations, and visions of the future.
Anthropology provides critical tools to understand how these global realignments are lived, negotiated, and contested. Rather than assuming a universal trajectory of modernity anchored in Western models, contemporary anthropological scholarship increasingly engages with pluriversal perspectives, which recognise the coexistence of multiple ontologies, moral worlds, ecological logics, and political imaginations. A pluriversal lens rejects the idea of a single hegemonic future and instead foregrounds the existence of many futures—rooted in diverse histories, cosmologies, solidarities, and social projects.
This symposium theme brings these two dynamics together: the geopolitics of multipolarisation and the anthropological imperative to account for pluriversality. It asks how emerging global configurations create new openings, frictions, and constraints for alternative futures in the Global South. Across different contexts, communities imagine and enact futures through Indigenous and spiritual ontologies, alternative economic networks, ritual and moral practices, multispecies relations, local ecological knowledge, care and social reproduction, and grassroots political imagination. These futurities often stand in tension with dominant geopolitical narratives—whether neoliberal, nationalist, developmentalist, or technocratic.
The Global South is not merely receiving the effects of multipolarisation; it is actively shaping emerging world orders. Indonesia, with its diplomatic role, cultural plurality, and ecological challenges, offers a critical site for exploring how pluriversal futures are crafted within a changing global landscape.
This symposium positions the Global South as an epistemic centre, offering conceptual innovations and grounded ethnographic insights into how people—and more-than-human beings—imagine and sustain life in a multipolar world. We invite panel proposals that explore how pluriversal futures emerge, clash, or coexist within a rapidly evolving multipolar global landscape, and how Global South perspectives can deepen and reshape contemporary anthropological debates.
IMPORTANT DATES
| Activities | Deadline |
| Call for panel proposals | 28 February 2026 |
| Notification for accepted panels | 16 March 2026 |
| Call for abstracts | 20 March – 18 May 2026 |
| Notification for accepted abstracts | 1 June 2026 |
| Registration | 25 May – 24 July 2026 |
| Symposium | 4 – 7 August 2026 |