Regenerative Listening and Anthropological Thinking for Pluriversality
Convener: Yulia Sugandi
Co-convener: Laksmi Savitri
This panel explores how anthropological thinking and regenerative listening can support pluriversality in contexts shaped by colonial histories, ecological precarity, and contested knowledge systems. Anthropological thinking offers a critical lens for engaging with complex socio-ecological challenges by situating problems and responses within their cultural, historical, ecological, and political contexts. Rather than isolating issues, it emphasises relationality, pattern recognition, and situated knowledge, helping to ensure that processes of change do not reproduce fragmentation or erasure. This perspective aligns with complexity logics and systems thinking, which are essential for navigating uncertainty, inequality, and the coexistence of multiple epistemologies in an increasingly multipolar world.
Drawing on Indigenous, decolonial, and place-based perspectives, the panel approaches transdisciplinarity not merely as a methodological framework but as a practice of epistemic justice. It foregrounds collaborative processes that bring together researchers, practitioners, and community actors in contexts where knowledge is deeply embedded in land, territory, and lived experience. Anthropological thinking, in this sense, supports deep learning by making visible historical and ongoing power asymmetries, while contributing to the cultivation of regenerative cultures grounded in socio-ecological justice and more-than-human relations.
At the centre of the panel is regenerative listening as a foundational epistemological and ethical practice. Regenerative listening is understood as a decolonial mode of engagement that moves beyond extractive research and instrumental consultation. It involves listening with accountability, care, and reciprocity; attending to silence, embodiment, territorial relations, and non-human actors; and allowing knowledge to emerge through sustained relational processes rather than being captured or owned. The panel asks how anthropological thinking, practiced through regenerative listening, can support the co-creation of pluriversal ways of being and knowing across diverse, place-based contexts.
Through empirical examples and reflective accounts from different socio-ecological settings, the panel demonstrates how regenerative listening enables knowledge integration without homogenisation, fosters trust across difference, and supports transformative responses to complex challenges. Overall, the panel contributes to ongoing debates on transdisciplinarity, decoloniality, and regenerative practice by showing how anthropological approaches can advance epistemic justice and sustain pluriversality in a multipolar world.