Organised within the framework of the Junior Professor Chair in Minority Studies, the Plurivers seminar opens a space dedicated to the reflections of students, early-career researchers and authors who contribute to current scientific debate in this field, foregrounding epistemologies developed within cultural studies, gender studies, decolonial studies and Global South epistemologies.

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The pluriverse is first and foremost a lived, practised, transmitted reality — the reality of peoples who have inhabited and continue to inhabit multiple worlds, weaving relations between humans and non-humans, between ancestors and the living, between earth and cosmos, never reducing this multiplicity to a single order. Amazigh cosmologies, among others, offer an ancient and enduring testimony to this. Akal — the earth in Tamazight — does not designate a delimited geographical territory but an ontological ground, the foundation of a profoundly animate world, implying that all knowledge has an irreducible provenance, an anchoring in a place, a body, a history, a trajectory, a web of relations. Akal is not an inert soil that one possesses but a living space that one co-inhabits — with the dead, with spirits, with the present generations and the generations yet to come — and which demands a return to the earth and to the communities that ground and sustain thought.

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Borrowed from philosophy (James, 1909) and astrophysics, the notion of the pluriverse has become a central framework within decolonial studies, under the influence of Latin American scholars (Quijano, 2000; Escobar, 2014; Mignolo, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2007; Lugones, 2008). It designates the coexistence of multiple worlds and knowledge systems. Pluriversalism is understood as a situated epistemological response to the universalism of Western modernity, which has, over time, rendered invisible the knowledges produced outside its frames of reference (Haraway 1988).

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The Plurivers seminar is grounded in this double perspective — pluriversal and situated — of great conceptual richness. Each session opens a space for discussion around ongoing research, recent publications and emerging questions, proceeding from the hypothesis that the articulation of diverse epistemic positionings is one of the conditions of scientific rigour.