AMC events

The unsettling experience of thinking and writing about unsettlement

AMC colloquium. Wednesday 13 May 2026, 15:30 - 17:30, Spiegelzaal, GG80-82. Speaker: Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University)

Unsettlement is a pluriversal planetary human and more-than-human condition which may be only partially grasped at different levels, with the help of single disciplines, theoretical frames and methodological tools. This leitmotif of our time can be expressed in psychological disorientation and uncertainty, in paradigmatic unhomeliness and lack of belonging, in chronophobia, and in endless fragmentation and instrumentalization of knowledge, resulting in the loss of integrity and complexity in our understanding of the world. How to think and narrate unsettlement then becomes a methodological and conceptual challenge. 

The most productive part of decoloniality, in dialogue with post-new-materialist feminist positions and critical retrofuturist inquiries, attempt to overcome coloniality of knowledge, ultimately grounded in alienation from the world, and disavow the established default epistemological hierarchy, according to which positivistic, instrumentalist and verificationist knowledge stands higher than phenomenologically and often biographically rooted, “idiographic” cognition based on revamped imagination, and using storytelling and speculative fabulation as its methods. It is precisely these latter epistemic and methodological forms that are more adequate in our efforts to understand and portray unsettlement including as a forecast for the near future. In the talk, I will share my experience using speculative fiction, dialogic thinking together, storytelling, and special political imagination exercises in my work on Narratives of Unsettlement (2023), and Not by Leviathan Alone (book in progress).