 right on in with a comment. Sorry, now I'm hitting the record button. And then we'll open it up to you, the audience. You can either raise your hand to ask your question to Laura live, or you can type in the chat box or the Q&A box, and I can read them out to Laura. So great. Thank you, Laura. I'm looking forward to the presentation. The floor is now yours. Great. Thank you, Seema Tumenda, for inviting me to new voices and releasing this. It is such an honor to have my presentation discussed by you. And before I start my presentation, I thought it would appropriate to display this with the content running, because I will be discussing crisis and kind of touching on issues of racism. And if you know that you are reacting, especially in a sensitivity to these issues, then I would suggest, you know, either to skip on this presentation, or I'm also displaying King's well-being resources to come back to you. And yeah, the title of my presentation today is the Crisis of the Everyday, Crisis Management and the Illusion of Bied Futurity. So a little background on my thesis. So the subject of my thesis is the crisis of the everydays, or synonymously, the crisis of social reproduction, which I will be explaining in a minute. And what you see here in this presentation slide is my thesis in a sentence. So in a nutshell, I will be looking into how neoliberal and modern and decolonial knowledges respond to the question, what are crisis and how do we best deal with them? And then I compare them based on their potential in it to understand and to offer solutions to the crisis of the everydays. And in today's presentation, I will be discussing my research puzzle only. So if, like, I'm a pre-upgrade student and my talk will be restricted to outlining that one fundamental problematic that kind of animates my research. And that is how comes that designated crisis managers that you might be sitting in government, in consulting firms, in think tanks, or scientific advisory groups, who do not really seem to name much about or care about the crisis of the everydays. And this is very curious, because the severity and the magnitude of what we know today about this crisis by far outweighs the attention it receives. So my question is, why is that so? And by why is that so, I mean that I'm interested in carving out the stakes that is what is at stake for whom in addressing or not addressing this crisis. And in fact, when we look closely, there seems to be really an ontological conflict even between the crisis of the everyday, meaning what it is and where it comes from, and the goal and means of today's dominant articulation of crisis and crisis solving, which presents itself with a neoliberal modern epistemogeniology. And the goal of today's presentation is to try to get a preliminary grip on that conflict. So what that conflict is, and where to find it. And I try to encapsulate that conflict in what I call the illusion of wild futurity. From experience, the very first question I get when I start to talk about my thesis is, well, what is the crisis of the everydays? And what do I mean by everydays? It is such a difficult to pin down notion. And how do the everydays have possibly anything to do with wildness and wild futurity? And in my thesis, I'm using the analytical lens of social reproduction to outline the crisis of the everydays as sharply and make it as tangible as possible. And so social reproduction comes from feminist theory. And it means a wide range of everyday activities, all behaviors, such as cooking, cleaning, caring for dependent relatives and the community or socializing children. So on the bottom line, social reproductive activities and behaviors are caring and life giving and life maintaining activities that happen on a daily and household and community level. And they are the precondition of existence of actually any society in the world, no matter it's political, economic form of governments. And what makes them caring and life giving and life maintaining is that they rise from a stance, from way of being innovative affirms life and its corporate reality, its situatedness, its relationality. This means life lift for its own sake. And I'm very happy to elaborate on that maybe when it comes to it during the Q&A. But what does it mean for the everydays to be in crisis? They are in crisis when we are systematically cut off from the material but also mental and emotional resources necessary to carry out social reproduction of reproducing the everydays. That means not being able to successfully live through the everydays. And that means encountering a premature death. Talking, I'm talking about the lack of monetary means and talking physical and mental exhaustion or unlivable and toxic natural environments. And how comes that the everydays are in crisis today on a global scale? And as far as we know, thanks to critical scholars, the ontology of social reproduction of the everydays being corporeal, situated, and relational, clashes with that of current capitalist political economic ontology which promotes as many decolonial scholars need disembodiment, universality, and individuality. And in consequence, embodied, situated, and relational or communal ways of knowing and being in the world become associated with femininity and weakness. They might be treated as disposable, less rewarded, less valued, less paid attention to, or even intentionally eradicated. Think of epistemocytes. And this attitude is encapsulated in the term backwardness, historically used to describe native and in general, later non-European ways of knowing and being. And the term backward allows us to a linear conception underlying modernity's idea of time, which positions whiteness and meanness in the sense of a political economic, racialized, and gender-power relation in the realm of the future, the real be, and relegates others into the realm of the past in the developmentalist sense of a not yet. And as Sarah Smith and Pavitra Vasudeva note, the epistemological grammar of backward and advanced centres futurity in the white subject, and disqualifies non-white subjects from full humanity and thus forward-oriented agency. And we can see how this power relation plays out in the crisis of the other days, which disproportionately affects precarious women and people of colour, because it is them who carry out most of the world's social reproductive work. Because they are the ones who mop up floors, sew our clothes, deliver our food, their doors, and fill the world's granaries. And these often under impossible conditions, because these are the people at the same time who are affected most by white futurity in practice, right? Think of IMF and World Bank in these structural adjustment programmes, think of displacement of disruption of community ties of land grab. So how is this crisis felt and experienced? So this crisis is felt as the impossibility to distinguish everyday life from a state of crisis or emergency. So the crisis of the other days is experienced as a chronic, a perpetual crisis on a material, affective and mental and emotional level. And interestingly, as you can see in these slides, the crisis of the other days increasingly voiced as such by those who experience it. And now logically, because social reproductive activities are the precondition to present capitalist modality to function. In fact, for any political economy arrangement to function, we could assume that this crisis would be bigger on top of policy makers, think tanks and consulting firms agendas who are after or appoint the crisis managers. But why isn't that same? And this brings me to a second part of my presentation where I will be approaching the same research question from a different perspective, namely from what I conceptualize as the neoliberal modern crisis management. What is that? So the relevant, that means widely accepted idea of what crisis are and how we need to deal with them comes from the theory and practice of business and management. So the field of crisis management began a simple business practice with books emerging on crisis management by the neoliberal turn of the 20th century written mainly by many identified CEOs, presidents and partners of consulting firms, mainly located in the United States and the United Kingdom. And it swept over into academia, right? It became a discipline in its own right, but without really changing its basic assumptions. And in this literature, we can say that there is a consensus of what makes a crisis a crisis. And there are three more cited definitions of crisis that are find particularly interesting because they don't just try to categorize, a pandemic can be a crisis, a earthquake can induce crisis, but they really try to pin down the very essence of what makes any situation a crisis. And in these definitions, different potential crisis phenomena have one crucial characteristic in common, namely that unspecified situations become crisis when they have the power to acutely endanger basic structures as the existential core, the core identity, the soul or the fundamental norms underlying a system be it an organization or a society which needs rescuing from the crisis. But what are those basic structures and existential core and fundamental norms that we are talking about? Because I think that in order to understand how crisis management today thinks and works, we need to understand those. And I'm going to single out here specifically Rosenthal and Kismis regarding the fundamental norms because I find them very helpful and probably the easiest to look into. Say, what I wonder here is, what is a norm? And whether we mean legal norms, laws, standards or traditional customs. A norm is always a guidance towards that which is good or desirable. And Foucaultian scholar Kelly captures that very well when he says that a norm is a model of perfection that operates as a guide to action in any particular sphere of activity. And the admission of Foucault himself tells us that we define and perceive normals of normal based on the norm that underlies our perspective. So applied to the previous definitions of crisis. We can say that neoliberal modern crisis management in the last instance is nothing else but the reasserting of the future by disciplining that which is a normal of that which is named crisis to reconform to the ruling norms, that safeguarding that norm. And here the question that imposes the staff well, that can define the norm underlying this articulation, this specific articulation of crisis and crisis solving. Now we can, in fact, we can find norms in the Foucaultian sense of a model of perfection at all. Can we find them in loss? Can we find them in constitutions? Can we find them in urban landscapes? And I'm certain that we can find the norms in all of these if we can't look close enough but I also suggest that in the most distilled most essentialized forms, norms can be found in origin stories or mythoid. Yes, I indeed mean those original origin stories that sure we have all come across at some point think of the Abrahamic religions Adam and Eve. So origin stories explain who we are. And the colonial feminist scholar Sylvia Winter tells us the exceptionality of human beings is their incapacity to pre-exist origin stories. So ironically, that means that human beings invent origin stories and then project them onto their paths. And this makes humans exceptional bios and mythoid or as Franz Fanon has famously put it, skin and mask hybrid beings. So the mask or the mythoid provides the interpretation to our skin or bios. In other words, origin stories harbor a norm, an idealized myth of what the humans are and what we are supposed to strive towards becoming and what the word around us is and is supposed to be like. And as Sylvia Winter notes, the human of today's colonial capitalist system is supposed to embody the mythoid to strive towards the norm or wear the mask of Homo economicus. And the Homo economicus ironically has many feminist scholars have noted the embodiment of the disembodied, the universal and accumulating white and male-gendered atomized individuals. So Homo economicus is basically this essential image of white futurity. And Homo economicus, the mask or the norm then is brought to life or translated into materiality or skin via the capitalist modality. And I suggested in this specific articulation of crisis that we have seen, the neoliberal modern articulation, I suggest that because it is native to the ontology of the modern capitalist system, the norm, the fundamental norm, the basic structure, the essential core and the goal of crisis management would be Homo economicus. That means the capitalist modality itself. In other words, whether our situation is deemed normal or crisis, but depend on whether the situation is perceived as norm sustaining, that is normal or norm contesting, that is crisis in relation to the colonial capitalist modality. And this conception of crisis is actually very reflected in a quote by Otto La Binger who says that a crisis is an event that brings or has the potential for bringing an organization or a system into this repute and imperils its future profitability, growth and possibly it's very survival. So against this background, I ask, where can we find the crisis of the everyday in this articulation of crisis? And for this, we need to find out where the crisis of the everyday is positioned in relation to the norm. That means, is the crisis of the everyday's norm sustaining or norm contesting in relation to the capitalist modality? And in how far? And now this is an analysis and a discussion that I will be rooting in my empirical case studies of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global financial crisis in the UK in my thesis. But I can say that my preliminary insight and basically my pre-fieldwork research that has obviously led me to formulating this research puzzle in the first place suggested the crisis of the everyday's is rather norm sustaining. And not only that, instead of being a goal of crisis management, feminist scholars have explored in depth how it is rather a tool of crisis management. Think about the gendered and raised and class effects of austerity politics that are implemented as a reply to crisis for capital. So in my cases, I will look into if and how this ontological conflict between crisis management as we know today and in the crisis of the everyday's empirically plays out in these two crisis phenomena. But I could stop here, but I think I still have one or two minutes left. And so I would like to use them to dwell a little bit more on my research puzzle. Because really what I'm wondering is all the time, how is this conflict possible on an ontological level in the first place? So really there is the bug in the ontological codings of homo economicus that legitimizes this. And for the sake of consistency in this presentation, I will be referring to Sylvia Winters and Franz Fanon's work to guide my thinking. So Fanon's sociogenic inquiry concerned the specifics of the psychopathology of the black person, which resulted from being figuratively forced upon like white mask by power relations that rendered blackness ontologically impossible. And based on Sylvia Winter, I suggested a similar psychopathology. In fact, an incommensurability between skin and mask can also be found in the ontological codings of homo economicus. So if the psychopathology of Fanon's black man can be symbolically resumed in the image of black skin white mask, then the psychopathology of the colonial capitalist in a homo economicus can be symbolically resumed in the image of white skin, no mask. Whiteness pretends to wear no mask at all. And in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if maybe some of my future readers would be bewildered by the idea that I suggest that capitalist societies are carried by a myth, an origin story. And until very recently, I would have been one of them. And this is, I think, one of many symptoms of an ontology that pretends to have no myth and to have no mask. And the result is that homo economicus is then projected as a natural essence of the human. So in short, the myth is that there is no myth. The myth is that capitalism is a natural, organic, and unavoidable fact. And I suggest that those who suffer the crimes of the everydays are precisely those who suffer the physical, de-effective, mental, and emotional consequences of this myth, of this psychopathology of homo economicus. And interestingly, Louise Argold and another Fanonian scholar caused Fanon's stretch of the earth, the disastrous people. People who modern coloniality have become disaster. And I wonder, who are the disastrous people if not those who live in permanent crisis? If not those who become the living embodiments of disaster? However, if people come to embody crisis, they cannot possibly figure on the side of humanity that Christ's managers need to rescue, but on the side that the protected nonce need rescuing from. And this code by Nelson Maldonado Torres in the context of the roads must fall, decolonize high education protests, I think shows very well how fine and fluid the dividing line between normalised people and those who embody crisis is. And indeed the frequency which are crisis managers are called upon whenever the disastrous people protest against norms and physically move closer to norm centres, for instance, through immigration and asylum seeking. And also the criminalization of solidarity. I think it is both eye opening and alerting to an imagining of crisis and crisis management that imposes security as either ontologically wide or not at all. And the question is that carries my thesis, how could we solve the crisis of the everyday on a structural level? And I suggested acknowledging the crisis of the everyday as a crisis in its own right would be a good start. But I also think that for this, we need to look into alternative articulations of crisis and crisis solving. And this is the background why I aim to investigate into forms of decolonising as potential tools of the crisis solving of the crisis of the everyday. And yes, this is the problematic and basically the puzzle and reflection underlying my thesis. So thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much, Laura. This is such a thought provoking conversation and I'm sure Vinicius has lots to say. And hi, Mervyn. I'm sure Mervyn will have lots to say too. But for the moment, let's pass the floor over to Vinicius. Thank you very much. And first of all, congratulations, Laura, for this presentation. Congratulations, Amanda, for putting together this series that I think it is really bringing not only new voices, but especially moving us around and trying to make us uncomfortable in the comfortable seats we had about what we think that we know. So I think it's a very beautiful exercise, epistemic exercise that you are promoting with this series and this talk of Laura together with that. Laura, you put me in a very difficult situation to comment or discuss after such a sophisticated reading and presentation that you have made here. So I need really to, when I got your paper to read, I really need to go back to my basis in theological studies and especially in my Basis on Theology of Liberation to get back to some substantial thing to say and comment on your discussion. And as well as looking at what I haven't thought for quite a long time in what I studied in my PhD that was negative theology especially. And I think that I will try to make some sense of all this when I approach your presentation directly. I have some comments on what you present and wrote and some questions that I think could ignite a conversation among us here. The first question that I wanted to bring is again, you pointed, you have been very precise in what you were pointing here. But I just want to start to ask in like, are you accepting this grammar of crisis and accepting the sense that I'm using the grammar as how I formulate my way of thinking? So are you accepting this grammar or you are looking at this grammar as something that I need to as a negative and apophatic approach to remove this grammar and understand that there are other grammars that can speak about crisis and not necessarily is one that we are and that you are criticizing very well in your presentation. And there is some points in the presentation specifically that I would like to ask more. You constantly are talking about neoliberal slash modern crisis management. I would like to ask, are you taking neoliberal or neoliberalism as a synonym of modernity? Why is neoliberalism and modern together here especially divided by this slash? Is there natural or inevitable for neoliberalism being modern or modern modernity being neoliberal? How can we think on the syntaxes again of this dialogue or these two elements here, neoliberalism and modernity? Because what is interesting that when you do that, you then come to talk about Foucault and Noir. So talking about norms is also a modern aspect of discussing it. So using the grammar of the neoliberalism and that's what I'm trying to say about the question of the grammar of crisis. What's the grammar that we are criticizing? Are we using the same grammar as criticism to that grammar that I want to criticize? So the question of normality and abnormality, is there any other probably outside this frame of philosophical modernity, especially in post-structuralism that we could use? Because are we supposing that the, this entire planet are seen ontologically and epistemologically and cosmologically the world and the same frames that Foucault is criticizing it? So admitting that the Foucaultian criticism of norm is applyable, are we not generalizing as well and replicating this neo-colonial, or sorry, this sort of neo-colonial sophisticated way of subordinate thoughts and subordinate epistemis as well. So those are questions that I think would be interesting to hear more about that. Then there is one thing that really caught my attention and that's a provocation that I want to push you. You said, we, and I'm quoting you, we all have come across origin myths at some point. Think of Abrahamic religions, Adam and Eve. Origin stories explain who we are. As the colonial feminist scholar, Sylvia Winter tells us, the exceptionality of human beings is our incapacity to pre-exist our origin stories. Well, that can be a very colonial perspective as well. So I can tell you about some indigenous tribes in the Amazonian region that don't have original myths. They don't have et al and even the language grammar that they have related to temporality in a very different way that we relate to temporality. This question of past, present, future, the immanence of their experience with the world, it's much more related to what I have experienced and not what I have in memories. So it's especially one tribe called Pirahan, very well studied by Daniel Everett. And he published some books and texts about that, about Pirahan tribes, the tribe, Pirahan. For instance, they don't talk about generations that precede who they met. So they don't talk about grandparents if they haven't met this person. This relationship with the immanence, with the experientiality and not with the transformation, subjectivation of the experience, it's a very interesting ethical approach here. And they are there and they exist. And they are humans as we are and they don't have original myths. And they're many as humans are not dependent for based on these original myths. So there is a paradox that I would like to push to probably discuss it further, no? So, and then coming to more like a general aspect of your discussion and presentation, we have talked about that before and you knew probably that I will push for it because you are, in my perspective, you are rounding, rounding around but not touching in the ethical aspect of it, the fundamental question that your research is really doing. And this is a very important element that you have, you have diagnosed. And I will be talking about, of course, the Ethics of Liberation and Higduso that you also have there, I know. Yes. And I was surprised that it was not there in the bibliography because it's not that it's a mandatory thing but I just think that as we have been discussing that, I think what we can bring from this discussion of Ethics of Liberation of Higduso, it's what are the alternatives? You present as a very important diagnosis of a critical picture of where we are but what are the alternatives? What is the alternative to this home economics that you are presenting here? What are the alternatives for this ontology or this ontological crisis that you described so well and diagnosed so well? So it must be in a positive terms, philosophically, cataphatically speaking, positive in this term and consequently being also normative or it must be apophatic, negative and consequently abnormal. Can we admit a grammar of abnormality in the sense I would put in these terms here? I would suggest to another reading, another philosophy of that it's quite neglected, incredibly neglected, Willem Flusser. I don't know if you came across Flusser's writings. You may think that, okay, that doesn't fit so well here but Flusser it's doing a very interesting phenomenological reading of history and especially in the contemporary, well, Flusser passed away in 1992 but what he wrote until that point was enough to see what we are looking at today and probably not having enough epistemological elements to discuss but he put it there and very strongly and especially this discussion about does writing have a future? And it's not a simple question of writing in itself but it's the way of we have built up all this building often that we call knowledge that we call rationality based on some models of grammaticality and even this grammaticality of crisis, even this grammaticality of abnormality is that still reasonable to talk in a post-history context as Flusser is pointing there in 1992 already. So I would recommend you to also give a look at some of Flusser's writings and you will have a privilege of reading Flusser in the language that he wrote because he wrote in English, Portuguese and German as well as sometimes the same text but completely different from each other because of the grammaticality of each one of these languages. So I think that's an interesting exercise to rethink this aspect of changing the grammar and the implications that it will have. So, and then I would just finalize my comments here quoting as well a passage of Ethics of Liberation of Flusser, not Flusser for Düssel and it is the chapter four of that book when he starts the title is the ethical criticism of the prevailing system from the perspective of the negativity of the victims. And again, it's an introduction to our chapter. It's not in very objective what I am bringing here but I just again listen to you and thinking about Düssel. I think the elements of this systemic approach that you both are doing must be more evident when you develop your thoughts and your writings. He says, this is an ethics of life. The negation of human life is now our subject. The clearest and most effective, definitely the point of departure from the entire framework of criticism that I have developed in this relationship produced between the negation of the corporealty, the bodily reality, libelic kite, reflected in the suffering of the victims of all those dominated and then the least is immense. As workers, indigenous people, African slaves, exploited Asians in colonized world as the bodily reality of women, of those who are not white, of the future generations who will suffer the effects of ecological destruction, all of the elderly we taught the place in a consumer society, children abandoned in the streets, all those excludes because they are foreigners, immigrants or refugees, et cetera. And the process by which the victims become conscious of the negation. And they say this chapter six to address the material contradiction between such negation and the consciousness it produces, it produces. And that's I think the fantastic aspect that your research can bring it to discuss. Those excluded, they are formulators of their own ethics and formulators of their own syntaxes on how to interact with this world, not simply as an object of our study, but as again, as formulators. And formulators in a grammar that sometimes it's not the same grammar as we are. And consequently, sometimes in a grammar that crisis, it is not as epistemically possible. I will stop here. I probably haven't said anything so really clearly or precise or even coherent. But I thought that much better engage in what the thoughts that your presentation brought to me and bring in some of those questions to articulate with you. Thank you again and congratulations again. Wow, yeah, Vinicius, thank you so much for these really thought provoking and challenging as well comments. And I will give it a try to answer to some of them and to engage with them to the best of my current capability. And I would love to start with your question about accepting the grammar, right? In how far am I accepting the grammar that they tried to criticize? And here, I need to say that I am in an early stage of my research. I have just now basically formulated this research puzzle and I am accepting the grammar in so far that this is the grammar I have grown up with, right, in my own position. And this is the grammar that I kind of see around me. And you're completely right because with the grammar, with terminology comes also meaning, you know, prescribed meaning. And this is exactly what I criticize when I ask what our crisis. So we are completely right. I am not yet able to divorce myself from this grammar, but this is exactly the purpose of why I'm looking into alternative articulations to help me do that and to help others. You know, my readers who might be interested in my research to do that. So I am using the grammar and I'm showing what grammar is being used today to think about what are the problems that we need to face to show that the meaning doesn't quite add up with what we see outside, right? So we need to either feel these terminologies with a new meaning and that might lead to completely different grammar, not just in a lexical sense, but also in a worldview, right? And this is the purpose of my thesis. And one thing that I would love to engage with that was really indeed challenging, what you have, but that you picked out the origin stories, right? And that origin, and that everybody has got an origin story that they are incapable of preexisting. And indeed how, what a kind of colonial statement from a decolonial scholar, right? Because as you have rightly pointed out, when we say that all humans have origin stories, origin stories already presuppose a specific idea of having a past and of seeing and of experiencing time and of thinking about time. And as you rightly pointed out, there is, for instance, when we look at the tribe that you have described, we have a blind spot. So this is a, in that case, when we speak of all humans, as the human kind, as this hybrid being, that might not apply to everyone, in fact. But I think this is the beauty of engaging with ontological research to find those blind spots, and which also always caution us of exactly what we always approach to modernity of being universalizing and the totalizing system. These cases caution us to look at our own totalizations. And I would definitely bring this into incorporate that into my thesis and I would love to read a little bit more about the case that you have brought in the tribe. In terms of what are alternatives to this ontological conflict, again, this is what I want to look into. And I specifically look into the colonial articulations of crisis because my question is that kind of motivates me is to carve out what are the stakes in addressing the Christ of the everyday, so not addressing the Christ of the everyday and things who I imagine. But if we say that crisis management is basically the safeguarding of ruling norms in one way or another, either to conserving or transforming externalities, then, okay, I just had a blackout. I'm so sorry, I need to gather my thoughts. That's okay. And I think while you get your thoughts back, I think, as I said in the beginning, the way it was to have this provocation indeed. And I don't have answers either for these questions that I am bringing and this positionality that we have as scholars and normally dealing with an ontology and the one epistemology that tends to be universalist or at least trying to explain the world in general terms. I think it's a very important reflection to bring and your text and your research is pushing us in that direction. It's exactly how can we be scholars coming from one tradition of modernity, coming from one tradition, a philosophical tradition of modernity and one clear epistemology. How can we look at other possibilities of existence, not as abnormality? Yeah. I got my line of thought back. Thank you very much, Vinicius. So yeah, so my suggestion would be that to look for alternatives in knowledges that might have the less stake or the least stake in upholding those structures. And by which I'm not saying that the colonial scholars and scholar activists don't have a stake. They don't have stakes in it, right? We are all now sitting here in this university and we all have our positionalities in that and also upholding these structures. But until now, as far as I know, at least in the coloniality, you find that the knowledge and the motivation and engagement with alternatives and this is, I think this is a very good space to also start something transformative in the structures where we are sitting. And finally, coming to Enrique Dussel, indeed, and finding alternatives and alternative ethical thinking. And here I might come back to this idea of corporeality, relationality and situateness of everyday life. So I might expand a little bit on that to say what I mean and well, we might find those alternatives. So corporeality and situateness and relationality, they have a very much literal dimension but also an ethical dimension. And when we look at Kantian ethics that is kind of has divorced the body from the mind and our bodies from other bodies, right? And from the body of our environment. And basically has protected the body and the corporeality as the origin of evil which kind of translates through modernity also into neoliberalism. And when we look at inspiration and loves come from and how and creativity is kind of enacted in the world but that comes from that belongs for me to a corporeal kind of ethics, a coronal ethics. And interestingly, Enrique Dussel is describing how millions of, for instance, indigenous people surround the world have been living this coronal ethics and saved much of it also through colonialism to the present day. And I have, and I want to share just a very interesting example because I'm in AQC. So I think a King's Association program and we had a very, very good and very fascinating presentation last week on Maori tattoos. And I was quite fascinated to see how my thesis related with the presentation from this ethical stance because so the presenters said how talked about the Maori definition of holiness. So, and they said that something is holy which is embodying divinity and embodies the force of God. So this can be in a very healing but also a destructive power. It can be a river. It can be a person embodying tapu and talking about tattooing. It is also in the practice and art of Maori tattooing that tapu is enacted. Say for them, tapu is holy because like the tattoo, the art of tattooing is holy. It carries tapu because it touches the blood and it brings out the blood from the body. So, and the body itself is the life force. So it carries in itself that divine force. And so the dead body, for instance, contains the essence of a person and is not denigrated and that is not objectified. And this quote, I think this is an example for this carnal ethics or corporeal ethics. And this also brings with itself as a result this situated and communal way of living. I think, which was also highlighted in the presentation. And I think that there are these ethical views that can contest or that are able to contest this content formulation of ethics. And it is just a question for my presentation. How do I bring them in conversation with that grammar that I try to criticize? But this is all kind of in the future. So now I just wanted to present my research puzzle. And yeah, I'm just going to have a long think about your comments and thank you so much, Evinidus, for engaging with my presentation and my thesis in general. Thank you, thank you. It's a great pleasure and great honor. A last recommendation of book as well. It's by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the book's called From the Enemy's Point of View. I think it is a very, very good book that you will dialogue a lot with what's written there. And thanks again for inviting me to discuss your presentation, your research. What is always a pleasure for me. Also thanks again, Amanda, for your kind words in the introduction and for allowing me to talk here with you. I just think this is a great example of what a beautiful intellectual exchange looks like. And Laura, I just have to comment. Well, I don't have to, but I want to comment how absolutely brilliant you are and how your ability to articulate pretty difficult navigation of ontologies and different theoretical frameworks and you synthesize them and present them in such a thoughtful, engaged and rigor way. And I just have to commend you on that in the early part of your PhD that you're doing this. This is fantastic. So you are brilliant. And I think Vinicius is difficult questions when he was opposing them. I'm like, whoa, I think that's also just a testament to his faith in your ability to even reflect and engage with them, right? So that's just my two cents I want to throw in. You're brilliant. And if you didn't know that, well, know that now. So there are no questions so far. I think probably people are, oh wait, there is one good. I was going to say people are just engaged in the conversation that I'm lost for questions, but we do have one question here from Amar Archie who says, thanks Laura for your presentation. I appreciate you're centering the original myths, particularly with decolonial epistemic interventions. I'm particularly interested in the idea of the original myths and the so-called traveler's tales which are core to the colonial identity. These myths often posit whiteness as normative. Such myths are reproduced and represented by and large by the colonial institution and form the basis of binaryed colonial identities opposed upon colonized bodies, especially around gender, sexuality and race. Scholars in decolonial methodologies such as Fanon, Winters, Nimbay and Chakrabarti particularly challenged notions of objectivity of the institution as the original myth in and of itself which reinforce ideas of the primordialism of the other and negate the plural knowledges held by indigenous communities. I'm fascinated by the idea that an interrogation of these myths is implicitly an interrogation of the very identity of the institution. I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Wow, what a great reflection and discussion. Do you want to reflect on that at all in this moment? Laura? I still do gather my thoughts. I still need to gather my thoughts. Perhaps there are some other comments. I don't know if Mervyn wants to chip in. Sorry, Mervyn, I'm putting you on the spot but I know ethics was talked about quite a bit too so I was thinking you might want to reflect or say something. Yeah, I'd love to. That was very interesting, Laura. Thank you very much for that. And I haven't read the papers so my comments are merely on what I've heard now but really a couple of questions. The one is about the meaning of this word crisis because crisis originally came from the people who use it most accurately I think of medics, doctors. So recently when I had the covered and it got worse and worse and worse and then I hit a crisis. This is a typical medical term and when you get a crisis they cart you off to hospital and they stick things in you and you hope you get out of there alive. So for medics a crisis is when certain indicators reach that level. So on that reading of the meaning of crisis, the notion of an ongoing everyday crisis that never stops, the word loses its meaning. So I guess my question is once you as it were made that move to make crisis cover an ongoing state of affairs, are you going to invent a different word for the everyday sense of crisis? So that's my first and my second comment is about ontology. So my understanding of ontology is there's a sense in which we've all got one or since the Greeks, those of us in that tradition have been brought up to believe we've all gotten ontology and it's about what we take to be being before we start philosophizing there's this. And there's one thing about ontology so it's not something you can choose because it seemed to me in the way you were talking as if, let's go into the shop and find the ontology we like. I don't think that's right. So one question I might ask is what's the ontology that's informing us here in our discussion today? And I wouldn't expect you to read. I wouldn't even accept if I started musing about that. I wouldn't even accept the idea that no more than that's a wrong ontology, go and choose another one. So those are my two questions. Thank you so much, Marvin. I have all the questions written down. I think we didn't have much time to reply to all of them. I'm still gathering my thoughts, but as to your last question, Marvin, I think this is a very important one. And I think that I would love to, maybe that would be the right moment to tell you a little bit about how I approach problems and what is for me ontology and why is ontological research so important for me in this specific research question? And I need to get back into my autobiography a little bit because in the previous university where I was in Germany, in the University of Basel, I have just because based on pure curiosity have made a certificate in digital humanities. And seems very far-fetched. I'm going to explain what this has to do with ontology in my view. So digital humanities is basically when we take digital tools like coding, et cetera, and software to help us solve questions in the humanities. For example, when you make a map, a Google maps of medieval times, there was, I think, something like that. That would be something digital humanities do. And of course, 3D photography and digitalizing documents, et cetera, to make them easier accessible. And so I have been engaging with coding. And I don't know much about coding anymore. I have forgotten a lot, but it has influenced about how I go about problems. So when you have, so what the digital humanities, humanist or an informatician would do, they see a software and they see something is wrong with the software. So what does the person do? They go into the source code of that software and they try to figure out where is the bug. And they try to do something, like to change something in the source code, which then when we again leave the source code, it makes suddenly the software work better. And so for me, it changed a lot of my way of approaching questions. So when I started here in King's College, I was also, I wanted to engage with crisis, but specifically in the context of the Second World War. And so I just say that something wasn't adding up. And so something wasn't adding up into how crisis management, as I would see it and formulate it, is going about crisis. So it can't really, so it's crisis solving potential wasn't really as expected, right? So it didn't add up. And in my mind, that's the software. So what I do now is that I go into the source code of the software and the source code for me, coming from digital humanities would be the ontology. So for me, ontology, I see it as a humanist source code, but so the, and I just have here a quote by Charles Mills that I always have displayed actually on my laptop because this is ontological research that's basically diving into the source code of our problems and of modernity and et cetera. That is, I think that is quite, that is what mostly colonial scholars do. So here's, for instance, a quote by Charles Mills where he says that, so, and he's talking about moral theories. And he says that what is really making the variable that makes the most difference to the fate of non-vites is not to find or even coarse-grained conceptual divergences between different theories. So which theory might be better, liberalism or conservativism or socialism, but it is just whether or not the subclose of the racial contract is evoked. So whether that theory, that particular theory is put into her and folk mode. So this is the question. It's not really the details. And for me, it's not even the details of crisis management, but I want to say is whether in any articulation of crisis management, of how governments in a concrete situation might go about solving a crisis, whether there, what is the fundamental norm? What is the norm? What is the existential core that is animating crisis management? And that for me is ontology. So crisis management is the epistemology and crisis. What are crisis? Is the, this is for me the ontological question. The big difference between just software and for instance crisis management is that when you go into a software and you go into the source code, well, you see what is, right? You see the source code. You see what is there. But when you go into ontology in humanities, for me, what's fascinating that often it doesn't, it doesn't only tell you what is or it can tell you what is. Obviously, it's very difficult to find source, humanist source code. But think of versus the sexual contract by Carol Pateman, you know, the racial contract by Charles Mille. That's this for me like coding, like source coding basically. And the difference is that there it doesn't only, it doesn't only show you what is, but also what could have been. So for me, ontology, yeah, it's not just what is there, but what could be there. And what could have been in particular moments of history. And for me, when I do ontological research and I look into, you know, alternatives, that is what I, I don't mean that we can just choose an ontology, but I say that there is the possibility of profound change that is really so profound that it reaches our coding, right? Our source codes as humans, and as humans in today's world. And I don't know if that answers, that just made everything much more confused, but this is what I can tell about my, my approach to ontology and my approach to research questions in general. Laura, that was a marvelous answer. That is a really very good answer because it makes it clear what you're getting at. And as you were talking now, I was thinking about my example of that kind of reasoning would be, you know, Pate South Africa, the ontology was race, you know, and the norm to be maintained was, you know, white racial purity. And it fits with everything you said now. And then it also fits a kind of strategic communication maneuver that the government made, which was to declare a crisis that was ongoing. So they instituted all sorts of abnormal measures doing away with human rights, habeas corpus, processes of law and so on. And they did it on a permanent basis, saying we face a crisis. And the crisis was referring back to the norm that you would say is the ontological norm. Thank you. Marvellous. Thank you so much, Marvin. And yeah, my heart is a little bit, is a little bit smiling. I know there have been more questions. I don't know if I'm in the right space to answer them now, but in any way, I'm very happy to leave my email address here for if anybody would like to reach out, I'm always happy to engage in these conversations. Yeah, thank you very much. That's great. And we're over time, but I don't mind because this was such an enriching intellectual conversation. So I want to thank you all, you know, Laura, especially for presenting such an articulate and fascinating presentation and for Vinicius and for Mervin, but also for our audience members for engaging and asking those brain-buzzing questions, right? And Laura, it's OK not to have the answer right now, right? This is the this is supposed to, you know, help you build and develop your projects. So when it comes time to publish your book, it's going to be an amazing book and you're going to blow us all away. So in the meantime, yes, thank you all for coming again. And hopefully I will see you next Wednesday. Thank you again, Laura and everyone for showing up and have a lovely afternoon. Thank you so much. Thank you.