ABSTRACT
Multiple worlds, in brief, is world politics. Ordinary folks throughout the globe deal with the entwinements and contestations of multiple worlds on a daily basis, in venues “high” and “low,” “public” and “private,” “inside” and “outside.” Globalization intensifies our interactions with multiple worlds so that, more than ever, decisions are made within a matrix of contending social ontologies (e.g., “how do we engage with capitalist modernity to develop for the community, rather than the state or the corporation?”). Worldism helps by offering a vaster inventory of visions and practices, ways and means, than the narrow confines of neoliberal Self vs Other. Drawing most recently from five centuries of enforced contact through European colonialism and imperialism, worldism also accesses knowledges and strategies dating from before that, as evidenced by “borderlands” life along the ancient Silk Roads.
