My work focuses on exploring the multivalent meanings of “nonviolence;” a framework that is grounded upon the premise that all life, and all beings, are sacred and interconnected. Nonviolence, as a meaning-making framework, goes beyond tactics of civil disobedience and strategies of resistance; although successfully used by historical movements as a tactic and a strategy, nevertheless, nonviolence means much more that: it signifies an alternate way of being in the world.

However, because nonviolence is a negative injunction—or a negation of the normative systems of violence in all its present-day permutations—it does not posit directives, injunctions or commandments; instead, as a profound critique of the premise that violence, either physical or systemic, is a natural human condition, the framework of nonviolence elucidates how this premise is a social construct—and the kinds of socio-political systems that benefit from such constructs. It also offers powerful and everyday ways to challenge and change such oppressive constructs.

Some of the questions the framework of nonviolence posits are: How do we produce alternate socio-political systems that foster peace, life and health in the place of violence, death and disease, and structures that profit from it? What alternate possibilities can be created if we conceive of the “human” not as intrinsically violent, or one who tries to transcend, control and dominate life, but as part of nature who can exist in a balanced relationship with non-human beings and the environment? What shapes can these alternate forms take if we include marginalized, oppressed and silenced narratives that already embody alternate cosmologies and more holistic ways of being?

In other words, the framework of nonviolence opens the space for many viable possibilities: a plurality of cosmologies, narratives and knowledges from our past, our present and from imagined futures that can inform the shapes of alternate possibilities and ways of being. I explore some of these possibilities, histories, movements and utopian imaginaries through my research, writings and teachings. And I invite you to join me in this crucially important and exciting exploration.

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