Cosmic Consciousness: Exploring Racial, Viral, Environmental Pandemics through Spirituality

Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic

In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik has a conversation with Dr. Michele Prettyman on the intersection between academic and spiritual discourses. The episode explores certain political implications of excluding certain views of life and inhabiting the world. Dr. Prettyman advocates for spiritually animating inquiry as a part of our lives. This part of inquiry opens a space for discovery and imagination to engage with life’s bigger questions as a response to very few people outside of certain fields being invited to those conversations. The ways in which we process knowledge by excluding spirituality reveal the limitation of racism and white patriarchy. Dr. Prettyman offers her way of challenging and undoing those models with spiritual discourse. She interrogates how the category of “the human” is fraud and an incomplete category. Focusing on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, she positions spirituality as another dimension of human experience in navigating life amidst racial, social, and environmental pandemics to rethink systems and structures that center life beyond violence and exploitation.