Emma Eileen Zhanat Anderson | 2026 I.S. Symposium
Name: Emma Eileen Zhanat Anderson
Title: (Re)turns as Future in Kazakh, English, and Spanish
Majors: English; Spanish
±Ê²¹³Ù³ó·É²¹²â:ÌýPublic Health
Advisors: Daimys GarcÃa and Rebecca Garonzik
This project views (re)turns to land, each other, and self as ways to imagine and create better futures. This project is contextualized within within interdisciplinary decolonial work, primarily that of diasporic, Indigenous, Chicanx, and Black feminist writing, focusing on decolonial women of color feminist thought. Chapter one affirms the importance of living and feeling a relational reality, which we can achieve through practices of relationality such as Bawaka Country et al. and Lauren Tynan’s Caring as Country. Chapter two demands that we create new models of loving across difference and being in the world together through a term I have created, internormativity, and its accompanying practice of internormative love, accessed through MarÃa Lugones’ faithful witnessing and ‘world’-travelling. Chapter three recognizes that our futures rely on our ability to feel, which can be learned and practiced through Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic. Finally, I intersperse letters, poems, songs, and other hybrid creative forms to demonstrate that the personal, political, imaginative, theoretical, and practical are necessarily intertwined. This project asserts future as praxis, and takes seriously how we move toward the multiplicitous material demands of decolonization and decoloniality (the political and economic demands, as well as the emotional, corporeal, sexual, spiritual, etc. demands), understanding these processes as mutually informing and dependent. This project moves us toward better futures predicated on a (re)turn to us—land, each other, and self—as interconnected, interdependent, and relational, always emerging and becoming together.
Posted in Symposium 2026 on May 1, 2026.
