Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, and Transfigurations inside the Anthropocene

Place-shattering practices, extractions, and displacements of world capitalism go on distending the spatial and temporal sites, scales, and resources of dwelling in the world, if not deforming the moral-cultural ethos it takes for such diverse practices to survive. The planet is marred by unsustainable ecological systems, unstable weather, climate threats, and species extinctions. To activate tactics of resilient worlding, “worlding Asia Pacific” implies not so much Euro-derived theory applied as situated practices of worlding across Asia and the interior Pacific. Worlding means activating practices and tactics that thicken bonds of resilient life survival on a damaged planet. Worlding as lifeworld experimentation is shadowed by residual forces and forms of deworlding, yet it also stands in relation to transformative life forces called reworlding. Belonging to Oceania then becomes a matter of political and cultural commitment and conversion—not so much the pathos (suffering) or logos (argumentative necessity) as shared ethos of care.