KJCKorea
Journal Central

Questioning the modern university’s institutionalization of particular knowledge systems as universal standards, this article reexamines pluriversity through the educational philosophy and institutional experience of Amawtay Wasi, an intellectual and educational project of Ecuador’s Indigenous movement grounded in community, territory, knowledge, and life. Drawing on educational models, legal texts, evaluation documents, and field materials, it examines how this philosophy was institutionalized in the curricula, organization, and decision-making of the university and traces the university’s relationship with the state, from its suspension in 2013 and its reconstitution as a public community university in 2018 to the budget cuts and state interventions since 2024. While the authority to recognize knowledge was partly shared with communities and their sages, the authority to judge the university’s legitimacy remained with the state. The article conceptualizes this arrangement as a “dual structure of recognition” and shows that pluriversity is concerned less with the coexistence of diverse knowledges than with the redistribution of authority over their production, validation, and evaluation among the university, communities, and the state. Finally, it proposes a “knowledge community of many worlds, ” in which different knowledge-worlds jointly produce and evaluate knowledge while sustaining their respective historical, linguistic, and communal foundations.

This article examines Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior through the lens of class, exploring the limitations of dominant American climate discourse and the possibility of an alternative climate community. Drawing on Anna Brickhouse’s concept of “elsewhere catastrophe,” the article argues that the American exceptionalist tendency to externalize climate disasters obscures the vulnerability of economically marginalized populations within the United States. Against this tendency, Flight Behavior places the rural white poor of Appalachia at the center of its climate narrative, exposing the tensions between the environmental ethics of the urban middle class and the material demands of economic survival. Rather than reducing climate denial and seemingly anti-environmental choices to mere ignorance or political conservatism, the novel presents them as complex responses shaped by poverty and precarity. Furthermore, through the protagonist Dellarobia Turnbow’s encounters with Mexican climate migrants and with an imagined low-wage Chinese female worker, the novel develops a “cosmopolitanism from below” grounded in class consciousness. Her emerging sense of solidarity extends beyond economic poverty to encompass the shared experiences of climate vulnerability, gendered labor, and constrained mobility. Although this solidarity remains largely confined to the level of personal recognition, Flight Behavior extends Ursula K. Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism by incorporating class sensitivity into its planetary perspective, thereby envisioning a climate community founded on solidarity with economically and ecologically vulnerable populations.

Through a cross-cultural comparison of Jean-Philippe Gaud’s Tazzeka (2018) and Song Hae-sung’s Boomerang Family (2013), this study explores how food mediates memory, hospitality, and solidarity in the imagining of ‘other worlds’. While Tazzeka depicts an external diaspora shaped by state, racial, and postcolonial borders, Boomerang Family addresses an internal diaspora amid the dissolution of the ‘normal family’ and class boundaries in contemporary Korean society. Despite these divergent contexts, both films show how marginalized subjects challenge such boundaries through cooking and sharing meals. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s ‘politics of coexistence’ and Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’, this study examines food as a tactical means of transmitting embodied memories, extending unconditional hospitality, and transforming passive subjectivities. The food truck in Tazzeka and the non-hierarchical dining table in Boomerang Family suggest that community transcends fixed territories and bloodlines and instead emerges as ‘utopias in movement’—an ongoing process of relational becoming. Ultimately, this study illuminates the emancipatory potential of imagining ‘other worlds’ at the intersection of Francophone and Asian cinemas.