First Symposium on Indigenous Philosophy across the Americas: Epistemologies and Ontologies outside the Settler Colonial Hegemony
Join this hybrid Symposium on
Friday, March 20th, 2026 at the University of Pennsylvania!
Venue: McNeil 403
Founders and Organizers
Symposium Description
How we as human persons understand and relate to the world has long been fodder for contention.
In the pursuit of absolute, universal truths, the occidental philosophical canon has found itself in a rigid dogmatism that casts out the roles of spirituality, land, and the-more-than-human-world in the formation of our understanding of reality. With this dogmatic commitment to the exclusion of the spiritual, the embodied and the particular–sharpened and spread through violent conquest–the space to offer and have taken seriously other non-western frameworks for knowing and being in the world has been severely reduced.
Ontological and epistemic frameworks cultivated by those subjected to settler colonialism become mere “folk understandings”, loose “cosmologies”, or “alternate philosophies”. These non western frameworks for knowing find themselves always measured against settler colonial logics that inevitably place them as secondary, partial, in comparison to the grand totalitizing projects of western philosophy.
What this symposium aims to accomplish, is a demonstration of the merit and stand alone importance of Indigenous Philosophies across the Americas. This gathering of scholarship celebrates the ontological and epistemic frameworks produced by Indigenous peoples not as mere “alternate philosophies”, but as themselves structures and questions that map to the realities of how human persons know and be in the world in ways western hegemonic Philosophy continuously fails to.
Keynote Speaker
James Maffie, University of Maryland, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and affiliate with the Latin American Studies Program.
Invited Speakers
Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, University of Maryland, Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Natalie Avalos, University of Colorado Boulder, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies
Zenón Depaz Toledo, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy
Schedule
9-9:30 AM | Breakfast and Check-in
9:30-10 AM | Opening Remarks
10-11:00AM | Invited Speaker 1: Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner
11:15 AM – 12:15 PM | Invited Speaker 2: Natalie Avalos,
12:15- 1:45 PM | LUNCH
1:45-2:45 PM| Invited Speaker 3: Zenón Depaz Toledo
3-4:30PM | Conversation: Jesús Rivera Guzman and Gwendalynn Roebke moderated by Cesar Cabezas
4:30-5 PM | BREAK / SNACKS
5-6:30 PM | Keynote Speaker: James Maffie
6:30-7:30| Reception
Organizing Committee
Jesús Rivera Guzman, University of Pennsylvania
Gwendalynn Roebke, University of Pennsylvania
Cesar Cabezas, Temple University
Sponsors
