Cosmology, Bentley Allan has argued, underwrites a sense of purpose, providing a framework of orientation to legitimate certain actions and decisions in the world. His study looks at how certain scientific developments throughout history came to influence not only how we understand the world, but also our place within it and why manners of navigating it come to make sense. This seminar examines the chasm between the profound transformations of our historical present on the one hand, and what amounts to our ‘cosmological stagnation’, on the other hand, addressing the violent incompatibility between them. This chasm, however, reveals a crucial site of labor for the arts and humanities to intervene in the narration of these changes, and how they ought to be conceptually, pragmatically and ethically integrated. The second part of the seminar examines how epistemologies ‘resituate’ us, departing from Donna Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges’, and extrapolating upon her initial theses in view of complex objects, wherein the agency to better grasp the systems creating our reality cannot be located in a single human agent, but is distributed among humans and machinic intelligences. Readings: Allan, Bentley B. ‘Introduction’ in Scientific Cosmology and International Orders, Cambridge: CUP, 2018. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3., Autumn, 1988. Reed, Patricia, "Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization," in e-flux Architecture (Artificial Labor Series), 2017. Available: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/artificial-labor/140674/xenophily-and-computational-denaturalization/