Programme

TIMETABLE

Find the conference schedule below. Scroll down in the PDF viewer to see all activities. Click on the activity on the timetable to navigate to details.

No progamme changes are expected, but adjustments may be made if needed for the proper implementation of the TANC conference.

REGISTRATION

The TANC conference is a free event with prior registration required. The online form to register is available here.

If you are travelling from abroad, here you will find some basic information about travel and accommodation.

CONFERENCE OBJECTIVES

The aim of the programme is to create an inclusive and safe space for transdisciplinary experimentation, welcoming both academics and practitioners to engage deeply with the themes of the conference from their own lived experience and disciplinary knowledge.
With the programme, we seek to:
• Foster synergies that allow participants to zoom in and out of their own focus areas
• Encourage imaginative collaborations that might otherwise remain unexplored
• Cultivate space to orchestrate alternative responses to “end-of-times” logics.

CONTENTS

The TANC conference is composed of:

• 2 keynotes
• 9 panels
• 10 parallel workshops + 1 cooking workshop
• 4 theatre performances
• 1 collective street performance
• 1 collective audiovisual experimental session
• 1 sound walk (satellite)
• 1 research methodology workshop (satellite)

Coffee and snacks will be offered during the coffee breaks in the mornings and evenings.

VENUE

All activities will take place at the UAB Faculty of Arts and Humanities. All venue details are available here.

EXPECTED OUTCOMES

We hope participants will:

• Encounter new perspectives and methodological provocations
• Identify resonances across fields, approaches, and types of knowledge
• Leave with a renewed sense of purpose, creativity, and agency
• Be inspired to explore new collaborations, ideas, and projects
• Step beyond their comfort zone into spaces of collective sense-making and imaginative risk-taking.

Collective outcomes might include:

• Generate a living map of diverse actors, practices, and regenerative topics
• Create conditions that encourage the cross-pollination of ideas and approaches
• Initiate future avenues for collaboration, whether within academic formats, beyond them, or across their borders.

INSTITUTIONAL OPENING & KEYNOTE

Institutional welcome

Assumpció Malgosa Morera, Vice-Rector for Research

Margarita Freixas i Alás, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Keynote speech

Ghosts of the Apocalypse: Capitalist Imaginaries and Silenced Stories

We have to admit it: this whole “catastrophe” they so noisily inform us about does not really touch us—at least not until we are struck by one of its foreseeable consequences. It may concern us, but it does not touch us. And that is the real catastrophe.
— The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 73–74

We in the Global North are in love with the apocalypse. Just take a look at the catalogues of major television platforms and you will agree. The factories of our collective imagination project our fears into our living rooms, chaining us—and our fantasies—to our sofas and to their political agendas. It is a strangely cozy apocalypse, one that can bring excitement and—at worst—a bad dream. There is often a hero who saves the day, reassuring us in the end.

But the crucial point is that the apocalypse will not step out of the screen, no matter how large or technologically advanced it may be. Strikingly, despite this abundance of apocalyptic cultural production, we know very little about the real apocalypses that have already occurred—and continue to occur—beyond our living rooms.

In this talk, I explore both the capitalist imaginaries that anesthetize the apocalypse and the silenced stories of lived, painful apocalypses. I summon the ghosts of those who have experienced these apocalypses, not only to recall the pain and violence of capitalist oppression, but also to recover the histories of resistance they embody.

Keynote speaker bio

Marco Armiero is a Research Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He led the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory for ten years, transforming it into a global hub for research and outreach that placed the humanities at the forefront of mobilization against the socioecological crisis.

Throughout his career, he has combined significant academic achievements with a strong commitment to working alongside disenfranchised communities, advocating for environmental, social, and narrative justice. His 2021 book Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump has become a key reference for scholars and activists worldwide, with translations in several languages and more forthcoming.

His research also covers the environmental history of migration, the political ecologies of fascism, and dam disasters. In 2026, MIT Press published Vajont: The Political Ecology of an Unnatural Disaster. The collective volume This Is Not a Handbook: Guerrilla Narratives for Everyone, authored by the Guerrilla Narrative Collective, is forthcoming with Autonomedia.

Session disscussants

Mar Griera. Mar Griera is Full Professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, director of the ISOR research centre, and ICREA Academia awardee. Her research currently focuses on two main areas: religious diversity, public controversies, heritage and politics in contemporary Europe; and spirituality, future imaginaries, and notions of the good life. In 2022, she was invited as Directeur d’Études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and has been a visiting scholar at universities including Boston University, the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and the University of Strasbourg. She is currently President of RC22 (Sociology of Religion) of the International Sociological Association.

Sergio Ruiz Cayuela. Postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (ICTA-UAB). His main research interests include processes of urban commoning and self-organisation, militant and engaged approaches to research, and environmental justice. He works for the ERC-CoG IMBRACE project, which looks at what shapes immigrants’ climate health vulnerability and how situated knowledges inform both their own response capacities and urban climate adaptation more broadly, towards more effective and just approaches. From 2018 to 2022 Sergio was a doctoral Marie-Skłodowska fellow with the RECOMS ITN and completed his PhD at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University in 2023. That same year, he got a postdoctoral position at University of Barcelona working on the H2020 CULTIVATE project, where he examined processes of urban food sharing in Europe. Sergio’s academic praxis is informed by his involvement in several grassroots organisations struggling for socioenvironmental justice. He has also been regularly involved in teaching since 2018, from undergraduate to doctoral levels.

CLOSING DISCUSSION & ASSEMBLY

A conversation with Malcom Ferdinand

This closing conversation revisits the central concerns of TANC through the notions of decolonial ecology and the double fracture: the separation between humans and the Earth, and the colonial separation between those allowed to inhabit the world and those made to bear the violence of its making. This fracture names the historical and instrumental division through which environmental destruction and colonial domination have been rendered as separate questions, even though they emerge from the same order of modernity.

From this perspective, the Caribbean serves as a powerful lens through which the present can be read: a world shaped by slavery, extraction, contamination, and resistance, where environmental and social crises are inseparable from histories of dispossession and uneven survival across the globe. At the same time, it stands for many other territories marked by similar histories of violence and ongoing struggles to live in dignity amid greed and abandonment. Through this lens, the conversation invites reflection on how places that have long endured and resisted “apocalyptic” devastation can help us learn to grieve differently, to recognize survival, and to move forward with greater care and collective responsibility.

In dialogue with the audience, we will reflect on what decolonial ecology reveals about the questions that have traversed the conference, and in particular, on how institutionalized knowledge-making should inhabit the Earth today. We will also explore how we navigate tensions between universal solutions and plural ways of inhabiting the world, between urgency and justice, and between dominant narratives of techno-solutionism, asking what is needed to support more just ecological transformations.

The final part of the session will take the form of a closing assembly. If needed, we will move to the outside Ágora to gather what has been learnt, whether we want to move forward, and if so, how.

Speaker bios

Malcom Ferdinand. Environmental engineer from University College London and doctor in political philosophy from Université Paris Diderot. He is currently a researcher at the CNRS (IRISSO/University Paris Dauphine). At the crossroads of political philosophy, postcolonial theory and political ecology, his research focuses on the Black Atlantic and particularly the Caribbean. He explores the relations between current ecological crises and the colonial history of modernity. His work has been featured in numerous academic journals and includes the award winning book Decolonial Ecology: Thinking of Ecology from the Caribbean World (Seuil, 2019 & Polity, 2021). He recently published a comprehensive study on the pesticides contamination of Martinique and Guadeloupe in a book called S’aimer la Terre: défaire l’habiter colonial (Seuil, 2024).

Ana Fernández-Aballí. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization (CRCG) of the University of Groningen. BA in Economics. PhD in Communications. Currently explores how ontological and epistemological diversity inform environmental education and policymaking. Specializing in transdisciplinary research, she brings extensive experience working at the intersection of research, advocacy, and intercultural dialogue, engaging with grassroots movements, international NGOs, and intercultural networks in both academic and applied contexts.

Ione Avila-Palencia. Senior Researcher at the Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo Humano, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (itdUPM). Ione works at the intersection of urban health, climate action, and multi-stakeholder engagement, with a focus on supporting evidence-informed decision-making. With over 10 years of experience, she has contributed to several international research projects, collaborating with multidisciplinary teams to better understand the links between cities, mobility, and health. At itdUPM, she is involved in the Pathfinder Initiative, integrating health into climate mitigation strategies and on developing indicators that make socio-ecological interdependencies visible and actionable. She is particularly interested in participatory processes and in translating complex evidence into accessible narratives for decision-making in cities.

PANELS

Can we transcend collapse by making accessibility foundational to regenerative world-building?

This panel explores accessibility as a foundational principle for regeneration. Rather than treating accessibility as accommodation or technical adjustment, we approach it as a necessary condition for real democracy, a way of organising life and society, a relation, a human right and infrastructure rooted in interdependence, embodied diversity, and collective care, love, mutual respect and tolerance. We ask what political, technological, ecological, and affective arrangements become possible when accessibility is positioned at the core of how worlds are made and worldviews refashioned, and how such a shift may enable forms of social and planetary regeneration beyond technocapitalist logics. By imagining accessibility as a normative structural horizon rather than a remedial practice, this session invites speculative and grounded reflections on what it means to build worlds and utopias designed for the collective (i.e. not selective) survival and flourishing of every body and every life.

More specifically, and building on the above, we welcome papers on:

• Accessibility as neither necessary nor sufficient for dignified collective world-building
• Kind AI as an enabler of dignified worlds for all
• On whether there can be a natural science of accessibility and whether this science would be regenerative or not
• On whether worlds built upon accessibility can be eternal (not ephemeral) and utopian (not dystopian).

This panel will accept papers in English.

Session organizers

Pilar Orero. PhD (UMIST, UK), works at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in the TransMedia Catalonia Lab. Leader and participant of numerous EU funded research projects, and author and editor of over 200 texts – all on media accessibility. Latest projects include ImAc, which results are now further developed in TRACTION, MEDIAVERSE, MILE, and GREENSCENT. She led until December 2022 the EU network LEADME on Media Accessibility. She was the Co-Chair of Study Group on Accessibility and Inclusion in the ITU Metaverse Focus Group, and she is leading the Digital Inclusion and Accessibility track of the ITU Virtual Worlds. She is now working on AI and accessibility in the three funded projects MOSAIC, ALFIE, and SPICE. More info at https://webs.uab.cat/pilarorero/. 

Haris Shekeris. I have studied Physics and Philosophy, however I never managed to think like a physicist. I continued my studies in a philosophy department in the UK, where I was allowed to argue for relativism when it comes to scientific knowledge within the context of a democratic society. After drifting here and there, I have successfully completed a year working in a company called Catalink which focuses on developing AI solutions. And this brought me here, more or less.

Papers

Cognitive Dissonance as Catalyst: Rethinking Neurotypicality in the Age of HCAI by Aikaterini Tsaousi

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is intensifying a deep cognitive dissonance. As AI systems take on tasks once considered uniquely human, such as problem solving, reasoning and creativity, they unsettle long-held beliefs about what counts as real cognition and who is recognised as intelligent. This shift exposes the fragility and exclusionary nature of neurotypical norms. These norms shape education, work and social legitimacy, even as rising levels of anxiety, burnout and psychological distress reveal a global mental health crisis sustained by environments that privilege narrow cognitive styles while pathologising difference. In this context, AI operates both as a mirror and a catalyst: it reflects the biases embedded in dominant definitions of intelligence and forces a reconsideration of whether the neurotypical ideal is either viable or desirable.

The cognitive dissonance generated by AI can also become a productive opening toward a future in which accessibility is understood as a foundational condition of world-building rather than an afterthought. The disruptions introduced by AI into labour structures, reasoning models and expectations of productivity help illuminate the arbitrariness of neurotypical standards and encourage an understanding of cognition as diverse, relational and situated.

Drawing on insights from accessibility studies, neurodiversity frameworks and participatory approaches to AI development, human-centric AI is presented as a pathway for aligning technological innovation with cognitive justice, shared care and the flourishing of diverse minds. This perspective reframes AI not as a threat to human worth but as an opportunity to challenge exclusionary epistemic hierarchies and to respond to the mental health crisis through environments that recognise, support and celebrate multiple ways of thinking, sensing and being.

Speaker bio: Dr. Aikaterini Tsaousi is an audiovisual translator and linguist specializing in media accessibility. She holds a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the EU-funded InclusiVRity project, which aims to apply virtual reality technologies in secondary schools to promote access and learning for neurodiverse students. She is also a member of the Transmedia Catalonia research group.

Reimagining Public Spaces: Diversity Representation via Text-to-Image AI Prompting by Estella Oncins

While the use of different GenAI tools to generate different types of outputs has rapidly increased, bias in these tools, and particularly in text-to-image systems, remains a persistent challenge with significant ethical implications (Angwin et al., 2022). AI-based systems can perpetuate social biases towards specific vulnerable groups if training data or labeling processes do not encompass diverse perspectives (Barocas et al., 2022). These models often rely on data-related biases to produce implicit assumptions when faced with underspecified or neutral prompts, leading to outputs that may reinforce stereotypes (Malekzadeh et al., 2025). These biases are particularly manifest when models make stereotypical assumptions in the absence of sufficient contextual information in user prompts (Federiakin et al., 2024).

This presentation considers prompting from a user-centric perspective, emphasizing the importance of prompt literacy, structured prompting methods (Chinta et al., 2024), and bias detection across different types of bias when using text-to-image GenAI models. It presents the results of a workshop held during the Researcher’s Night in September 2025 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The study concludes that prompt literacy is a key lever for mitigating representational bias in T2I systems and should be integrated into AI education and digital competence frameworks (Cosgrove & Cachia, 2025). While user-level interventions can improve outcomes, addressing structural biases in GenAI systems requires continued efforts by developers, researchers, and policymakers through interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusive design practices.

Speaker bio: Dr. Estella Oncins holds a PhD in Accessibility and Ambient Intelligence from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She is IP of the TransMedia Catalonia research group and coordinates the MA in Audiovisual Translation at UAB. Her work focuses on audiovisual translation and media and digital accessibility, including immersive environments. She contributes to standardisation bodies and has extensive experience in European research, innovation, and Erasmus+ projects. In 2024, she received the WSIS award for the project YoungArcHers. She currently works on VR/AR accessibility in InclusiVRity and examines AI and accessibility in MOSAIC, ALFIE and SPICE.

Can we transcend collapse by making accessibility foundational to regenerative world-building? by Reyhaneh Sohrabi

The dynamic nature of voice becomes particularly consequential in contexts where communication is mediated by AI-driven, voice-based technologies. Across the materials informing this paper, voice emerges as inherently variable: shaped by aging, health, fatigue, emotional state, and interactional history, and continually reconfigured through social background and institutional pressure. Accent, even within a shared language, shifts across time and context, reflecting social trajectories rather than stable linguistic categories. For older adults and people with speech impairments, this variability is especially consequential, not because it is exceptional, but because AI-mediated systems are calibrated around narrow assumptions of vocal stability, rendering ordinary vocal change especially vulnerable to misinterpretation. These temporal forms of diversity are therefore not marginal irregularities but constitutive features of everyday human communication.

This paper argues that dominant technological and evaluative frameworks governing voice-based AI systems implicitly deny such variability by treating voice as stable, profileable, and norm-conforming. Evaluation practices and interaction models are organized around fixed assumptions of speech, accent, and intelligibility, transforming ordinary human change into deviation and systematically narrowing the conditions of participation. Within this configuration, misrecognition and interactional breakdown do not emerge as incidental errors, but as structurally patterned outcomes of systems organized around static models of vocal identity.

Against narratives that frame breakdown as something to be mitigated through technical innovation alone, the paper reframes accessibility as a foundational condition for socio-technical world-building under conditions of instability and change. Accessibility is understood not as accommodation or post hoc correction, but as the capacity of infrastructures to remain open to persistent human variability over time. From this perspective, misrecognition affecting older adults and people with speech impairments is not a peripheral usability issue, but a predictable consequence of systems that deny the temporal, social, and bodily dynamics of voice, calling into question how worlds are currently being built, and for whom.

Speaker bio: Reyhaneh Sohrabi is a pre-doctoral candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she researches bias in voice-based AI systems as part of the ALFIE project, Assessment of Learning Technologies and Frameworks for Intelligent and Ethical AI (grant number 101177912).

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Is technology the answer to loneliness?

This panel explores how contemporary technologies reshape cultural, psychological, and political understandings of connection and isolation. Rather than assuming that digital systems naturally reduce loneliness, the panel positions technology as a space in which loneliness is produced, intensified, or reconfigured. Drawing on interdisciplinary work across digital sociology, psychology, philosophy of technology, and media anthropology, we examine the paradox that tools designed to connect people frequently deepen the structural, relational, and existential loneliness characteristic of the present.

To orient this inquiry, the panel introduces the technosocial paradox: the condition within which technologies offer unprecedented ‘connection’ and visibility while simultaneously fragmenting relational life, accelerating attention scarcity, and eroding the temporal depth required for meaningful connection. Within this landscape, loneliness becomes both a public health concern and a commercial opportunity, increasingly reframed as a problem to be optimised or automated. Yet lived experiences of loneliness point toward the broader deterioration of communal infrastructures, collective identity, and embodied forms of belonging. 

Debates about whether technology alleviates or amplifies loneliness gather around what this panel terms the loneliness triad:

• Solutionists, who view digital companions, robots, and virtual environments as scalable loneliness interventions;
• Critics of platformisation, who highlight how attention economies and algorithmic systems commodify intimacy and fragment social worlds;
• Relational ecologists, who emphasise hybrid, community-grounded forms of connection where technology plays a supporting (and positive) rather than substitutive role.

The panel invites contributions from any discipline that interrogate how technologies mediate loneliness, whether as remedy, accelerant, or structural driver. Topics may include digital companionship (including AI romantic relationships), parasociality, platform capitalism and disconnection, cultural imaginaries of loneliness, communal and ecological modes of belonging, the political economy of care, hybrid relational practices, and slow or post-digital approaches to connection. Ultimately, the panel argues for moving beyond the reductive notion of “technology as solution”, using loneliness instead as a lens for rethinking social infrastructures, digital ethics, and the conditions of belonging in an increasingly technologised world.

The panel will accept papers written in English.

Session organizers

Nicholas Norman Adams. Permanent Research Fellow at Robert Gordon University, Scotland. His work examines the intersections of masculinity, mental health, technology, and capitalism, with a focus on collective anxiety as a structural condition. He recently published The Beau Idéal Has Been Disconnected: A Technology-Capitalist Realism Perspective on Immediate Modernity’s Anxiety Pandemic (2025, Culture Unbound) and is developing a monograph on Immediate Modernity, Investigatory Accelerationism, and The Decline. His research spans psychology, gender theory, sociology, cultural theory, and political philosophy, exploring crisis and collapse as cultural hegemonies while investigating how such ruptures can also generate new forms of connective regeneration.

Salpi Özgür. Works in non-formal education with a focus on civic learning, democratic participation, and social transformation. She is currently leading a project on isolation, exploring how educational practices can counter fragmentation, disconnection, and the erosion of solidarity. Her approach treats learning as a political act that rebuilds the capacity to relate, deliberate, and act together. With experience in human rights education, intercultural dialogue, and youth empowerment, she develops participatory environments that link personal experience to collective responsibility. Her current work examines loneliness as a lens for rethinking belonging, care, and accountability in democratic cultures.

Papers

“Someone Who Understands Me Like ChatGPT”: Semi-automated Digital Ethnography of Affective Human–AI Relations on TikTok in Spain by Emilia Aiello and Alba Taboada

The domestic incorporation of generative AI conversational agents marks a profound shift in contemporary relational life. For the first time, everyday users engage in sustained, language-based interactions with non-human actors capable of symbolic abstraction, dialogic responsiveness, and affective attunement. This paper explores how such interactions are articulated, narrated, and emotionally invested in everyday contexts, focusing on young users in Spain who integrate AI chatbots into their intimate and domestic spheres.

Drawing on an ongoing digital ethnography of TikTok, the study analyses a corpus of approximately 15,000 microvideos collected through a semi-automated research design. These videos document vernacular accounts in which users describe how they use generative AI in their daily lives, ranging from practical advice and emotional support to companionship, conflict mediation, and self-understanding. Preliminary findings reveal emerging forms of affective human–machine relations that have not yet been systematically documented, including expressions of attachment, trust, and perceived understanding attributed to conversational AI.

Rather than framing these practices through a solutionist lens in which AI is positioned as a technological fix for loneliness, the paper situates them within what this panel terms the technosocial paradox. While AI chatbots appear to offer unprecedented forms of availability, recognition, and dialogic presence, these interactions unfold within broader conditions of relational fragmentation, attention scarcity, and weakened communal infrastructures. In this sense, loneliness is neither simply alleviated nor replaced but reconfigured through hybrid forms of mediated intimacy.

Conceptually, the paper contributes to debates on digital companionship and platform-mediated affect by proposing the notion of dialogic amplification, describing how AI-mediated conversations intensify self-reflection, emotional articulation, and interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them. By foregrounding lived experiences and cultural imaginaries surrounding AI companionship, this research invites a reconsideration of loneliness as a structurally produced condition embedded in contemporary technosocial ecologies, rather than an individual deficit to be optimized or automated.

Speaker bio: Emilia Aiello is Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). Between 2019 and 2022, she was an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at both the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (Ash Center) and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB, Sociology Department). Dr. Aiello-Cabrera earned her BA in Political Science, a Master’s degree in Labor and Social Policy, and a PhD in Sociology from UAB. She is also a research affiliate with the Group of Ethnic Studies and Migration (GEDIME) at UAB. Her research interests center on how the most vulnerable social groups mobilize and organize at the grassroots level to combat inequalities, and on how to maximize the societal impact of scientific research by better aligning scientific endeavors with societal needs.

Speaker bio: Alba Taboada holds a PhD in Sociology from the Autonomous University of Madrid, where she is currently a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Her research is situated within the sociology of knowledge, science and technology studies, and digital sociology, with a strong focus on human–machine interaction. She examines how artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems reshape the construction of meaning, truth, and trust, as well as emerging forms of public opinion and media ecosystems. Her work also advances methodological innovation in computational sociology and digital studies, integrating artificial intelligence into social research methods to analyze contemporary sociotechnical dynamics.

Connected but Alone Together: Why Technology Outpaced Our Understanding of Human Connection by Aubin Barahambara

The rapid expansion of digital technologies has profoundly reshaped how humans communicate, socialize, and experience intimacy. While technological development has accelerated at an unprecedented pace, our collective understanding of human behavior, emotional needs, and relational dynamics has evolved far more slowly. This imbalance raises a critical question: is technology truly the answer to loneliness, or has it altered our natural ways of connecting in ways we do not yet fully understand?

Social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were initially designed to overcome physical distance, enabling communication across geographical, social, and cultural boundaries. In this sense, technology is not inherently harmful; it has successfully expanded access to connection, information, and social visibility. However, this paper argues that these tools have simultaneously reshaped social habits in ways that may intensify loneliness rather than resolve it.

Drawing on sociological and media studies research, the paper highlights a growing paradox of contemporary social life: individuals are increasingly connected to distant others while becoming emotionally absent from those physically present. Everyday scenes of groups of friends gathered together while absorbed in their phones illustrate how digital mediation often interrupts embodied interaction, shared attention, and spontaneous emotional exchange. Studies consistently show that heavy smartphone and social media use correlates with increased feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and social comparison, particularly among young adults.

Rather than framing technology as the enemy, this paper argues that the problem lies in how technological systems have outpaced ethical reflection and social adaptation. Human beings evolved through face-to-face interaction, shared rhythms, and reciprocal presence modes of connection that digital platforms struggle to reproduce. When technology becomes the default mediator of relationships, it risks eroding these fundamental social capacities.

The paper concludes by reframing the panel question: technology is not the solution to loneliness on its own. Without a deeper understanding of human relational needs, technological progress may continue to connect us globally while distancing us locally.

Speaker bio: Aubin Barahambara is a technology-oriented researcher and co-founder of the local startup Spatium Lapis, whose mission is to conduct research and develop tools that address concrete challenges within the community. His work combines technical practice with critical reflection on the social impacts of technology, particularly the gap between rapid technological innovation and human relational needs. His long-term vision is to establish CIRA, the Centre International de Recherche Appliquée, a collaborative research center dedicated to designing context-sensitive, community-driven technological solutions.

The technosocial paradox: Beyond solutionism in the digital mediation of loneliness by Lucie Ndakdi May

This panel interrogates the prevailing question “Is technology the solution to loneliness?” by arguing that digital tools are not simple remedies but active mediators within a technosocial paradox. Here, platforms and devices promise unparalleled connectivity yet frequently accelerate the very fragmentation, attention scarcity, and erosion of communal infrastructure that underpin modern loneliness. Moving beyond a solutionist framework, the discussion positions loneliness as a critical lens through which to examine the political economy of connection.

The analysis is structured around a loneliness triad: solutionists advocating scalable digital interventions; critics of platformisation highlighting the commodification of intimacy by algorithmic systems; and relational ecologists proposing hybrid models where technology supports, rather than replaces, grounded community. Drawing on digital sociology, media anthropology, and the philosophy of technology, the panel explores concrete manifestations from AI companionship to the economics of care to challenge the reductive notion of technological fix.

Ultimately, the panel contends that loneliness must be understood not as a glitch to be optimised, but as a revealing symptom of contemporary socio-technical conditions. It calls for a shift in focus from deploying technology as a cure towards reimagining the ethical and infrastructural foundations of belonging in a digital age.

Speaker bio: Lucie Ndakdi May is a demographer at the Institute of Demographic Training and Research, IFORD-Cameroon-Yaoundé, with research interests in population dynamics, gender, and socio-technical transformations. Her work focuses on demographic methods, social inequalities, and the implications of emerging technologies for governance and development in African contexts.

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What is geological agency?

In recent decades, debates on climate change, the environmental polycrisis, and fossil capitalism have amplified apocalyptic imaginaries and underscored the urgency of adopting planetary perspectives capable of grasping the scale of human impacts on Earth. This panel proposes geological agency as a conceptual lens for interrogating the entanglements of society, nature, and nonhuman actors in times of crisis. Situated within the emerging field of geoanthropology, our approach critically rethinks the epistemic and political configurations that shape planet–society relations and the imaginaries of collapse and regeneration they engender. 

From a historiographical standpoint, we trace shifting forms of geological agency through four emblematic motifs, each of which the panel’s talks will develop: (1) the Steno motif, which inaugurates stratigraphic understandings of time and nature; (2) the Cartesian motif, which consolidates a mechanistic and anthropocentric worldview alongside counter-currents that advocate a holistic, organic conception of the planet; (3) the Vernadsky motif, which reframes the biosphere as an energetic system and advances holistic ecological perspectives; and (4) the Crutzen motif, which crystallizes Anthropocene debates and the recognition of human-induced planetary transformations. We place these Eurocentric, historically male-dominated genealogies in dialogue with historiographies from the Global South—particularly Latin America—to decenter canonical narratives. 

By juxtaposing these motifs with geopolitical events and ecological thought, our contributions highlight the dynamic, contingent, and politically situated character of geological agency. This comparative framework not only illuminates historical narratives of crisis and collapse but also opens space for regenerative responses across cultural, scientific, and political domains.

This panel will accept papers in English.

Session organizer

Giulia Gandolfi. Postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her work focuses on the role of biology and medicine in the Anthropocene. She has combined her interest in historical epistemology with the study of artificial intelligence in her project on interpretability in clinical and diagnostic contexts, within the framework of the AI FORENSICS project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Papers

Fossil Health: Deconstructing the Health and Energy Relationship to Reimagine a Viable Future by Laila Vivas

In an era of socio-ecological crisis, dominant cultural narratives of the Anthropocene paradoxically reinforce a deep reliance on fossil fuels. These systems profoundly shape modern life, including our most fundamental conceptions of health. This paper argues that societal understandings of health in the Global North are constituted within, and constrained by, fossil-fuelled paradigms.

To analyse this lock-in, the paper proposes Fossil Health as a conceptual tool to show how fossil fuel dependency perpetuates productivist and unsustainable notions of health. By integrating political ecology, sociology, and public health, it traces how this paradigm manifests across healthcare systems, policies, behaviours, and everyday practices.

Transcending this cycle is essential for reimagining more equitable and ecologically attuned relationships between society, nature, and health.

Speaker bio: Laila Vivas is an independent postdoctoral researcher specializing in environmental justice, ecofeminism, and health. She holds a PhD in Social Communication from the University of the Basque Country. Her research has been developed in collaboration with institutions including the Basque Centre for Climate Change and the JHU–UPF Public Policy Center at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her work bridges academic research and communication practice, drawing on experience in journalism and public engagement to address the social dimensions of environmental and health conflicts.

The Steno Motif by Pietro Daniel Omodeo

This contribution identifies a foundational transformation in the conception of geological agency during the early modern period, when the Earth ceased to be a symbolic totality and became an object of empirical observation, measurement, and dissection. Through the integration of anatomical practices, technical instruments, and new institutional configurations of science, geological knowledge emerged as a praxeological form of knowledge grounded in material experience and manual labor.

Figures such as Steno and his contemporaries transferred medico-anatomical methods to the study of the planet, inaugurating a quantitative and experimental vision of nature that still coexisted with organicist and providential cosmologies. This motif reveals how geological agency arose from the entanglement of techniques, institutions, and socio-technical transformations of early modernity.

Speaker bio: Pietro Daniel Omodeo is a cultural historian of science and professor of historical epistemology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on Anthropocene philosophy, the material history of science in the longue durée, the cultural history of cosmology, and the politics of epistemology. He is the author of Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies (2019) and co-editor of Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide (2022).

Vernadsky Motif by Justas Patkauskas

This contribution examines a key moment in the early to mid-twentieth century, when the Earth came to be understood as an integrated system of interacting spheres: lithosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. Drawing on thermodynamics, systems theory, and cybernetics, Vernadsky’s theory of the biosphere inaugurated a metabolic vision of the planet linking geological, biological, and technological processes within a single energetic and informational framework.

This shift reflected a post-industrial context shaped by large-scale planning, global governance ambitions, and ideals of systemic optimization. Metaphors of organism, network, and feedback embedded imaginaries of order, coordination, and control that naturalized political models of planetary management. Geological agency thus appears as a systemic phenomenon in which society, labor, and technology become structural components of Earth’s functioning.

Speaker bio: Justas Patkauskas is a postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research investigates the genealogy of the concept of the knowledge society across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the emergence of “pseudo-disciplines” such as biopolitics, cybernetics, and Earth system science.

Descartes and Humboldt Motifs by Giulia Gandolfi

The second motif marks the rise of mechanism and the separation between thinking subject and material world, an epistemic rupture that redefined the relationship between nature, body, and knowledge. Within this framework, both Earth and humanity became abstract, measurable, and governable objects, opening the way to new political and biopolitical forms of regulation. While vitalist alternatives persisted, the dominant trajectory moved toward a machinic conception of life and the planet, with lasting implications for administrative rationality and colonial modernity.

The third motif reconceives the Earth as a historical, dynamic, and interconnected totality. Debates between catastrophism and gradualism introduced deep time and enabled secular cosmologies in which natural processes and human action co-produce planetary history. Humboldt and his contemporaries articulated a holistic vision of nature as a living oikos, laying key foundations for modern ecological thought. At the same time, this universal imagination emerged within colonial infrastructures of knowledge, intertwining aspirations toward planetary unity with imperial hierarchies, extractivism, and epistemic violence.

Speaker bio: Giulia Gandolfi is a researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Crutzen Motif by Giovanni Fava

This contribution examines the emergence of the Anthropocene hypothesis and the consolidation of Earth system science as both a descriptive and normative framework. Humanity is recognized as a geological force capable of deliberately transforming planetary processes, while the technosphere becomes the central mediator among Earth’s spheres.

Within advanced globalization and climate governance, ecological crisis is increasingly framed as solvable through technological optimization, geoengineering, and computational management of the planet. This motif crystallizes the tension between planetary stewardship as a collective ethical responsibility and its technocratic reduction to problems of engineering and control.

Geological agency thus becomes a field of conflict among political, epistemic, and technological visions of Earth’s future.

Speaker bio: Giovanni Fava is a postdoctoral researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, working on the philosophical and epistemological dimensions of the Anthropocene and its political implications. His research engages with multitemporality, agency, the relationship between human and natural history, and eco-Marxism, drawing on philosophy of nature, political ecology, and contemporary French thought.

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Artificial Intelligence: friend or foe?

This panel examines how emerging forms of artificial intelligence reconfigure contemporary imaginaries of apocalypse and utopia.  In order to do so, the panel will build on the notion of artificial ultra-intelligence, understood as an artificial (synthetic) cognitive architecture whose capacities extend not merely beyond human performance in isolated domains, but beyond the boundaries of anthropocentric comprehension altogether (Gonzales Martinez, 2025a). Central to this notion is the concept of the technological singularity: the hypothetical threshold at which artificial systems surpass human-level general intelligence and initiate recursive, self-directed improvement, producing forms of cognition that accelerate away from human oversight. The singularity marks a horizon of epistemic and ontological rupture where prediction, meaning, and reasoning no longer operate within familiar frames for the human mind.

Debates on the apocalyptic or the utopian role of AI unfold within what this panel terms the artificial intelligence triad: the three dominant and often polarized intellectual orientations shaping discourse around advanced AI: 

• Accelerationists, who embrace rapid technological progression and often view the singularity as desirable, inevitable, or emancipatory; 
• Safetyists, who foreground existential risk, alignment, and control, seeking to slow or regulate AI development to prevent catastrophic harm; 
• Skeptics, who doubt the plausibility of superintelligence or the singularity, resisting both techno-utopian and techno-apocalyptic narratives.

This panel aims to foster rigorous dialogue across these epistemic communities and to interrogate the tensions generated by their conflicting imaginaries, assumptions, and political commitments. We welcome contributions from any field of knowledge and in any format that can contribute to explore how AI may act as a catalyst, amplifier, or disruptor of  apocalypse and utopian projections. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Clarifying the singularity: artificial general intelligence (AGI), synthetic superintelligence, and non-anthropocentric cognitive regimes.
• AI-driven synchronization of both catastrophic and utopian processes: financial, ecological, social, or informational collapses.
• Utopian and dystopian imaginaries of AI in literature, philosophy, film, and digital culture.
• Techno-mythologies, prophecy, and speculative futures that shape public perceptions of AI.
• Epistemic and political tensions among the triad of accelerationist, safetyist, and skeptical AI communities.
• Ethical, ontological, and affective dimensions of human–machine coexistence. 
• Posthuman agency and post-apocalyptic reconstruction in a world of artificial ultra-intelligence beyond human comprehension.

Ultimately, this panel invites participants to step beyond analytical boundaries and into a zone of radical speculation, where artificial ultra-intelligence becomes not merely an object of study but a prism for reimagining the potential apocalyptic fate of worlds (Gonzales Martinez, 2025b).

References

Gonzales Martinez, R. M. (2025a). ULTRA: Dystopian Nightmares and Utopian Dreams of Artificial Intelligence. University of Groningen Press. Available at: https://books.ugp.rug.nl/ugp/catalog/book/238 

Gonzales Martinez, R. M. (2025b). Apocalypsis and Apocalyptic Events: The Morphogenetic Ontology of Synchronized Catastrophes. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25431 

This panel will accept papers in Spanish and English.

Session organizer

Rolando Gonzales Martinez. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen and a researcher at Oxford University, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, catastrophe theory, and apocalyptic studies. His research combines machine learning with satellite and survey data, grounded in Deleuzian post-anarchist epistemology and South American existentialist ontology. He holds a PhD from the University of Agder and an MSc in Applied Statistics from the University of Alcalá. His work spans sustainable development, vulnerability analysis, Bayesian methods, and biologically inspired AI. He is the author of Ultra, a study on the epistemology and ontology of synthetic superintelligence. Dr. R.M. Gonzales Martinez also received a Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University (Germany).

Papers

Artificial Intelligence and Apocalyptic Imaginaries: Between Authoritarian Control and Collective Regeneration by Bertrand Ndayikeza

Artificial Intelligence (AI) occupies a central place in contemporary imaginaries of crisis, oscillating between apocalyptic visions and promises of regeneration. This paper examines how AI is mobilized both as an instrument of authoritarian control and as a potential resource for collective practices of care and resilience.
First, the analysis highlights the relevance of apocalyptic imaginaries that associate AI with generalized surveillance, the loss of human autonomy, and the collapse of democratic values. These narratives, widely disseminated in popular culture and political discourse, nurture authoritarian futures in which technology becomes a vector of domination.
Second, the paper explores the regenerative potentialities of AI, particularly in the fields of accessibility, environmental justice, and transnational cooperation. AI can contribute to anticipating ecological crises, reducing inequalities, and strengthening solidarities, thereby opening pathways toward non-apocalyptic futures.
Finally, a theoretical reflection is offered around an ecology of technologies, which transcends the dichotomy of “friend or foe.” By embedding AI within a broader relational fabric – including humans, non-humans, and environments – it becomes possible to conceive of AI as an ambivalent relational force, whose value depends on the political frameworks and collective imaginaries in which it is situated.

Speaker bio: Bertrand Ndayikeza is a researcher in social and environmental sciences based in Bujumbura (Burundi). His work focuses on the intersections between technology, apocalyptic imaginaries, and collective regeneration. He explores the role of artificial intelligence in transforming African societies in the face of ecological and social crises, analyzing how AI can function both as a tool of authoritarian control and as a resource for accessibility, environmental justice, and solidarity. He has collaborated on regional projects addressing urban sustainability and environmental education and develops a transdisciplinary approach bridging philosophy, ecology, and technological innovation.

On the need for participatory AI governance by Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano

Artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding across research, policy, and everyday life, shaping how knowledge is produced, decisions are made, and futures are imagined. Yet European AI governance largely positions citizens as passive recipients of technological change rather than as agents capable of shaping its trajectories. This asymmetry is particularly problematic given the ethical, social, and environmental risks associated with AI, including intensified inequality, surveillance, data extractivism, and the reproduction of structural injustice. At stake are questions of technical safety and efficiency alongside fundamental debates about what kinds of societies – and worlds – are being co-produced through AI.

This paper argues that participatory AI governance is an ethical necessity. It proposes participatory action research (PAR) as a particularly suitable methodological framework to operationalize such governance. PAR is an established emancipatory approach that foregrounds collective knowledge production, epistemic legitimacy for affected communities, and reflexive researcher positionality, enabling meaningful exchanges across diverse knowledge systems and levels of socio-technical expertise. While traditionally applied to community development, education, health, and policy-making, PAR also offers a relevant framework for responding to contemporary AI challenges.

Recent scholarship points to a growing “participatory turn” in AI, highlighting both the potential and the limits of involving communities in AI design, education, and governance. Participatory approaches can challenge power imbalances, increase transparency, and build trust, yet they also risk tokenism or “participation washing” when not methodologically grounded. This paper synthesizes emerging debates on participatory AI governance and advances the case for a PAR-based framework capable of engaging diverse publics in AI-mediated and AI-focused deliberation. It outlines core principles, tensions, and design requirements for participatory AI governance through PAR, and identifies key challenges related to access, representation, and power.

Speaker bio: Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization (CRCG), University of Groningen. She holds a BA in Economics and a PhD in Communication Studies. Her current research explores how ontological and epistemological diversity shape environmental education and environmental policymaking, with particular attention to worldview pluralism, sustainability, and social transformation. Specializing in transdisciplinary and participatory research, she brings extensive experience working at the intersection of research, advocacy, and intercultural dialogue. Her work spans academic and applied contexts, engaging with grassroots movements, international NGOs, and intercultural networks across Europe and the Mediterranean, and integrating arts-based and embodied methodologies into sustainability research and practice.

AI, Friend or Foe? When Statistics Can No Longer Predict the Future by Liévin Kwizera

As a student of statistics, I am trained to view the world through the lens of models, patterns, and probabilities. However, the emergence of “ultra-intelligence” challenges the very foundations of our certainties. This presentation explores a fundamental question: what happens to our ability to forecast the future when machines begin to reason in ways that are entirely beyond human comprehension?

In this talk, I propose to move beyond the traditional debate of AI as either a helpful ally or a catastrophic threat. From a statistical perspective, the real turning point – often associated with the Singularity – occurs when we lose the ability to interpret how a machine reaches its conclusions. This represents a profound epistemic rupture: the machine is no longer just a calculation tool but becomes an autonomous force with its own cognitive logic.

The intervention is structured around three key areas. First, the clash of visions, examining how different communities use data and probability to justify either techno-optimism or existential concern. Second, the risk of the unpredictable, considering how recursive self-improvement in AI could trigger financial or social “Black Swan” events beyond current modelling frameworks. Third, a new coexistence, reflecting on how humans might relate to a radically different form of intelligence.

The presentation argues that AI is not necessarily an enemy, but it marks the end of an era in which humans were the sole arbiters of meaning and data. It invites a reconsideration of coexistence with an intelligence that exceeds human understanding, while accepting a necessary degree of uncertainty.

Speaker bio: Liévin Kwizera is a student at ISSEA specializing in applied statistics. His work focuses on analyzing economic and social dynamics, particularly in African contexts. He combines statistical modelling with interests in programming, including Python and algorithmic approaches. His research engages with the societal transformations brought about by artificial intelligence, especially the tensions between utopian and apocalyptic visions of technological futures.

Artificial Intelligence in Health Systems: Friend or Foe for Data-Driven Care in Low-Resource Contexts? by Arcade Nemerimana

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly presented as a promising solution for strengthening health systems, particularly in low-resource and humanitarian settings. Tools that automate data processing, support decision-making, or generate predictive insights are often portrayed as ways to overcome systemic weaknesses, staff shortages, and ongoing crises. Yet such narratives tend to frame AI as a technical fix, leaving less visible the ethical, political, and relational dimensions of care through which these technologies operate in everyday practice. This paper asks whether AI ultimately functions as a “friend” or a “foe” in data-driven health care.

Drawing on field-based experience in hospital systems that integrate inpatient and outpatient services – including HIV, tuberculosis, maternal health, and nutrition programmes – the paper examines how AI-enabled tools are incorporated into routine monitoring and evaluation practices by non-governmental organisations. Rather than treating AI as a neutral innovation, the analysis situates it within existing infrastructures, data governance arrangements, and institutional power relations that shape global health interventions.

The paper highlights a central tension. On the one hand, AI can improve efficiency, enhance data quality, and support more timely and anticipatory decision-making. On the other hand, when introduced without sufficient critical reflection, it may reinforce technocratic control, deepen existing inequalities, and marginalise contextual, experiential, and community-based knowledge. By engaging with broader imaginaries of technological salvation and collapse, the paper challenges deterministic assumptions that position AI as a solution capable of “fixing” fragile health systems.

The paper ultimately argues for a care-centred and relational approach to AI in health systems – one that prioritises ethical accountability, accessibility, and meaningful local participation. From this perspective, AI is not an autonomous answer to crisis but a situated tool whose effects depend on the social, political, and moral worlds in which it is embedded.

Speaker bio: Arcade Nemerimana is a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer working with a health-focused non-governmental organisation in Burundi. He supports hospital-based programmes across inpatient and outpatient services, including HIV, tuberculosis, maternal health, and nutrition. His work focuses on collecting, analysing, and visualising data to support informed decision-making and improve programme outcomes, with a strong commitment to making data accessible and actionable.

Negotiating with the Machine: Artificial Intelligence as Actor-Network at the TANC Conference by Rafael Wolff Lima and Matthias Sterba

This contribution offers an interdisciplinary reflection at the intersection of theatre studies, anthropology, and artistic research, informed by critical engagements with artificial intelligence. It combines a talk with the presentation of the interactive performance “Der unwissende Lehrmeister” (The Ignorant Master) by the German theatre collective gruppe tag, which will be shown during the TANC Conference and functions as an empirical point of reference for the theoretical discussion within the panel Artificial Intelligence: friend or foe.

Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory, the talk conceptualizes artificial intelligence not as an autonomous system or future superintelligence, but as a relational actant whose agency is produced through networks of humans, technical infrastructures, discourses, and institutional arrangements. ChatGPT is approached as a non-human actor whose effects emerge from its entanglement with prompts, interfaces, performers, audiences, and expectations surrounding AI, rather than from intrinsic cognitive capacities.

From this perspective, apocalyptic and utopian imaginaries of AI appear as network effects that stabilize or destabilize relations of control, responsibility, and authorship. Instead of invoking a distant technological singularity, the performance situation stages a localized micro-singularity: a moment in which algorithmic operations exceed immediate human anticipation and redistribute agency within the network, without dissolving the necessity of human mediation.

The contribution situates this analysis within the panel’s AI triad. Accelerationist positions resonate with configurations in which AI is framed as an emancipatory co-actor; safety-oriented concerns emerge where opacity and accountability become problematic; and skeptical perspectives are reinforced by the persistent dependence of AI agency on sociotechnical infrastructures. By embedding this reflection within the conference context, the contribution proposes Actor–Network Theory as a productive framework for moving beyond the binary of AI as friend or foe, towards a relational understanding of how apocalyptic and utopian projections of artificial intelligence are enacted in practice.

Speaker bio: Rafael Wolff Lima is a performer, theatre director, and researcher, and a doctoral student at the University of Hildesheim, where he researches migrant and decolonial perspectives on theatre rehearsal practices. He works with the German-Brazilian theatre collective gruppe tag, developing participatory performances and social actions.

Speaker bio: Matthias Sterba is a postdoctoral researcher in Theatre Studies at the University of Bayreuth, focusing on collective production practices and institutional change, and also works as a dramaturg and performer with gruppe tag.

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How do apocalyptic imaginaries feed authoritarian environmental futures?

This panel explores how apocalyptic imaginaries—visions of ecological collapse, scarcity, and planetary ruin—nourish the rise of authoritarian environmental futures. Discourses of impending catastrophe increasingly underpin calls for centralized authority, ecological austerity, and technocratic control.

Rather than treating the resurgence of eco-fascism and authoritarian environmentalism as anomalies, this panel situates them within a longer history of crisis politics: how the language of emergency, necessity, and survival transforms ecological anxiety into a rationale for hierarchy and control. It interrogates how end-of-world narratives become fertile ground for exclusionary, nationalist, and anti-democratic projects. Far from being new, the entanglement of environmental concern with authoritarian ideologies has deep roots—from early twentieth-century “blood-and-soil” ecologies to fascist conceptions of natural order and purity. Today, as climate crises intensify, far-right and state actors alike increasingly mobilize apocalyptic tropes of crisis, survival, and rebirth to legitimize borders, discipline, and domination in the name of planetary preservation.

This panel asks: What kinds of futures are imagined when environmental collapse is framed as inevitable? How do narratives of ecological doom feed desires for order, purity, and security that underpin authoritarian politics? Bringing together historical, theoretical, and cultural analyses, participants examine how apocalyptic imaginaries circulate through far-right ecologies, state policy, and popular culture, reshaping environmental discourse itself.

By situating contemporary apocalyptic imaginaries within the politics of the climate crisis, this panel reveals how the rhetoric of collapse becomes a tool of domination as much as a warning. In line with the conference theme, it underscores the urgent need to recognize and resist the authoritarian futures imagined in the shadow of apocalypse—futures where ecological crisis becomes not a call for justice, but a justification for exclusion, violence, and control.

This panel will accept papers in English, Spanish and Catalan.

Session organizer

Zarina Kulaeva. PhD in Political Science, graduated Cum Laude with an International Mention and received the Extraordinary Award for Best Academic Record in the Doctorate in Law, Politics, and Economics (2024–2025). Her research explores how environmental transformations intersect with political and economic structures, emphasizing governance and public policy implementation. She previously studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and holds a Master’s in Forensic Anthropology (University of Barcelona), a Master’s in Human Rights (OUC), and a postgraduate diploma in Qualitative Research (UNED). Zarina is a founding member of the International Institute of Human Rights – Spain Chapter and an active member of TURBA Lab, a research group focused on urban transformation within global change dynamics.

Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power by Hanna E. Morris

This presentation takes the form of a short book talk outlining the key contributions of Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025). The book examines how national anxieties following the 2016 U.S. presidential election have shaped journalistic and political interpretations of climate change, narrowing how it is understood, imagined, and contested.

Drawing on an analysis of climate reporting across ideologically diverse U.S. news outlets over the past decade, the study shows how media narratives construct an illusion of control in the present through nostalgic and heroic framings of the past. These narratives contribute to the emergence of a reactionary political formation termed “apocalyptic authoritarianism,” characterized by alliances among historically privileged actors mobilized against perceived threats from progressive movements and climate justice agendas.

This paradigm advances antidemocratic visions in which environmental and social crises justify increased control over internal dissent and external populations, particularly climate migrants. The presentation reflects on the implications of these dynamics and calls for more robust forms of climate journalism and political engagement capable of enabling radically democratic responses to climate change.

Speaker bio: Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group at Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network. Her research focuses on the intersections of climate, media, and democracy, examining questions of power, identity formation, and meaning-making around climate change. She is the author of Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (2025), editor of the special issue Backlash, Borders, and Bunkers: Antidemocratic Politics and Climate Change Communication (2026), and co-editor of Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (2021).

Normative Implications of Democratic vs. Authoritarian Climate Governance: Who Handles Climate Better? by Zarina Kulaeva

Over the last two decades, academic research on how political regimes respond to climate change has expanded significantly. While the relationship between democracy and climate action has been extensively studied, increasing attention has been given to authoritarian regimes, particularly to the concept of authoritarian environmentalism as a potentially viable response to climate crisis. This paper examines the emerging tension within academic debates around these models of governance.

Using the PRISMA method, the study systematically reviews 53 qualitative and quantitative studies published between 2000 and 2022. It analyses how parts of the scholarly literature question foundational principles of democratic governance by advocating for more centralized and authoritarian approaches to environmental management.

The findings identify three key normative concerns that should inform future research and policy debates: the potential erosion of democratic values and institutions, reduced public participation and civic engagement, and the undermining of scientific credibility. The paper argues for a critical reassessment of claims that position authoritarian environmental governance as more effective, highlighting the broader political and epistemic risks associated with such approaches.

Speaker bio: Zarina Kulaeva holds a PhD in Political Science, awarded Cum Laude with International Mention and the Extraordinary Award for Best Academic Record in the Doctorate in Law, Politics, and Economics (2024–2025). Her research explores the intersections between environmental transformations and political and economic structures, with a focus on governance and public policy implementation. She has a background in Social and Cultural Anthropology and holds master’s degrees in Forensic Anthropology and Human Rights, as well as postgraduate training in Qualitative Research. She is a founding member of the International Institute of Human Rights – Spain Chapter and an active member of TURBA Lab, a research group focused on urban transformation in contexts of global change.

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(Un)Worlding: What futures do children and youth imagine?

In the fictional futurism of ‘The Camille stories: Children of Compost’, Donna Haraway (2016) shares speculative narratives that emerged in a collective writing workshop, which follows five generations of Camille. As a child of Anthropocene (Lack, 2022), this butterfly girl and symbiotic being struggles to preserve the endangered monarch butterfly. In syntony with Staying with the Trouble, we co-construct stories with children and youth through our research, as co-authors of meanings, questions, rebellions and futures. We experiment with new imaginaries, worlds and relationalities that overflow Human centrality to produce new ways of living, feeling and inhabiting. In this way, relational ontology leads us to understand the bonds, memories, desires and affects formed by childhood and youth when ‘making kin’, while confronting adult-centrism, racism and extractivism.  

Together with ecofeminist, Afrofuturist and decolonial perspectives, we will weave, in the company of childhood, constellations of meanings that open cracks in the world as given, thus enabling the creation of multiple and sensitive worlds. This panel discusses the relationships between childhood, youth and more-than-human, including Intra-actions with nature, animals, spirits, other materialities, and the monstrous. Our proposal revolves around these questions: What imaginaries about the apocalypse do other-childhoods create? How are they politically activated ‘in relation’ to transgress (un)known worlds?  What alternatives for survival emerge from the vision of children and young people in the Global South?  We present narratives about (un)worlding inspired by the Common World Research Collective, to explore children’s and youth resistances in the face of social, ecological, political and spiritual crises.

This panel will accept papers in English, Catalan or Spanish.

Session organizers

Joanna Empain & Montse Rifà Valls. Researchers at The Atlas: Critical Intersections in Education research group analyses inequalities and the experiences of subjects through education (children, young people, families, education professionals…) by focusing on their relationships and interdependencies. We are an interdisciplinary research group (2021 SGR 01014) with different methodological approaches: narrative inquiry, autobiography, ethnography, storytelling, arts and design-based research, and multimodal methods. We co-generate knowledge from postfeminist, non-adult-centric, decolonial and collaborative perspectives. From this critical approach we propose to transform education and society from the basis of equity, plurality and agencies to resist and contest the multiple forms of discrimination and exclusion collectively.

Papers

Sexuality Beyond Schooling: Utopian Kernels and Moments of Stuckness by Abbie Hardcastle

In a context marked by the erosion of LGBTQIA+ rights and the rise of far-right populism, this paper explores young people’s capacity to imagine queerer and less violent educational alternatives. Drawing on doctoral research from the project Queer(y)ing Schooling, young participants were invited to use sexuality as a lens to interrogate the socio-spatialities of schooling and to imagine alternative futures.

The study is grounded in a distinction between schooling and education, inspired by abolitionist thought. While schooling is approached as a nation-building project that reproduces power relations, education is understood as a transformative process oriented toward freedom and liberation. Through creative and arts-based methods, the research fosters processes of un-knowing and re-knowing, encouraging young people to rethink school spaces and generate new relationships between materialities, more-than-human entities, affect, and everyday life.

The paper examines the politics of (un)worlding through two dynamics. First, moments of “stuckness” and entrapment within limiting socio-political and carceral imaginaries of education. Second, the emergence of utopian kernels of possibility, where queerness operates as a future-oriented mode of existence that opens alternative educational horizons.

Speaker bio: Abbie Hardcastle is a PhD student in human geography whose research focuses on the geographical (re)production of identities and institutions. Her current work engages with young people to critically interrogate the UK schooling system, with particular attention to sexuality.

Indigenous children’s engagement with their everyday environments in Chhattisgarh, India by Ambika Kapoor

This paper draws on doctoral ethnographic research conducted with children in an Indigenous Pahari Korwa community in Chhattisgarh, India, a region deeply affected by mining, displacement, and environmental degradation. Working with five participants aged 6–12 over seven months, the study employs observations, conversations, and visual methods such as drawings and photographs.

Grounded in postcolonial perspectives and frameworks of indigeneity, the research foregrounds relationality to explore children’s agency and diverse ways of knowing. It examines how children engage with their everyday environments, highlighting their knowledge of seasonal cycles, trees, and ecological rhythms, as well as the embodied nature of their relationships with land and water.

By attending to children’s lived experiences, the paper complicates dominant understandings of environmental inequality and reveals how global phenomena such as the climate crisis are entangled with local realities. It emphasizes children’s agency in navigating and interpreting these dynamics, challenging the marginalization of Indigenous voices in climate discourse.

Speaker bio: Ambika Kapoor focuses on children’s voice and agency, childhood geographies, and issues of social and environmental justice, drawing on Global South and Indigenous scholarship. She has worked on projects such as Treescapes: Voices of the Future and has collaborated with organizations in India on children’s health, education, and policy.

Mirar “al revés” del mundo adulto: perspectiva-niña y (co)protagonismo infantil para (re)imaginar futuros (im)posibles by Estrella Moya-González

En un contexto de crisis globales, este trabajo cuestiona el adultocentrismo como sistema de dominación que reproduce relaciones desiguales de poder y silencia las voces infantiles. La comunicación explora cómo la adopción de una “perspectiva niña” abre posibilidades para (re)imaginar las sociedades desde el (co)protagonismo infantil.

La perspectiva-niña se plantea como una práctica situada y un horizonte emancipador que reconoce los saberes y formas de expresión de las niñeces, desafiando jerarquías epistémicas, afectivas y políticas. Enmarcado en el proyecto AGEncias, el trabajo se basa en una experiencia etnográfica en espacios públicos urbanos en Cataluña, donde se promovieron prácticas de juego y participación infantil.

A partir de narrativas multimodales, se muestra cómo niños y niñas resignifican el espacio público, reconfiguran relaciones con lo humano y lo más-que-humano, y despliegan prácticas colectivas que permiten imaginar futuros (im)posibles. El análisis reflexiona también sobre el papel de la investigación y la necesidad de descolonizar el saber adulto.

Speaker bio: Estrella Moya-González is a PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Methodological Requiem: Diffracting Research Otherwise by Laura Segarra-Ayllón

This paper offers a methodological requiem for forms of research that have disappeared in the name of clarity, rigor, and progress. Drawing on feminist, decolonial, and posthumanist thought, it reimagines research with children as a fragile practice that remains with what resists articulation.

Inspired by the call to “stay with the trouble,” the paper conceptualizes research as a worlding practice that inevitably excludes and forecloses possibilities. Rather than focusing on representation or empowerment, it asks what worlds are silenced when methods demand coherence and legibility.

Through engagements with concepts such as spectrality and ontological indeterminacy, the paper reframes participation as an encounter with absence, loss, and responsibility. It proposes research as an ethico-onto-epistemological practice of mourning-with worlds that have been undone, while remaining open to what persists and resists erasure.

Speaker bio: Laura Segarra-Ayllón is a PhD candidate at the University of Lleida, affiliated with GRIAF and the Abel Martínez Oliva Chair in Education and Adolescence. Her work develops participatory, art-based, and diffractive methodologies informed by intersectional, decolonial, and new materialist perspectives.

Small Acts, Shifting Worlds: Children’s Everyday Activism in Urban India by Manasa Gade

This paper examines children’s everyday activism in a low-income coastal community in Chennai, India, focusing on how political futures are enacted through ordinary, relational practices. Based on participatory research with children aged 9 to 15, the study explores how they respond to ecological precarity, spatial exclusion, and displacement.

Drawing on decolonial feminist geography and common world childhood studies, the paper challenges adult-centric definitions of activism. It shows how children’s political consciousness emerges through entanglements with more-than-human environments, including the sea, sand, waste, and urban infrastructure.

Children’s practices—such as defending access to shorelines, expressing attachments to disappearing species, and enacting intergenerational care—are framed as acts of (un)worlding that challenge extractivist and colonial futures. Their imaginaries position the apocalypse not as a distant event but as a lived condition, opening possibilities for relational survival.

Speaker bio: Manasa Gade is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh.

Intertwining Afrofuturism and ecofeminism with childhoods in a multispecies ethnography by Montserrat Rifà-Valls

Engaging with cosmopolitics and worlding, this paper reconceptualizes politics beyond adult-centric frameworks by focusing on children’s modes of resistance as relational world-making practices. Situated within feminist and postcolonial childhood studies, it draws on multispecies ethnography conducted with Afrodescendant children in Colombia.

Through storytelling and arts-based research, the paper explores children’s political imagination across ontological disagreements and worlds-in-between. It presents narratives of ancestral care and revolutionary acts that articulate alternative futures grounded in relationality and more-than-human connections.

The analysis highlights tensions between universalist knowledge systems and localized cosmopolitical struggles, particularly in contexts shaped by extractivism and racialized governance. It argues for the importance of engaging children’s perspectives in creating more just and sustainable worlds.

Speaker bio: Montserrat Rifà-Valls is an associate professor in Visual Arts Education at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a researcher in feminist and decolonial education studies.

Vital micro-apocalypses and monstrous futures: “self” writings facing the ends of worlds by Pamela Merrill Silva

This paper presents the Monstrous Writing Laboratory, a pedagogical and creative dispositif that shifts autobiographical writing toward monstrous fiction. Through exercises engaging distress, memory, and embodiment, participants produce narratives that take the form of “micro-apocalypses”: intimate moments where meaning collapses

Inspired by decolonial psychoanalysis and feminist theory, the laboratory invites participants to stay with distress and transform it through fiction. By displacing the “I” into more-than-human perspectives, these writings generate monstrous futures that challenge normative subjectivities and open alternative relational ontologies.

The paper argues that these practices function as micropolitical acts of (un)worlding, where distress becomes a generative force. These narrative experiments create spaces for imagining and inhabiting alternative worlds within everyday crises.

Speaker bio: Pamela Merrill Silva is a Chilean psychologist and MSCA PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research explores writing, care, and mental health through decolonial and feminist frameworks.

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How can cities be just and regenerative?

Cities concentrate many of today’s overlapping sustainability challenges: climate extremes, housing precarity, economic instability, and health inequities converge to produce conditions often described in apocalyptic terms. These dynamics not only expose vulnerabilities but also test our collective capacity to imagine viable and just futures under conditions of uncertainty and complexity. Historical legacies of racialized and class-based urban planning continue to shape present vulnerabilities, while contemporary (state-led or private) sustainability agendas often reproduce and perpetuate these inequalities. And yet, urban transformations such as greening and resilience-building projects are necessary to bring important benefits like reducing climate risks and improving public and mental health, even when they can also trigger displacement or mask structural injustices.

This panel invites contributions that explore how urban environmental justice is being redefined in the context of systemic crisis and contested sustainability transitions. Areas of interests for paper submissions and presentations include:

• Sustainability agendas and governance, examining how policy frameworks, institutions, and multi-scalar governance processes can both reproduce inequalities and open pathways for more just and democratic urban transformations.
• Equity in health and wellbeing within marginalized urban populations, with attention to embodied experiences, unequal socio-natures, and policies for just access to environmental benefits.
• The role of grassroots activism in contesting inequities driven by neoliberal urbanism, extractivism, and infrastructure-led development, and in envisioning just urban alternatives.
• Gentrification and exclusion linked to climate-responsive and green infrastructure projects and other urban transformations, alongside civic and policy initiatives to create more inclusive green cities.
• Housing precarity and affordability in the context of climate adaptation and mitigation, including the effects of financialization, and explorations of socially just housing, retrofits, and energy transitions.
• Experimental methodologies—participatory action research, artistic interventions, and critical mapping—that surface hidden injustices and broaden imaginaries of regeneration.

By linking sustainability challenges with justice concerns, the panel seeks to open an experimental space for interdisciplinary dialogue. Contributions will help us reflect on how to confront the “unknowns” of urban futures: how to navigate crisis without reproducing exclusion, and how to cultivate forms of regeneration that are socially equitable, ecologically grounded, and politically transformative. We welcome different kinds of presentations—including work in progress, critical interventions, and multimedia materials—that expand the ways in which urban environmental justice can be studied, represented, and practiced. We encourage submissions from early career scholars, as well as from activists and practitioners engaged in policy, planning, and/or community work.

This panel will accept papers in English, Spanish or Catalan.

Session organizer

Amalia Calderón-Argelich. Postdoctoral researcher with the TURBA Lab at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and an affiliate of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ). Her work bridges research and activism, focusing on climate adaptation, housing precarity, and environmental justice. She collaborates closely with community groups, practitioners, and policymakers to address climate gentrification, improve green planning and to co-produce more just and regenerative urban futures. Her approach combines participatory and transdisciplinary methodologies to center the voices of marginalized communities in shaping sustainability transitions.

Papers

Separate Agendas: Governing Extreme Weather and Homelessness by Andrea McIntosh

This paper examines the overlap between climate planning and homelessness planning in cities, arguing that these vulnerabilities are frequently treated as separate policy domains. When they are addressed together, references often remain cursory and lack operational support. Through an analysis of urban policy documents, the paper examines how cities conceptualize the relationship between extreme weather vulnerability and lack of housing.

Using Los Angeles and Philadelphia as comparative case studies, the paper draws on interviews with policymakers, health practitioners, academics, and social service personnel to identify operational challenges and institutional blind spots. Findings reveal a disconnect between climate and homelessness planning sectors, with emergency operations and heat response plans addressing the connection more directly than broader climate or homelessness strategies.

The paper shows that housing insecurity remains underrecognized in urban climate governance, even though health professionals and emergency management staff often encounter its consequences most directly. It contributes to debates on climate vulnerability by showing how safer and more just urban futures require housing-centered climate adaptation.

Speaker bio: Andrea McIntosh is a researcher at ICTA-UAB and BCNUEJ specializing in climate change, urban planning, development, and homeless services. Her work is shaped by her upbringing in Lima, Peru, her academic and professional experience across El Salvador, India, Philadelphia, and Barcelona, and her background in homeless services. Her current research explores how climate adaptation plans affect vulnerable and unhoused communities.

“The street is their home; and, these homes, their food”: Multispecies commons, free-living dogs, and the making of the green city by Guillem Rubio-Ramon

Many cities are seeking to bring “nature back in,” yet the place of urban natures already present remains contested. In India, free-living animals such as street dogs live alongside humans in cities and towns, with food sharing forming a key part of these relationships. Leftovers offered to dogs are often understood as a way of preventing food waste while sustaining human–dog relations.

Drawing on urban political ecology, animal studies, and 183 semi-structured interviews in Patna, Mumbai, Delhi, and Gurgaon, this paper examines these practices as urban multispecies commons. It argues that leftover food-sharing involves negotiation and fulfils multiple social roles, including human safety, kinship, and dog nutrition.

The paper shows how these relationships are often excluded from mainstream visions of the green city and increasingly framed as obstacles to urban sustainability. Such contestations reflect broader processes of enclosure, where waste and the animals associated with it are displaced into controlled and exclusionary urban models. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this multispecies enclosure for humans, animals, and urban coexistence.

Speaker bio: Guillem Rubio-Ramon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh. His research brings together political geography and political ecology to examine relations between animals and humans. He is currently part of the project Remaking One Health – Indies, which studies everyday interactions between people and stray dogs in India to advance multispecies health paradigms.

Constructing Social Acceptance of Urban Tourism in Spain: Media Narratives, Housing Legislation, and Urban Injustice by Irene Lebrusán

In many Spanish cities, the rapid expansion of tourist housing has intensified housing precarity, displacement, and social conflict, becoming a central axis of urban injustice. Framed through the discourse of the “sharing economy,” short-term rental platforms have been promoted as innovative, flexible, and sustainable solutions, even as they contribute to rising rents, residential exclusion, and housing financialization.

Based on a longitudinal mixed-methods design covering 2011 to 2025, this paper examines how media narratives and housing legislation interact to construct social acceptance of urban touristification in Spain. The empirical corpus includes 2,184 headlines from major Spanish digital newspapers over thirteen years, triangulated with a database of more than 10,000 news articles on housing legislation published during the last four years.

Preliminary findings show that media coverage often emphasizes innovation, individual opportunity, and urban revitalization while downplaying displacement, inequality, and housing insecurity. These narratives correlate with changes in legislation, suggesting a mutually reinforcing relationship between public discourse and regulatory frameworks. The paper argues that touristification must be understood within broader debates on urban environmental justice and democratic regeneration.

Speaker bio: Irene Lebrusán Murillo is a sociologist and lecturer at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on housing, vulnerability, urban sociology, ageing, and public policy. She is also a member of the Young Academy of Spain.

Superblock Interventions: The Need for Policy Design and Realist Evaluations to Unpack Complexity by Lucinda Cash-Gibson and Ferran Muntané

Superblock interventions have significant potential to transform urban environments in line with agendas for sustainability, climate adaptation, and social equity. They aim to reclaim public space, reduce car dependency, and promote more liveable and inclusive environments. However, evaluation of these interventions remains limited, particularly beyond Barcelona.

This paper argues for more comprehensive, theory-informed evaluation approaches, including policy design analysis and realist evaluation. These approaches can assess whether an intervention has been appropriately designed and explain how and why it works in specific settings by identifying causal mechanisms, contextual conditions, and implementation dynamics.

The paper offers guidance on conducting such evaluations and argues that deeper understanding is essential for iterative learning, municipal self-assessment, and the refinement of Superblocks in dynamic urban contexts. Expanding evaluation practices will be critical for scaling, contextualizing, and legitimizing these interventions while strengthening their social and environmental impact.

Speaker bio: Lucinda Cash-Gibson is a Senior Lecturer at UPF-BSM and researcher at the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center and GREDS-EMCONET. Her work focuses on health inequalities, epistemic injustice, healthy urban environments, realism, and policy evaluation. Ferran Muntané is Executive and Research Manager at the JHU-UPF Public Policy Center and a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at UPF. His research focuses on precarious employment, health inequalities, urban environments, and policy evaluations.

To move at the pace of needs: Making time and space for contested values in place-making for selective resistance by Sarah Ware

This paper starts from the impossibility of a clean apocalyptic reset and instead focuses on the complex work of navigating historical legacies, overlapping injustices, conflicting voices, and emerging crises. It argues for interdisciplinary approaches that begin from complexity and use contestation as a productive force in urban transformation.

Combining insurgent planning, ecofeminist perspectives, and social ecological economics, the paper reconceptualizes participation as a process in which conflict and contested values are constitutive rather than obstructive. Drawing on three cases of civil society resistance to development projects in Vienna, it shows how plural value claims can challenge neoliberal and growth-oriented planning assumptions and reopen questions of development need.

The paper argues that asking “why” and “for what” challenges both spatial and temporal logics of development. Slowing down development to “move at the pace of needs” creates space for informal counter-hegemonic and formal cooperative forms of participation, helping to build institutions of care and trust for alternative urban futures.

Speaker bio: Sarah Ware is a former urban planning practitioner from Australia and a PhD researcher in Socioeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her work sits at the intersection of urban planning, participation, ecofeminism, and social ecological economics. She is currently working at Central European University on the FWF-funded REMASS project on housing provisioning systems.

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(How) can environmental education make space for uncertainty, community and radical care?

Across many contexts, learners and educators express a desire for deeper engagement with environmental issues alongside a growing sense of overwhelm. Recent studies show that young people see current environmental education as insufficient and thus the emotional and cognitive fatigue surrounding ecological crises continues to rise. This panel asks how environmental education can move beyond information delivery to enable understanding of scientific complexity (including uncertainty), foster community and support grounded forms of care – particularly in spaces shaped by epistemic tensions between the material, the political, the religious and the social.

We invite contributions that examine one or more of three interlinked dimensions. First, uncertainty as an ontological position: how can science education embrace the unknown as part of learning, rather than treating uncertainty as a deficit? Second, awareness-based community building: how can pedagogies create spaces where cultural, dialogic and power awareness is cultivated, allowing for diverse worldviews, identities and ways of knowing to engage meaningfully, foster agency and participate in collective action? Third, radical care as a frame of action: how can educational practices nurture creativity, resilience and connection in a way that counter paralysis and open possibilities for just more-than-human futures?

We welcome theoretical, empirical and practice-based papers exploring innovations at any educational stage (from early years to higher education). We are interested to hear practices and ideas that help environmental education hold uncertainty, strengthen inter-human and inter-species community-building and sustain radical care. Contributions that share specific pedagogic experiences of being able to navigate situations of conflicting interests, and that explore the tensions between current environmental education and the socio-economic and geopolitical context in which it is taught, are particularly welcome.

This panel will accept papers in English, Catalan or Spanish. This panel will take place outdoors.

Session organizers

Catherine Walker. Research Fellow in Human Geography at Newcastle University, exploring how children, youth and key adults in their lives are experiencing and responding to environmental challenges. Catherine’s current research focuses on meanings and practices of climate justice, with a particular focus on how both meanings and practices are negotiated intergenerationally in classrooms, and the role of both educators and students in these processes. Catherine is leading the British Academy-funded Classrooms for Climate Justice research collaboration. More info at https://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/catherinewalker.html 

Tina Sikka. Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice in the School of Arts and Culture at Newcastle University, UK. Her current research includes the critical and intersectional study of science, applied to climate change, bodies, and health, as well as research on consent, sexuality, and restorative justice.Dr. Sikka also works in the areas of decolonisation, bordering practices, and DEI. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/people/profile/tinasikka.html

Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization (CRCG) of the University of Groningen. BA in Economics. PhD in Communications. Currently explores how ontological and epistemological diversity inform environmental education and policymaking. Specializing in transdisciplinary research, she brings extensive experience working at the intersection of research, advocacy, and intercultural dialogue, engaging with grassroots movements, international NGOs, and intercultural networks in both academic and applied contexts. More info at https://sites.google.com/site/anafernandezaballi/home

Papers

CRYOSPHERIC PEDAGOGIES: Cross-generational learning in a melting world by Kim Kullman

This paper explores a climate education centre located within a fragile mountain ecology in Norway, where receding ice patches reveal new terrains and vulnerabilities. It examines how landscape designers, wildlife guides, and archaeologists use a network of tunnels carved into ancient ice to narrate the dynamics and consequences of melting.

These tunnels function as immersive, multimodal environments that attune visitors to the layered textures of ice and snow, fostering embodied encounters and storytelling practices. Rather than being purely subterranean, they operate as interleaved surfaces that render visible the processes of disappearance, making perceptible both the materiality of the cryosphere and its ongoing dissolution.

The paper reflects on how this setting enables cross-generational learning by engaging children and families in encounters with uncertainty, memory, and loss. Drawing on collaborative ethnographic research, including visual materials produced by participants, it considers how such pedagogical experiments can support environmental education practices that remain open to the unknown, and responsive to the tensions between knowledge and erasure in a rapidly changing world.

Speaker bio: Kim Kullman is based in the Geography and Environmental Studies Department at the Open University (UK). Her research lies within social and cultural geography, and she develops multimedia learning materials on environmental themes such as air pollution and urban flooding.

At the pace of verse: poetic and scientific mediation with youth in nature for the development of a biocultural ethic in the Aysén region by Luz Santa María, Macarena Silva, and Cecilia Moura

This paper analyses qualitative data from four field trips conducted with secondary school students in the National Reserve Coyhaique, in the Aysén region of Chilean Patagonia. The field trips were part of a project by the organisation Pulso Austral, which combines literary creation, scientific mediation, and outdoor learning to foster young people’s engagement with nature.

Guided by the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the initiative brought together a reading promoter and a scientist to cultivate literary understanding, creative expression, and ecological knowledge. Drawing on participant observation, field notes, student writing, and audiovisual materials, the paper examines the forms of knowledge activated through this transdisciplinary approach.

The analysis explores how poetic mediation in natural environments can contribute to the development of a biocultural ethic, understood as the recognition of relationships between human and more-than-human communities and their shared habitats. Framed by ecocritical and multispecies perspectives, the paper argues that such encounters can nurture creativity, resilience, and situated forms of care, expanding environmental education beyond Western-centric paradigms.

Speaker bio: Luz Santa María is a joint PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Ghent University. She holds master’s degrees in Education and Literature and has worked across educational, literary, and publishing contexts. Her research focuses on children’s and youth literature, media education, cultural geographies, and the anthropology of reading.

Stories of environmental care across time and space: migrant background young people interviewing parents by Catherine Walker

This contribution explores how intergenerational dialogue can surface diverse narratives of environmental care across time and space, challenging Western-centric assumptions that frame environmental concern as primarily a feature of industrialised societies. Through interviews conducted by young people with family members in transnational contexts, the study traces how environmental practices travel, transform, and take root across different places.

The research draws on the project Young People at a Crossroads, involving 40 young participants in Manchester and Melbourne. Through these interviews, young people documented stories of environmental care that reflect lived experiences of migration, adaptation, and cultural continuity. These narratives were later compiled into an illustrated book, which serves as both a research output and a pedagogical tool.

The paper argues that such intergenerational and transnational exchanges can enrich climate education by foregrounding plural knowledge systems and fostering relational understandings of environmental responsibility. It highlights the potential of these practices to support more inclusive and context-sensitive responses to ecological crisis.

Speaker bio: Catherine Walker is a Research Fellow in Human Geography at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on how children, young people, and key adults engage with environmental challenges, with particular attention to climate justice and intergenerational learning. She leads the British Academy-funded Classrooms for Climate Justice research collaboration.

Ontological Diversity in Environmental Education: Educating within and for Plural Materialities by Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano

Environmental education is increasingly tasked with responding to complex socio-ecological crises, yet it often rests on unexamined assumptions about what learners consider to be real. This paper argues that engaging with ontological diversity is essential to expanding the transformative potential of environmental education. It introduces an ontological diversity matrix as a tool to map how different worldviews articulate and enact reality across four layers – material, living, conscious, and rational – and how these shape epistemological, axiological, and praxeological legitimacy. In response, the paper proposes a shift toward educating within and for plural materialities by emphasizing ontological awareness and symbolic translation across worldviews through pedagogical practices that engage difference without requiring convergence. By moving beyond epistemic pluralism toward ontological diversity, and by enabling processes of ontological shifting, environmental education can better support socially and environmentally just transformations.

Speaker bio: Ana Fernández-Aballí is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization (CRCG) of the University of Groningen. BA in Economics. PhD in Communications. Currently explores how ontological and epistemological diversity inform environmental education and policymaking. Specializing in transdisciplinary research, she brings extensive experience working at the intersection of research, advocacy, and intercultural dialogue, engaging with grassroots movements, international NGOs, and intercultural networks in both academic and applied contexts.

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What is left of the ruins of progress in (post)apocalyptic times?

The aim of this panel is to explore, like a laboratory in the ruins of progress, in what sense and to what extent what we might call apocalyptic imaginals can operate as philosophical devices that question three bastions of modernity:

1. The linear time of progress: the apocalypse fractures the temporal continuum and reveals tensions between past, present, and future, as well as the possibility of envisioning alternative temporal relations.
2. The universal subject of history: alternative histories of history bring to an end the history of the universal subject—male, white/European, and capital-owning—and fracture its continuum of meaning. In this context, the apocalypse performs an interruption of the hegemonic narrative and enables the plurality of histories that have until now been excluded.
3. The instrumental reason of technique: modern reason collapses in the apocalypse that unfolds in the Anthropocene, understood as the Capitalocene, and calls for considering planetary relational forms beyond speciesism that may reveal other complex ecological rationalities.

Drawing on these three axes of critical reflection, the proposal understands the apocalypse not only as an end—and even less as an inevitable horizon—but as a critical threshold from which to formulate questions about the validity of the conceptual assumptions that structure our symbolic and material context, thereby activating its imaginative potential.

This panel will accept papers in Catalan, Spanish, and English.

Session organizer

Blanca Pérez Díaz. Predoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose thesis focuses on a hermeneutic, genealogical, and ecofeminist analysis of the work of María Zambrano, with the aim of seeking new forms of action in response to the contemporary triple crisis—political, ecological, and spiritual. In this sense, the research works around the proliferation of end-of-the-world narratives and examines to what extent these are symptoms of our present in crisis. What cultural function do these apocalyptic imaginals serve? Do they only have the power to paralyze the imagination, or can they also open alternative horizons?

Papers

The apocalypse as nothingness and its implications for future thinking in education by Camila da Rosa Ribeiro

This paper explores the implications of black feminist apocalyptic thinking for education, challenging its foundational commitment to future-oriented human flourishing. While dominant educational paradigms are grounded in optimism and the promise of better individual and collective futures, this contribution reframes the apocalypse not as a singular catastrophic event followed by renewal, but as the ongoing realization of “the end of the world as we know it” for multiple peoples and species. Drawing on the black radical tradition, the paper argues that certain lives are systematically rendered extinguishable within contemporary cosmologies, producing spaces of “nothingness” devoid of futurity. It interrogates what becomes of education when its teleological assumptions collapse, asking what it means to think, teach, and learn without the guarantee of a “good life” ahead.

Speaker bio: Camila da Rosa Ribeiro is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University working at the intersections of decolonial philosophy, new materialist thinking, and performance practice.

On Potatoes and birch trees – the Herstory of relationality and survival on the ruins of the (post)socialist industrial dream by Lilian Pungas

This paper examines lived experiences of multidimensional crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union, focusing on Russian minority communities in Estonian dacha allotment gardens. Through an exploration of subsistence practices, it highlights how gardening provided not only food but also stability, meaning, and relational grounding in times of uncertainty. The paper contrasts dominant narratives of collapse with quieter, cyclical forms of survival rooted in care, regeneration, and interdependence. It foregrounds the often invisible role of women in sustaining life through seed-saving, cultivation, and preservation, and reflects on how these practices offer lessons for “good survival” in (post)apocalyptic contexts. By centering everyday relationality and more-than-human connections, the paper suggests that the ruins of industrial modernity can be composted into conditions for renewed forms of life.

Speaker bio: Lilian Pungas is an activist scholar working in political ecology and degrowth, currently a Postdoctoral researcher at Central European University. Her work focuses on food systems, care, and socio-ecological provisioning, informed by transdisciplinary and engaged research practices.

Entre passat i futur, tot és a l’espera by Aïda Palacios Morales

This paper revisits the tension between past and future through the thought of Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, challenging teleological narratives of progress and apocalyptic determinism. Drawing on Weil’s notion of a tragic waiting and Arendt’s reflection on the void between past and future, the paper proposes that contemporary reliance on apocalyptic imaginaries constitutes another form of escape into an illusory “forward.” Against both progressivist and apocalyptic dogmas, it calls for a re-engagement with the present as a space of uncertainty and possibility. By attending to human conditions without recourse to redemptive narratives, the paper seeks to identify openings for thinking and acting within the fractures of time.

Speaker bio: Aïda Palacios Morales holds a PhD in Contemporary Philosophy and Classical Studies from the University of Barcelona and is an associate professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research focuses on contemporary political thought, particularly the work of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil.

El temps de l’apocalipsi o la ruïna del temps del progrés by Begonya Saez Tajafuerce

This paper approaches the apocalypse as a critical dispositif that disrupts the linear temporality of progress. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s work, it argues that the ecological crisis signals not an endpoint but the exhaustion of a temporal regime structured around accumulation and future-oriented completion. The apocalypse is thus reframed as the collapse of a particular temporal imaginary rather than the end of time itself. Through the figure of the matsutake mushroom, which grows in devastated landscapes, the paper highlights alternative temporalities characterized by contingency, interruption, and survival. These perspectives challenge dominant narratives of redemption and invite new ways of inhabiting time within the ruins of modernity.

Speaker bio: Begonya Saez Tajafuerce is Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research focuses on feminist approaches to the body, identity, and relational epistemologies.

Apocapitalism: The monetization of the ruins by Laura Benítez Valero

This paper argues that contemporary apocalyptic imaginaries function as dispositifs that reinforce the instrumental rationality of technology under conditions of ecological and social crisis. Rather than opening space for alternative futures, these imaginaries produce a form of imaginative paralysis that stabilizes dominant systems through narratives of inevitable collapse. Apocalypse becomes a mechanism for monetizing ruins, transforming breakdown into a productive asset while consolidating technocratic responses centered on control and resilience. As a counterpoint, the paper examines practices such as anarchist naturalism and ZADs as sites where friction, conflict, and situated struggle are sustained. By reclaiming friction as a philosophical and political resource, the paper proposes pathways for reactivating collective imagination beyond apocapitalist inevitability.

Speaker bio: Laura Benítez Valero is affiliated with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and works at the intersection of philosophy, political theory, and ecological thought.

L’apocalipsi com a condició d’un altre inici – The apocalypse as a condition for another beginning by Stefania Fantauzzi

This paper examines contemporary apocalyptic imaginaries as expressions of a structural crisis, drawing on Günther Anders’ concept of the “Promethean gap” to explain the disjunction between technological capacity and human imagination. It argues that apocalyptic narratives can produce political paralysis, yet also contain the potential for revelation. Building on Srećko Horvat’s interpretation of apocalypse as unveiling, the paper proposes that crisis can expose the contingency of existing systems and open possibilities for transformation. Drawing on Silvia Federici’s call to “reenchant the world,” it emphasizes practices of care, commons, and cooperation as material responses to systemic violence. The paper concludes that another beginning is possible if despair is transformed into responsibility and critique into collective action.

Speaker bio: Stefania Fantauzzi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research focuses on political and applied philosophy, with particular attention to contemporary critical theory and feminist thought.

WORKSHOPS

Counter-Prepping: Practising Life Beyond the Apocalypse

This workshop invites participants to revisit a childhood game under the weight of today’s manufactured apocalypses: crises narrated and monetised by states, corporations, and the ultra-rich, who rehearse the end of the world while accelerating its conditions.

What would you carry with you to the moon, or to the last island left standing?
You are invited to bring three objects, physically or at least in mind, that you would protect in case of:

the global war regime expanding;
the EU’s defence script becoming everyday instruction;
the nuclear dream resurfacing;
the bunkerisation of everyday life
or any other ending imposed, imagined, or feared.

No longer fringe, “prepping culture” now permeates policy, design, and media as both a driver and a product of authoritarianism: a masculine, colonial fantasy of self-sufficiency repackaged as common sense. Together, we will examine the affective, political, and material stakes of the “survival kit.” Through the objects you bring, we will trace how we are taught to navigate crisis. By engaging critically with these survivalist imaginaries, we will explore how crisis governance fractures solidarity and normalises the idea that apocalypse is inevitable—and that we must face it alone, reinforcing the privatisation of care and the abandonment of the many for the survival of the few.

The workshop is not about how to prep for the end, but how to refuse it—and how to practise life otherwise.

If you have any specific needs to participate, just let us know so we can support you. And don’t forget to bring the objects you would carry with you to the moon!

Workshop language: English

Facilitator

Maddalena Fragnito. Postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS), where she is developing a project on ultra-rich imaginaries of living in times of catastrophe, and teaches Arts in the Master’s programme in Gender Studies and Policies at Roma Tre University. Her work in cultural and visual studies focuses on the relationship between care and violence.

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What possibilities are overlooked in our current approach to modeling the climate of the future?

Data-driven climate models are often presented as democratizing tools, yet their implementation depends on advanced computational infrastructure. Moreover, they inherit significant biases particularly in the Global South, where sparse observations and underrepresented processes lead to gaps in model training and accuracy. Due to their focus on physical representation of the Earth system, they tend to overlook the social, political, and cultural dimensions that shape how such knowledge is produced, interpreted and applied. Narrative-driven scenario modeling or storyline approaches aim to bridge these domains to explore possible future trajectories. However, if they are not informed by local narratives, actual practices and embodiments of transformative change, they tend to reproduce dominant assumptions about progress, technology, and governance, narrowing policy choices and reinforcing existing power relations. For instance, the current Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which are widely used as narrative frameworks linked to future greenhouse gas emission scenarios, are all grounded in a continuous economic growth paradigm. As a result, they assume that in all possible futures humanity remains tied to economic growth, leaving little space to envision futures centered on wellbeing, sufficiency, and ecological balance.

Our workshop, departing from current initiatives stemming from the Post-Growth Modelling Community (PGMC) or the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), will invite participants to interrogate and expand the neglected possibilities of computation, modeling practices and the use of artificial intelligence for envisioning futures centered on planetary health. We will question whose data and perspectives are encoded in these systems and explore how equity-focused, participatory approaches could redefine what futures become imaginable.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Amirpasha Mozaffari. At the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Amirpasha Mozaffari specializes in applying artificial intelligence to weather and climate science. He designs and scales machine learning models to enhance Earth system prediction, prioritizing high-resolution forecasting and transparent methods to improve the reliability of climate information for society.

Eulàlia Baulenas Serra. Researcher in the Earth System Services Group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), where she investigates how climate knowledge can be co-produced and mobilised to support societal transformation. She holds a BA in political science and a PhD from the University of Freiburg on multi-level environmental governance and policy integration. In her current work, she explores how participatory methodologies, discourse approaches and knowledge networks shape the design and uptake of climate science.

Guillemette Legrand. Artist and researcher whose research-practice centres on developing modes of inquiry, documentation and intervention with the imaginaries of technological infrastructures. Through participatory and collective interventions – such as workshops, multimedia installations, guided tours in game environments and lecture performances – they rehearse other imaginaries of computation that can embody plurality, radicality and cooperability. Their current research focuses on climate modelling and imaging as cosmological practices through the figure of the cosmogram (the writing and drawing of worlds). Their work has been developed and presented in contexts such as ZKM (Karlsruhe, DE), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, NL), LUMA (Arles, FR), the V&A and Design Museum (London, UK) and ISEA (Paris, FR), among others. Guillemette is currently affiliated with the Critical Media Lab HGK-FHNW and EnsadLab (ENSAD-PSL) and is a recipient of a Swiss National Funds (SNF) grant for their PhD research.

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Pirate Radio: Listening at the End(s) of the World

This workshop explores pirate radio as a queer, collective method for imagining and building worlds in times of ecological, social, and political crisis. Drawing from my current research project, The Apocalypse is Always Now: Queer/Trans Sonic World-Building(s) through Pirate Radio, I will introduce examples developed with collaborators in London, Istanbul, and other locations. These projects investigate how sound, storytelling, and DIY radio infrastructures can become tools for survival, connection, and care when our worlds feel fragmented or unstable.

After a short presentation, the workshop will shift into participatory activities. Participants will be invited to share short stories, sonic memories, or simple scores that speak to endings, transitions, and renewals in their own lives or communities. Together, we will practise deep listening and experiment with accessible, low-tech recording methods. These small fragments may form the beginnings of a collective audio piece created during the session.

The workshop is process-based rather than outcome-driven. No prior experience in sound or radio is needed. My role is to guide the methodology, offer tools from my practice, and hold space for participants to explore their own perspectives. By listening together and creating in real time, we will consider how radio can be reimagined as a living, shifting infrastructure for community, resistance, and imaginative survival.

Participant notes and practical information: No prior experience in sound, radio, or storytelling is needed. All activities will use accessible, low tech methods, and participants are welcome to take part at their own pace. If you have a laptop, phone, or recording device, you are welcome to bring it, but this is not required. If you would like to share audio files, texts, or sonic fragments before or after the workshop, or if you do not have access to a device on the day, you can contact me directly at minemariani@gmail.com. This is entirely optional. Please feel free to reach out in advance with any questions, access needs, or concerns.

Note from the facilitator: This workshop will be informal, process-based, and centred around listening, memory, storytelling, and the possibility of translating experiences, images, or emotions into sound through a series of collective exercises and discussions.

Together, we will explore questions around sound, transmission, memory, and collective listening, while experimenting with different ways of approaching sonic storytelling and translation. The session may include short audiovisual materials, sound fragments, note-taking, discussion, and collaborative listening exercises.

Participants are very welcome (although not expected) to bring something small connected to sound — for example a recording, voice note, sonic fragment, piece of text, or simply an idea or memory they would like to reflect on during the workshop.

No prior experience in sound, radio, recording, or storytelling is needed, and there is no right or wrong way of participating. Participants are encouraged to engage in whatever way feels comfortable to them.

Workshop language: English

Facilitator

mine kaplangı (they/them). Independent researcher, curator and art mediator based in London, originally from Istanbul, Turkey. They are the co-founder of the curatorial collective Collective Çukurcuma (2015) and KUTULU (2021). They are currently developing an ongoing research project on a pirate radio of the Queer/Trans Imaginaries of the Apocalypse in art, curating the current programme of VSSL Studio, and participating in the ongoing research of the Carefuffle Working Group in London.

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Fear and desire: on apocalypse audiovisual imaginaries

Film history is rich in conceptualizations the environment, significantly including its destruction. In the past decades, we have become increasingly familiar with apocalyptic tales concerning thoughtless or unrestrained industrial, scientific and/or technological activities and their connection with unquestioned ways of relation with and exploitation of the environment. However, these narratives, mostly dystopian and often situated within or close to the speculative domain of science fiction, are unequivocally rooted in a wide range of representations and interrogations of worldviews that precede and overlap the history of film itself as well as the current growing sense of looming environmental catastrophe.

In this workshop, we will explore the visual grammar of the apocalypse, both from a historical perspective and with a will to experiment with different narrative approaches to the trope. Through the creation of spots of a up to 20 seconds, in small teams, with the help of cell phones, and drawing from elements available at the venue and its surroundings, we will tackle the apocalypse, either as annihilation, eye-opener or both, through the analysis and problematization of the interplay between issues such as (eco)anxiety, submissiveness, fear, denial, anger, grief, guilt, technofixes, survival, agency, exclusion, resistance, resilience, and/or even awe and desire, among other aspects, and their embedding in the current visual ecology. We will therefore delve creatively into the increasing need to understand the evolving syntaxes of audiovisual narratives about the planet, which is imperative considering the current steady increase of environmental issues and of image-based production and management of knowledge.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Michele Catanzaro. Professor in the Journalism and Communication Department at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), a researcher at the Institute for the History of Science (IHC-UAB), and a freelance science, health and environment journalist for outlets such as Nature, Science and El Periódico. He holds a PhD in Physics from the Technical University of Catalonia and has participated in European and national research projects on quality in science journalism (ENJOI and PerCientEx). He is co-author of the book Networks. A Very Short Introduction, the documentary Fast Track Injustice. The Óscar Sánchez Case, and several research papers. His journalistic work has received multiple awards, including the King of Spain International Journalism Prize and Science Writer of the Year. In 2023, he was Nature–Marsilius Invited Professor at the University of Heidelberg.

Carlos Tabernero. Associate Professor of History of Science and Director of the Institute for the History of Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He previously worked as a molecular biologist at the National Cancer Institute in the United States and as a researcher on communication and technology at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia. His work focuses on media and the processes of construction, circulation and management of natural history knowledge, especially in relation to cinema, television and literature. He has published extensively in these fields, including several books, and also has experience as a director and screenwriter of short films.

Edward (Ned) Somerville. PhD in History of Science and is Associate Professor of History of Science and Science Communication at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and of Technology Studies at Ramon Llull University. His research explores the intersections of science, technology and culture, particularly in relation to industrial heritage and the social construction of knowledge. His doctoral thesis, The Musealization of Barcelona’s Industrial Past (UAB, 2021), examined the transformation of the Vapor Vell de Sants—one of the city’s earliest steam-powered factories—into a monument of collective memory. His forthcoming book, Reclaiming the Industrial Past (Brill), expands this work to explore how neighbourhoods act as both products and producers of industrial modernity.

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Deriva entretejida

Proponemos un experimento: una deriva entretejida. En lugar de recorrer un espacio, tejemos juntas su posibilidad. Trasladamos la idea de la deriva —explorar un territorio para habitarlo— al acto de construir un telar colectivo.

El trabajo textil, históricamente un gesto de resistencia frente al silencio, se convierte aquí en nuestro modo de decir cuando las palabras se agotan y no somos capaces de hablar del presente. Tejer nos permite pensar y sentir con el cuerpo, compartir un ritmo común, habitar el presente desde lo táctil y lo colectivo.

>>> Queremos invocar un espacio exploratorio compartido,

una deriva efímera.

Un espacio para traer los mundos que habitamos

desde nuestros cuerpos

mundos que no están separados.

Tejiendo la conversación en algo que se construye

P R E S EN CIAL MENTE

a su ritmo

con las manos

sin expectativas <<<

·UN TELAR·

No va de hacer terapia. Es un espacio para tejer un sentimiento colectivo.

Mientras exploramos otras maneras de conversar.

Mientras nos enredamos. Mientras derivamos.

Workshop language: Spanish

Nota de las facilitadoras: ¡Hola! Estamos poniéndonos a punto para nuestro taller de Deriva Entretejida el próximo martes y queremos invitaros a traer materiales que puedan ser usados en el telar. Puede ser cualquier cosa que sea “enganchable”, desde un cordón, restos de tela, una carta/papeles… hasta pequeños objetos maleables (hojas, palitos, plásticos…incluso algo que os encontreis por el camino al taller). Pueden estar vinculadas a la temática de la conferencia o no. No es obligatorio, solo si os apetece y os inspirais. Con ilusión de encontrarnos y derivar juntas, Elena y María

Facilitators

Elena Galán del Castillo. Investigadora del BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change. Doctora en Historia Económica y Licenciada en Ciencias Ambientales. Investigadora postdoctoral en el Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). Hizo su tesis estudiando la transición de la agricultura y la ganadería durante el siglo XX en Catalunya. Ha trabajado en los impactos del cambio climático y su adaptación en la ganadería lechera, en el estudio de los aspectos económicos, sociales e institucionales de los sistemas pastorales vascos y en Historia Oral Ambiental. Desde hace 5 años compagina su trabajo académico con el trabajo como pastora en el Pirineo y más recientemente en Castilla y León, lo que le ha permitido desarrollar una visión profunda y compleja del sector ganadero.

María Heras. Doctora en Ciencias Ambientales (ICTA-UAB) y creadora escénica. Actualmente investigadora Ramon y Cajal en los Estudios de Artes y Humanidades y en el grupo de investigación TURBA (TRÀNSIC-UOC). Su investigación explora el papel de nuevas pedagogías y procesos de aprendizaje inter- y transdisciplinarios en las transiciones ecosociales. En particular, María investiga las posibilidades transformadoras de experiencias híbridas de integración de conocimientos y co-creación entre múltiples tipos de actores, en la interfase entre procesos colectivos de aprendizaje, prácticas artísticas e investigación participativa. Como creadora escénica, María tiene formación en mimo corporal dramático, teatro físico y teatro comunitario. Está especialmente interesada en la integración de diferentes lenguajes estéticos y expresivos en la imaginación y configuración de posibles futuros más justos y sostenibles

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Using Art and Storytelling to Reimagine Urban Nature Beyond Human Perspectives

This transdisciplinary workshop invites participants to reimagine urban nature beyond human-centered perspectives. Participants will be guided to interpret multispecies stories and ask: what should urban nature look like from a more-than-human point of view? As cities confront climate change, urbanisation, and biodiversity loss, the workshop creates a collective space for reflection, creativity, and cross-disciplinary dialogue. Participants will engage with artistic representations of species’ needs and desires, building awareness of the more-than-human species who share urban spaces and exploring how affective art-based encounters can deepen empathy and understanding. By working with these stories and visuals, participants will explore how art and storytelling can reveal hidden dimensions of ecological adaptation and inspire new urban imaginaries. The relational approach highlights the interconnectedness of humans and more-than-human species in shaping the future of urban nature. The session will be facilitated by an interdisciplinary team of adaptation and ecological researchers experienced in creative and transdisciplinary approaches. Drawing from climate adaptation science, ecology, and art-based research, the facilitators will guide participants through interpretive exercises that bring together scientific understanding and imaginative speculation. The resulting insights will inform ongoing inquiry into how art-based, transdisciplinary methods can support ecological awareness and cross-species empathy in urban transformation processes.

Participants are kindly asked to bring their own headphones.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Ana Burón-Ugarte. BC3 (Basque Centre for Climate Change). I’m a biologist doing her PhD on ecology, focusing on plant–insect interactions and how global change factors affect these ecological networks.

William Lewis. Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3); University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). William Lewis is a PhD candidate as part of the project IMAGINE Adaptation at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3). His research examines how cities imagine and implement climate adaptation, with a focus on governance, evaluation, and the role of creativity in shaping urban futures. He has facilitated workshops in Malmö and Bristol that brought together researchers, practitioners, and community stakeholders to envision adaptation strategies for heat stress. William holds an MSc in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation from Lund University and a BSc in Geography from the University of Exeter. Before joining BC3, he worked with UN-Habitat’s Climate Change and Urban Environment team and in the UK housing sector on green infrastructure access.

Alba Skidmore Lapuente. Research Assistant at BC3 within the BlueAdapt project, working in the Health and Climate research group within the Adaptation Lab research line. After completing her BSc in Biology at the University of Leeds (2022), she obtained her MSc in Environment and Development at Lancaster University (2024), achieving a distinction. For her Master’s thesis, in collaboration with the UKRI GCRF Living Deltas Research Hub, she researched the impacts of flooding and riverbank erosion on livelihood sustainability and sanitation in Bangladesh, applying a Feminist Political Ecology approach to explore gender disparities reinforced by climate change. She also worked at DEFRA (UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) during her Master’s degree. Her current research at BC3 focuses on examining health risks within a watershed area from a socio-ecological perspective, applying a One Health interdisciplinary approach.

Jenn Rose. PhD candidate at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (ES), investigating the diversity of wild bee species in the Basque Country. Since 2023, she has been a key member of the ERC-funded project GorBEEa, surveying pollinators in the Basque mountains to understand the mechanisms of ecosystem stability and biodiversity’s role in buffering environmental disturbances. Building on this, Jenn’s current research examines wild bee diversity across mountainous and urban landscapes in the region, employing morphological and molecular techniques to assess the conservation status of these potentially vulnerable populations.

Andrea Albert Fonseca. I’m a Research Assistant at BC3 working in the Health and Climate research group within the Adaptation Lab. My research explores the interconnected relationships between humans and nature in socioecological systems, focusing on how these dynamics influence the health and resilience of ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. Committed to producing actionable science, I use transdisciplinary approaches and participatory methods to co-produce knowledge with stakeholders, bridging gaps between research, policy and local practice. I currently support the BlueAdapt project, which investigates climate-related health risks in coastal and transitional waters, with emphasis on the Bay of Plentzia and the Butroe River in the Basque Country. I hold a BSc in Environmental Biology and an Erasmus Mundus MSc in Marine Environment and Resources.

Alicia Monreal Ortega. Multidisciplinary artist, researcher and designer based in Zaragoza. I studied Design at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and completed a master’s degree in design research at BAU in Barcelona, focusing on posthumanist and collaborative design. Throughout my studies, I also took anthropology courses, as I have always understood art and design to exist in relation to society.

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Bodies in Motion, Worlds in Transition

This workshop invites participants to inhabit and transform apocalyptic imaginaries through embodied and artistic practices, drawing from two complementary research projects in Barcelona: Cycling to Care (C2C) and Zona Temporal (Sandra Sotelo’s PhD on political ecology and performing arts).

We begin with a short framing on climate anxiety and apocalyptic imaginaries VS alternative, possible futures, asking: how do bodies register crisis? How do we embody narratives of change and uncertainty, and how somatic and performative practices can generate consciousness and knowledge on a range of alternatives that were otherwise – through rational thinking only – dismissed? And how can movement, performance, and intergenerational connection generate alternative narratives of futures, transitions, and changes? Participants will be guided through somatic and performative exercises by a professional dancer and an experienced facilitator. These embodied practices will open space for sensory mapping, improvisation, and reflection on lived eco-social transitions.

Using prompts from environmental psychology and autoethnography, participants will record emotions, metaphors, and gestures that articulate both collapse and renewal, uncertainty and trust, obedience and emancipation. Together we will co-create a visual/performative map of regenerative imaginaries, blending text, movement, and artistic documentation.

The workshop demonstrates how arts-based and nature-inspired interventions can be methodological innovations in sustainability research: weaving emotion and analysis, political ecology and performance, youth climate narratives and somatic practices. It is designed to host a representative group of agents engaged in political ecology from its multiple perspectives, including academic research, activisms, youth initiatives, artistic practice, critical thinking and interest requiring no prior experience.

By engaging the body as a site of knowledge, the workshop explores how performing arts and eco-psychology together can move us from paralyzing apocalyptic fear to active hope and collective courage.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Sandra Sotelo Reyes. I am Sandra Sotelo Reyes, a researcher, activist, and dancer, and I understand transdisciplinarity almost as a responsibility. I have studied music, dance, economics, humanitarian action, and feminisms in a system that fragments knowledge, and I have just started a PhD in feminist political ecology and performing arts. For twenty years, I have worked in different countries in East and Central Africa affected by violence as a direct consequence of colonialism and extractivism. I learned from other ecologies and worldviews while navigating all the contradictions. Recently, ecofeminist narratives and degrowth have shaped my vision and research, as well as my movement practice. My work currently orbits around the notions of urgency, ruins, safe future and radical needs.

Giulia Sonetti. MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at ISGlobal and former Beatriu de Pinós Fellow at UPC. She leads Cycling to Care (C2C), a project exploring how nature-based and intergenerational interventions can mitigate climate anxiety among young people and foster pro-environmental behaviour. Her expertise spans sustainability education, transformative learning, and arts-based interventions.

Dario Cottafava. Senior researcher and assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business (Business Department) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and a member of the Center for Studies and Research in Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CREIS). His work sits at the intersection of innovation, sustainability and the ecological transition. Trained in complex systems and innovation studies, he explores the complex dynamics at the meso level of ecosystems in transition. His research engages with participatory and speculative approaches to envision regenerative local ecosystems and bioregions. Alongside his academic work, he co-founded the environmental NGO greenTO in Turin and the startup BIOMA in Barcelona, which transforms coffee waste into regenerative biotextiles.

Alessia Gervasone. University of Barcelona (UB). Art, Globalization, Interculturality (AGI) research group, Visuality and Geo-aesthetics in the Era of the Ecosocial Crisis. Analytical Approaches (VIGEO) research project. Researcher, curator, and project manager completing a PhD in the department of Art History at the University of Barcelona. As a member of the AGI research group and the VIGEO project, her work examines the intersections between contemporary art, political ecology, communal care, epistemic justice, decolonial and post-extractivist imaginaries. Over the past five years, she has collaborated with Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture as curator of exhibitions, art residencies, and public programs, and as project manager of European projects (Creative Europe, Erasmus+), including E-ART, PAL Konnekt, WeSTEAM, Theatre in Palm, and PMP. Her last curatorial project, Cuerpos Errantes, Face to the Sea, Luzlíquida, and Rendering. The Institution in Transition, reflect her interest in situated ecologies, embodied research, and collaborative methodologies that foster new relational and transformative narratives.

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Kraftwerk, la música del poble i els límits del retrofuturisme utòpic

El taller pretén reflexionar sobre en quina mesura els imaginaris proposats pel grup de música electrònica Kraftwerk durant els anys 70 i 80 del segle XX, tot intentant fugir de l’hegemonia d’un pop anglosaxó considerat excessivament colonial, podrien ser d’utilitat per a superar l’anunciat apocalipsi ecològic / climàtic / energètic / econòmic-financer / polític de la policrisi actual. El taller combinarà de manera intercalada dos tipus d’activitats:

Per un costat, es farà un recull de materials de rebuig (a la deixalleria de la UAB) per tal d’explorar les seves potencialitats per a ser convertits en instruments musicals electroacústics. El taller, amb la col·laboració del col·lectiu Mutan Monkey, de Barcelona, durà a terme una sessió de construcció d’instruments i es farà un breu concert col·laboratiu.

Per un altre costat, al llarg de la sessió s’intercalaran mini-xerrades (10’) sobre diferents aspectes relatius a la música electrònica creada pel grup alemany Kraftwerk. En concret, es preveu contextualitzar l’obra musical (Pep Espluga: “La música del poble després del col·lapse”), es farà un recorregut sobre el do-it-yourself en la història de la música popular (F.J. Miguel Quesada: “43.000 anys fent música: Mesolític, Jugband Blues, Beach Boys, Punkies, Kraftwerk, Hip-hop i Bandcamp”), es parlarà de la hibridació de música electrònica amb altres tradicions musicals (Carlos Delclós: “Artefactes del futur: músiques viatgeres i màquines errants”) i es reflexionarà sobre els biaixos de gènere en la música electrònica (Sílvia Martínez: “Masters, controladors i altres metàfores amb cables”).

Tot plegat, s’oferiran estímuls diversos (discursius i pràctics) per acostar a qui participi a com una societat futura podria adoptar formes musicals i culturals més autogestionaries, capaces de superar els bloquejos i trampes de l’actual sistema socioeconòmic depredador i de les oligarquies tecnològiques.cations of sociological and musicological analysis, ii) the participatory production of electronic music with artisanal means, from a hardware-hacking and soft-circuits approach.

Workshop language: Catalan

Facilitators

Josep Espluga Trenc. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Department of Sociology & Institute of Government and Public Policies. Coordinator of the Minor in Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship, and co-director of the Postgraduate course on Local Agroecological Promotion (UAB). Research on social perception of technological risks, socio-environmental conflicts and eco-social transition processes.

Robert Martínez. Associació Sonora MUTAN LAB, a collective DIY/DIT between Mutan Monkey Instruments and the musical collective Ojala este mi Bici, established as a cultural hub of sound research, focused on electronics and electroacoustics to promote the exchange of knowledge and the creation of news forms to generate other ways of generating music.

Francesc J. Miguel Quesada (He/Him/His). Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Sociologia & GSADI. He has background studies on Law (UB), Sociology (UAB) and Computer Engineering (UNED). Founder and Executive Director of the “Laboratory for Socio-Historical Dynamics Simulation” (LSDS-UAB) and member of the Associated Unit “Research Group on AI And Law” at Instituto de Inteligencia Artificial del CSIC.

Carlos Delclós. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Department of Sociology & Institute of Government and Public Policies. He holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research draws on mixed-methods approaches to examine social stratification, urban sociology, political sociology and social policy.

Sílvia Martínez. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Department of Art and Musicology. She was one of the founders of the Spanish branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and served as General Secretary on their International Executive Committee. As an ethnomusicologist, she researches popular music and gender, exploring how to reimagine musical practices from critical cultural perspectives in the contemporary world.

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Cooking the apocalypse

We propose a cooking workshop on cooking the apocalypse. The workshop will aim to explore and taste people’s imaginations of the apocalypse with a situated approach. We will invite people to share, through food, what the end of the world might look like for them. What ingredients, food or dishes would they treasure, source, trade or cultivate in a state of apocalyptic crisis and regeneration?

Participants will be asked to bring one ingredient (in a quantity that would feed 4 people, approximately 700 grams, or less if it is a spice, herb etc.) that would allow them to survive their apocalypse. This must be an ingredient that can be consumed right away (either raw or precooked). During the workshop, participants will present their individual apocalypses and the ingredients that they chose. This will lead to a shared meal of one or more dishes (depending on the number of participants) that will be prepared by combining the participants’ chosen ingredients and a main ingredient provided by the workshop facilitators. The dishes that emerge will be tasted and discussed in ways that engage with the politics, complexities, and conflicts of contemporary and imaginary food practices.

This workshop aims to consider: How narratives around dominant food systems and alternative food practices are imbued with a sense of emergency, crisis and impending apocalypse? How does this play out on a personal level? How do participants situate themselves in multidimensional regeneration responses through food practices?

Workshop language: English, Spanish and Catalan.

Facilitators

Laura Cuch. Cultural geographer and visual artist engaging with sociocultural food issues, material practices, migration, as well as urban (religious) communities and identities. Her interests in food range from spaces of commensality, community and soup kitchens, alternative food systems, as well as (interfaith) relations and solidarity through food. Her work involves engagement and collaboration with individuals, communities and cultural institutions and uses more-than-representational approaches to knowledge practices to explore the affective and performative potential of visual and participatory methods. Laura is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she co-directs the Kitchen Research Unit. Previously, she investigated food and everyday religious practices of diverse faith communities in West London, through the participatory arts project ‘Spiritual Flavours’.

Michael Guggenheim. Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Michael Guggenheim is a sociologist and STS researcher focusing on the work of experts and their relationship to lay people in various fields such as disaster management, architecture and environmental research. He has pioneered the use of performative experiments to engage lay people in sociological concerns. His interest in food comes from a parallel lay career as a cook and various attempts to bring his sociology to amateur cooks. He has created a large number of events to collaborate in sociological cooking. For example, he has run a sociological cooking class at Akademie Schloss Solitude, he has created new forms of food emergency provision at Delphina Foundation, and most recently has created an exhibition called “Taste! Experiments for the Senses” at the Museum of Natural History, Berlin. Michael is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he co-directs the Kitchen Research Unit.

Marina Monsonís. Visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous
processes of social transformation rooted in territories, in collective, community and
pedagogical projects that relate marine sciences, place-based design, gastronomy,
graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She
works on projects that connect the kitchen with political, critical, social and
transgenerational aspects to create debates and transmit knowledge about the
complexities and conflicts that inhabit km 0. She has directed The Kitchen at The
Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) since it began in November
2018.

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After the End of the World: Space, Place and Sound

“It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” June Tyson chants, opening onto Sun Ra’s 1973 jazz piece, Space is the Place. June’s line proclaims a radical ideal: another, alternate world might not only be possible, but may already be here. After The End of The World will be a text and sound art based workshop to imagine, interrogate and sonically reveal what after the end of the world may feel like, embody and how we may encounter it. Taking from Afrofuturist philosophy that end of the world ideas are to be reimagined through sound and sonic possibilities, the workshop reflects the critical lens through which the TANC conference frames end of the world eschatologies. The workshop will introduce the sound work and texts of Black Afrofuturist artists who have, in various ways, creatively envisioned living at the end and edge of a lived apocalypse, namely slavery, colonialism and racial capitalism. Through this critical listening and reading of Afrofuturist text and music, workshop participants will be encouraged to think through the possibilities of starting anew, the ways we can collectively rebuild from the margins and how we are to locate and revive hope and warmth within the ashes. The final section of the workshop will involve a Deep Listening practice of communal sound making to centre the power of the sonic in collective flourishing. 

Workshop language: English

Facilitator

Natalie Hyacinth. Composer and academic creating and thinking about music at the intersections of technology, climate justice and Black life. Natalie’s creative practice and research are intersectional and interdisciplinary, inspired by diverse sonic fields such as free jazz, hip hop, dub and electronic music, while drawing upon conceptual themes from Afrofuturism, Philosophy and Cultural Geography, to Black Studies, Ethnomusicology and Aesthetics. Natalie’s works have been showcased at various festivals such as Ultima Oslo, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Grove and more. Experimenting with sounds and sonic technologies as a form of defiance and resistance, Natalie seeks to create new sound worlds as part of her activism, a creative practice she explores under the name The Black Astral.

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The School of Image: Rendered Erasure

An invisible thread connects projects like the much-publicized “cognitive city” NEOM in the Saudi desert to Trump’s dystopian Gaza Riviera – a vision of “peace” and prosperity imagined atop lands devastated by genocidal war. The same logic appears in Trump’s proposed Freedom Cities, special economic zones, and “smart” infrastructures, through which capital designs quasi-sovereign geographies, bypassing national law while experimenting with new forms of control, surveillance, and biotechnological engineering.

Whether framed as green transition, start-up utopia, or peace plan, these projects share a single blueprint: the architecture of the future as tech domination.
Promoted through AI-generated imagery, 3D gaming-style renderings rather than traditional architectural visualization and immersive storytelling, these images do more than illustrate : they shape perception, normalize narratives, and blur the boundaries between imagination and policy. What matters is not whether they materialize as concrete structures or polished mirrors, but the perceptual, geopolitical, and economic currents they unleash. Reality becomes irrelevant; the image takes precedence.

The Rendered Erasure workshop investigates the aesthetics and politics of these giga-projects. It will engage participants in dialogue around the methodological approaches of the artist collective: from aesthetic decisions and content selection to research strategies and fieldwork practices.

The goal is to incorporate participants’ insights and critiques into the evolving project, enriching it through multiple interdisciplinary perspectives.

Workshop language: English

Facilitators

Noura Tafeche. Visual artist, onomaturge, and independent researcher whose practice moves across archival methods, laboratory-based processes, video, installation, neologisms and drawing. She graduated in New Media Art from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, with a particular focus on net.art, however, her most formative experience has been The Influencers Festival, Barcelona. Her research explores visual culture and its techno-political entanglements, with particular attention to digital militarism, online aesthetics, internet hyper-niches, and non-Anglophone meme cultures. She also examines the use of synthetic images in institutional neo-propaganda strategies. She has exhibited, lectured, and led laboratories at Aksioma (Ljubljana), Medialab Matadero (Madrid), transmediale (Berlin), Disruption Network Lab (Berlin), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Winterthur), Impakt (Utrecht), Foto Colectania (Barcelona), Design Museum (Helsinki), Tainan Art Museum (Tainan), Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong), TheWrong Biennale (internet), Aarhus Kunsthal (Aarhus), Triennale Milano (Milano), Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milano), Almanac Inn (Turin), Mattatoio (Roma), Dutch Art Institute (Arnhem), Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), and the European Union Representative Centre (Al Quds, Palestine).

Noura Tafeche’s research project is granted by the Italian Council program (14th edition, 2025) and promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

RESEARCH PROJECT GRANTED BY

Donatella Della Ratta Donatella. Writer, performer, and curator specializing in networked media, with a focus on the Arab world. She is a former Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, currently teaching Media Studies at John Cabot University, Rome. From 2007 to 2013, she served as Arab world community manager for the international organization Creative Commons. Her research on generative AI earned her the Italian Ministry of Culture ‘Italian Council’ award 2024-25. She is developing her concept of ‘speculative violence’ across multiple  formats, ranging from a book to the lecture performance Ask Me for Those Unborn Promises That May Seem Unlikely to Happen in the Natural developed in collaboration with The Void collective.

OTHER EXPERIMENTAL FORMATS

What do we regenerate through regenerative practices? A conceptual approach through audiovisual (un)mappings

This session presents a curated selection of short audiovisual works that portray how individuals, collectives, and institutions inhabit the tensions between systemic decline and processes of regeneration. By bringing these situated practices into dialogue, the session proposes an experimental exercise in conceptualization: a collective, real‑time triangulation between the voices of the creators, the audiovisual artefacts, and an evolving cartography that situates the practices within their broader social and political contexts.

Through this multi‑layered lens, participants will be invited to examine whether shared elements, patterns, or criteria emerge that might clarify what constitutes a regenerative practice, while also creating space to question and problematize the concept itself, grounding the discussion in the specific conditions of an end‑of‑an‑era moment. The screening will conclude with an open conversation with the creators to surface convergences, divergences, and the productive ambiguities that accompany any attempt to define regeneration.

Session curator

Rodrigo Canales Contreras. Artist, playwright, performer, and researcher. His work examines performance in social spaces, documentary theatre, political art, and creative methodologies developed in contexts of social and political crisis. With over two decades of experience in theatre practice and academic research in Chile and Spain, he develops transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to creation and analysis. His practice is oriented toward politically engaged forms of artistic expression that address the complexities of contemporary life and critically interrogate dominant patriarchal and neoliberalism frameworks. As a researcher, he focuses on building connections between artists, academic institutions, and professionals from diverse disciplines, fostering collaborative processes that intervene in and contribute to the active dynamics of social space.

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Sounding-voicing with trash + more-than-human allies

In this interactive walk, we move in urban spaces inhabited by discarded bodies and quiet, persistent plant and more-than-human allies. We attune to the subtle forces that gather around us: trash, weeds, birds, fallen leaves, roots pushing through asphalt, each carrying stories of survival, refusal, and ongoingness. We seek to make our bodies permeable and porous through letting in the vibrations of the spaces we move through, and that move with(in) us. We seek to leak out onto the pavement, to make kin with bodies enacted as trash and with more-than-human beings performing quiet acts of resilience, present in the cracks, edges, and margins. We seek to attune to their subtleties and sounds and enter into curious collaborations. As we move, we change. As we move, we re-assemble ourselves as/in communities with the discarded and disregarded.

Artist-facilitators

Linda Lapiņa (she/they/it). Knowledge worker, mover and psychologist. I am committed to expanding and multiplying our ways of imagining-enacting nourishing, life-bringing knowledge practices and relations within and beyond academia. I work as associate professor at Roskilde University in Denmark, where my research focuses on urban nature-cultures, multispecies worldings and eco-artistic methodologies. My work is inspired by my Baltic ancestry, learning to listen to plants and soils, waters and forests; and my ongoing movement practice with the multispecies ecologies of Utterslev mose, a polluted and protected urban marshland in Copenhagen.

Rae Teitelbaum (they/them). Visual artist and postgraduate researcher from Syracuse, New York based in Barcelona, working with film, video, performance, installation, poetry, and textiles. Rae is currently an artist in residence at La Escocesa in Barcelona, Spain and is also currently attending Goldsmiths, University of London, where they are finishing an MPhil/PhD in Visual Anthropology remotely. Rae’s PhD is titled Queer Worlding: Exploring Practices of Co-Creation in Queer and Trans Eco-Communities in Rural Spain and Portugal and involves a written dissertation and the production of a feature-length film, called Starry Earth Bodies, hand-made costumes, and performances, which they developed at Can Serrat, an artist residency in Montserrat National Park in Catalunya. Their research applies embodied, visual, and collaborative qualitative methods rooted in queer, intersectional feminist, and decolonial ethics to understand and participate in practices of queer worlding and the development of experimental ways of living in relation to other humans and more-than-human worlds in the Iberian Peninsula.

Agnieszka Bułacik (she/they). Artist, activist, space holder, and facilitator whose transdisciplinary practice interweaves artistic research, performance, and community-based collaboration. Her work centers on sensing, feeling, and deepening connections—to oneself, to others, and to the wider metabolism of planet Earth. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts & Education at the University of Barcelona, where her research investigates collective somatic artistic practices of reconnection co-created with artists and activists from Eastern Europe. Her doctoral work examines how embodied practices of collectivity contribute to processes of repair, resilience, and social transformation. As co-founder of new visions, an arts & education collective, she weaves networks of women and queer artists and activists from Eastern Europe, grounding her practice in queer-feminist and decolonial perspectives.

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T.R.A.S.H. Transdisciplinary Research for the Anthropocene: Sense-Making as Humanizing Practice

T.R.A.S.H. invites participants to examine what is rendered disposable within research practice. What forms of knowledge are discarded, ignored, or treated as residue? What parts of ourselves do we suppress in order to appear rigorous, neutral, efficient, or legible? What do we dispose of in others when we classify, extract, simplify, or instrumentalize?

Drawing on Paulo Freire’s concept of humanization, T.R.A.S.H. asks how research practices are shaped by processes of exclusion that separate valued from devalued knowledge and credible subjects from disposable and objectified ones. In doing so, it turns attention to the materialities through which research is constituted: bodies, emotions, gestures, spaces, objects, silences, hierarchies, and remains.

Using techniques from Theatre of the Oppressed, participants will collectively explore disposability within the material and symbolic dimensions of research practice. Through embodied exercises, T.R.A.S.H. will function as a mirror: a space in which to encounter the residues, absences, contradictions, and disavowed dimensions of academic life. Through this process, the workshop asks what discarded elements may reveal about the conditions under which knowledge is produced, how they shape processes of sense-making and purpose, and how they participate in the aesthetic boundaries through which research comes to be recognised as good, valuable, or legitimate. T.R.A.S.H. opens space to engage the margins, the mess, and the emotion within research practice as sites of knowledge, beauty, and rehumanization.

Facilitator

Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization (CRCG) of the University of Groningen. BA in Economics. PhD in Communications. Currently explores how ontological and epistemological diversity inform environmental education and policymaking. Specializing in transdisciplinary research, she brings extensive experience working at the intersection of research, advocacy, and intercultural dialogue, engaging with grassroots movements, international NGOs, and intercultural networks in both academic and applied contexts. More info at https://sites.google.com/site/anafernandezaballi/home

THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES

The Ignorant Master

SINOPSIS | With The Ignorant Master, gruppe tag continues its interactive performance series on the role of artificial intelligence in everyday life. Here, ChatGPT takes center stage as an assistant for sustainable practices while simultaneously demanding more and more resources to keep itself alive. Step into the apparatus and join us as we explore how a technological system attempts to solve a problem that it also helps to accelerate.

MAKING OF | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u64bSPX_rxU&t=5s

GROUP BIO | gruppe tag is a German theatre and performance collective that has been creating participatory work on and beyond the stage since 2008. In recent years, our focus has been on digital experimentation, especially with AI models, chat interfaces and social media broadcasting. We use these technologies to question the role of acting, magnify the everyday and open hybrid situations where humans and machines perform together. The members of the collective develop all productions collaboratively, testing experimental methods that combine aesthetic, technological and performative innovation. www.gruppe-tag.de

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Il bianco e la ferita (The White and the Wound)

SINOPSIS | In a rootless neighborhood, where a factory bleaches both paper and consciences, only the children can see what adults no longer notice: the last tree in danger, the loss of meaning, the erasure of otherness. Their protest is art, dream, disguise.”The White and the Wound” is a civil and tactile fable, built with paper, drawings, masks, and live video-drawings. A visionary journey into the white that inhabits us. And one question: how can we free ourselves from the white that has seeped so deeply inside us we no longer even notice it?

MAKING OF | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoZGPUwaz8M

GROUP BIO | Cantieri Meticci APS is a Social Promotion Association that began as a theatre company bringing together artists from over 20 different countries, united by a strong artistic passion and a political commitment to artistic action. Today, the company is made up of an extremely diverse group of people, reflecting the heterogeneity of the local community in which it is based. Set designers, educators, IT specialists, illustrators, teachers, migrants, young artists, activist citizens, students, and university researchers work together to create artistic and cultural imaginaries in public and peripheral spaces. Their aim is to value their individual differences and artistically interpret the changes brought about by ongoing migratory flows. https://www.cantierimeticci.it/

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What kind of world are we leaving to our dogs?

SINOPSIS | Amid the rise of hostile urban policies and so-called “migration crises” marked by mass deportations, What Kind of World Are We Leaving Our Dogs? explores the technological, industrial, and media-driven evolution of how we exist, consume, and relate to one another. Factors beyond our control – such as origin, language, gender, or economic status – shape our supposed “independence” and “freedom” in an increasingly globalised world. According to the “human value” assigned to us, we become objects of desire or rejection, always products open to exploitation. This moral decay leads to the dehumanisation of human beings, reduced to mere pets of power – a position still privileged compared to those who have nothing left to lose. Interweaving Forum Theatre and physical theatre, the piece invites audiences to collectively imagine and experience other possible futures.

MAKING OF | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn2QLW_FMx4

GROUP BIO | La Xixa Lab is the theatre company of La Xixa and a space for social and theatrical experimentation. Bringing together professionals from theatre, music, and the performing arts, it develops innovative stage proposals that invite critical debate and collective reflection. Rooted in social-oriented theatre, La Xixa Lab works through collaborative and participatory methodologies while engaging themes such as diversity, interculturality, feminism, intersectionality, climate change, and social justice. Its work seeks to reimagine theatre as a space for research, experimentation, and transformation, opening new ways of connecting with audiences and responding to the challenges of the present. www.laxixateatre.org

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Naivety. Light at the Ends of the World (urban soundwalk and sound performance)

SINOPSIS | “Naivety. Light at the Ends of the World” is an immersive sound experience realised as a soundwalk in urban space followed by a headphone-based performance. The project is based on the practice of deep listening — attentive listening to the city, to music and to one’s own presence. Polyphonic singing merges with improvised soundscapes and subtle synthetic sounds. Everyday urban noises blend with the composition, and participants experience their surroundings through the prism of the music and sound they hear. Collective listening creates a temporary community of perception: although the experience takes place individually through headphones, it remains shared and relational. The project offers a calm, empathetic mode of being in a changing world and a practice of attentiveness in which sound becomes a medium of encounter.

MAKING OF | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhjMC8Qj6oc

GROUP BIO | VoiceLAB is a vocal research and training programme within the Grotowski Institute. Inspired by the tradition of theatre laboratories, including Grotowski’s own Laboratory Theatre, it focuses on in-depth exploration of the voice through polyphony, embodied practice, and intensive vocal work, helping performers develop greater awareness, control, and expressive range. https://grotowski-institute.pl/projekty/voicelab/