JavaScript is Disabled
Your browser's JavaScript functionality is disabled. It has to be enabled to use this function of ConfTool.
Here you can find information on how to enable JavaScript
If you have any problems, please contact the organisers at drs2026@thedrs.org.

Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Only Sessions at Location/Venue

Daily Overview

Session

PAPERS: Design Philosophy: Amplifying the Unheard (Session 2)
Location: Appleton Tower, LT4
Zoom link
accessibility: https://www.accessable.co.uk/the-university-of-edinburgh/central-area/access-guides/appleton-lecture-theatre-4-edinburgh
Session Chair: Fernando Del Caro Secomandi, Delft University of Technology
Session Chair: Daniel Portugal, State University of Rio de Janeiro

Presentation 4

Towards Positional Citizenship: designing for the More-than-Human Political

Vanessa Monna¹, Abhigyan Singh^1,2, Natalia Romero Herrera¹

1: TU Delft, IDE Faculty, Human Centred Design Department, Netherlands, The; 2: Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions

“We have never been modern” wrote Bruno Latour, proposing that the dualism between nature and society has represented a convenient fiction. If humans have never genuinely stood apart, what happens to one of its most anthropocentric fabrications, citizenship? Conventionally a marker of political agency, citizenship determines who can speak, act, and belong. This conceptualisation excludes the multiple more-than-human agents shaping collective experiences. Building upon Plessner’s concept of positionality, the paper introduces “Positional Citizenship” to transcend the Cartesian divide between humans and more-than-humans, reshaping the political as a relational space of co-presence. Building on this shift, design becomes a practice of relational reconfiguration, making these distributed agencies visible and actionable. This paper outlines mechanisms facilitating this transformation: unlearning Western ontologies of mastery; integrating indigenous epistemologies of interdependence; recognising non-human entities as agents; cultivating material ethics and care; translating institutional and infrastructural assemblages; and working within interstitial ecologies where hybrid forms emerge.

View Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2605