Conference Program

According to Edgar Morin (2015), the crisis of education depends on the broader crises of civilisation, society and democracy that we are experiencing, and in turn contributes to them. The entanglement of social, political and cultural events, articulated across interconnected local and global nodes, together with coexistence within a hybrid network – composed of humans, non-humans, artefacts, discourses and heterogeneous languages and sustained by rapid and unpredictable technoscientific developments – unfolds against a backdrop of epochal climate change, global conflicts and new forms of deprivation. In what terms can we speak today of the democratisation of educational processes? Within this framework, the contribution explores the constraints and possibilities of technological devices in educational settings. It emphasises the epistemological assumptions that underlie not only their use but, above all, their narration, and argues for the inseparability of technological, pedagogical and ecological reflection.

Bruno Latour (2008) states that those who think that in the future we will be more connected to others and will have to interact with an increasing number of ever more hybrid beings are not modern. He recalls that, in the Western tradition, becoming modern meant conforming to a world unified by science, technology and economics, under the assumption of limitless progress and an extractive stance towards planetary resources. By contrast, humanity today faces the challenges of complexity (Bocchi, Ceruti, 2025), which demand a vision of reality that is no longer simplistic or homogenising but capable of holding together multiple levels of description, mindful of the vital interdependencies that bind the world’s inhabitants – human and non-human alike – and open to the idea that their histories are increasingly entangled with those of other entities in co-evolutionary relations.

If sites of education are continually redefined through the unique and material encounter of biographies and ideas, technologies – by becoming embedded in these intersections – contribute to the transformation of cognitive experience through circular and recursive relations, generating mixed social ecologies (Damiano, 2020). Embodying particular visions and epistemologies, technological devices can foster scientific, ethical and social inquiry into the human condition. Democratic education must be cultivated by attending to the meanings that emerge within these unprecedented ecosystems, where the idea of accumulating knowledge in order to govern reality may lead to the use of new devices according to the same instrumental logics. A shift towards ecological thinking for a sustainable and equitable future becomes possible when technological presences are interpreted as opportunities to revisit underlying premises and as elements that move beyond immobilising and alienating forms of instruction, enabling participation, activation and engagement.