Conference Program

The ecological crisis is increasingly recognized as one of the defining conditions of contemporary life. Climate change and ecosystem degradation—documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2023)—are not only environmental challenges but social and cultural phenomena that exacerbate global inequalities and question the epistemological foundations of modern societies. At the same time, the crisis is reshaping subjective experience: research highlights climate-related emotional responses such as eco-anxiety and eco-guilt (Agoston et al., 2022), pointing to a growing awareness of the vulnerability and interdependence that bind human and non-human life. These developments challenge education to rethink its role in a world where ecological instability and socio-environmental injustice are intertwined.
This paper argues that many educational responses to the ecological crisis remain constrained by implicit humanist assumptions that position the human subject as the central reference point of educational thought and practice. While such perspectives have historically contributed to emancipatory projects, they risk reproducing anthropocentric frameworks that obscure the relational entanglements through which life on Earth is constituted. The ecological crisis therefore calls for a deeper pedagogical reorientation capable of decentring the human and rethinking education within more-than-human worlds. To address this challenge, the paper develops a theoretical dialogue between posthumanist and relational approaches to education. A first pillar of this framework is the concept of agential realism elaborated by Karen Barad (2007), which conceptualizes reality as constituted through processes of intra-action among human and non-human entities. From this perspective, matter and meaning are inseparable, and educational practices can be understood as material-discursive processes that participate in shaping the worlds we inhabit. Learning environments, bodies, technologies, and ecological systems thus become co-constitutive elements of educational processes. This relational perspective is further developed through the notion of the pluriverse proposed by Arturo Escobar (2018). The pluriversal horizon emphasizes the coexistence of multiple forms of world-making grounded in radical interdependence and challenges the universalizing logic of modernity. Thinking education from the pluriverse opens the possibility of engaging with diverse ecological knowledges and situated practices that foreground reciprocity, relationality, and care in organizing human and more-than-human life. The pedagogical implications of these perspectives are explored in dialogue with the idea of world-centred education developed by Gert Biesta (2021), which conceives education as a space where subjects encounter the world and are called into responsible relation with what exceeds their own interests. Within this framework, education becomes an ethical and political practice oriented toward responsibility for a fragile world. Building on these insights, the paper proposes multispecies democracy as a pedagogical horizon for rethinking education in more-than-human worlds. Rather than referring only to institutional arrangements, multispecies democracy is approached as a cultural and educational project aimed at expanding the boundaries of political imagination and ethical concern beyond the human. By foregrounding relationality, vulnerability, and interdependence, this perspective invites educators to reconfigure pedagogical practices that acknowledge the entangled destinies of human and non-human communities, opening pathways for addressing the ecological crisis while confronting the social inequalities shaping life in the Anthropocene