Conference Program

The current eco-climatic crisis, made evident by the “intrusion of Gaia” (Stengers, 2013) into public debate, calls for a profound revision of the paradigms through which humanity interprets its position in the world. In this context, the category of “hyperobjects” (Morton, 2013) offers a particularly significant interpretative key for understanding phenomena such as global warming, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification. These phenomena cannot be understood simply as natural “catastrophes”; rather, they appear as entities distributed across spatial and temporal scales that radically exceed human experience. They are ubiquitous, viscous, and nonlocal, manifesting themselves only through perceptual and cognitive fragments. This condition produces a profound epistemological and ontological disorientation, since it dissolves the illusion of a clear separation between the human and the non-human and compels us to recognize that humanity lives “within” planetary processes that exceed its capacity for control and representation (Id, 2018). In such a scenario, education is confronted with a decisive challenge: to rethink its fundamental categories and to overcome a long anthropocentric tradition that has conceived education as a process of emancipation from the natural or animal dimension. Yet attempts to decentre the human may generate new aporias. On the one hand, reductive forms of naturalism risk dissolving the specificity of the human within an impersonal natural order; on the other, processes of anthropomorphization project typically human characteristics onto natural entities (Chiurazzi, 2021). The question thus becomes how to rethink the relationship between the human and the non-human in ways that acknowledge both interdependence and difference. In this direction recent pedagogical reflections (Oliverio, 2024) have proposed extending the notion of world-centred education (Biesta, 2021) to encompass the complex web of relations that includes other “companion species” (Haraway, 2016). From this perspective, a dialogue with theoretical fields such as biosemiotics (Hoffmeyer, 2008) and ecosemiotics (Maran, 2020) may prove particularly fruitful. The idea that processes of signification traverse the entirety of living systems suggest the possibility of fostering experiences capable of making perceptible the web of connections that constitutes the living world (Galimberti, 2024; Luini et al., 2025). In this way, the encounter with hyperobjects does not merely produce anxiety or paralysis; rather, it becomes an opportunity to develop new forms of ecological sensitivity and to initiate a process of re-composing a shared common world.