Conference Program

In the current Anthropocene scenario (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), the ontology of being is reconfigured as a relational and rhizomatic event (Marchesini, 2018), in which subjectivity emerges as a dynamic process of hybridization with animal and technological alterity, understood as essential co-evolutionary partners. Consistent with the systemic approach (Bateson, 1972), intelligence is decoupled from anthropocentric exclusivity and investigated as an emergent and distributed property within cognitive assemblages (Hayles, 2017), where reflective activity arises from the symbiotic interaction among biological dimensions, technological circuits, and environmental contexts. Against this theoretical background, this contribution presents the findings of a pedagogical research project conducted in a university setting. The study aims to deconstruct human exceptionalism through a critical revision of the educational categories inherited from the humanist tradition (Braidotti, 2013), adopting ecodidactics as a paradigm of situated inquiry (Strongoli, 2021). The research analyzes educational materiality (Barone, 1997) not as a mere background, but as an actor endowed with symmetrical agency (Callon & Latour, 1992), capable of acting upon subjects and shaping their experience. Through the concept of the “educating space,” the classroom setting is considered a complex dispositif (Massa, 1992) and is analyzed through Ray Bradbury’s short story The Veldt (1950). The story is adopted as a heuristic tool to explore procedural latencies (Massa, 1992). Bradbury’s “nursery” is understood as a dimension of built pedagogy (Monahan, 2002) that educates independently of the subjects’ will, revealing how technology operates a transformation of subjectivity toward a “becoming-machine” (Ferrante, 2025). The research seeks to document the students’ perceptual “species leap” toward a post-personal and pre-individual subjectivity (Marchesini, 2018) through the production of rhizomatic mappings. These graphic artifacts function as devices that reveal what appears dormant within the material structures of the school, transforming the classroom into a relational learning environment (Strongoli, 2023).