Conference Program

Without yielding to the temptation to frame posthumanism merely as a pacified cosmology of relational co-belonging, this contribution seeks to demonstrate how the interconnections between the human and the non-human, when captured and governed through logics of frontierization, may turn into architectures of domination, and how the theatre laboratory, in conjunction with ecopedagogical thought, can become a tool of resistance. Becoming Black of the world, brutalism, nanoracism and necropolitics reveal how modernity has produced a durable cartography of the less-than-human. In the age of the world’s combustion, of the exit from the climatic niche, of the triumph of computational reason and of lives deemed minuscule, Mbembe asserts the urgency – given the shift from the human condition to the terrestrial condition – of a new nomos of the Earth and a new planetary consciousness, one that goes beyond the rights of the people, historically intertwined with conquest and appropriation, and opens instead to the rights of the living and to “an integral community that embraces all living beings” (2024, p. 177). To the biotope state, which is ecofascist by definition, immune and closed, Mbembe contrasts the earthly community. By dismantling the founding assumption of the modern order (“In the beginning was the fence” as he states following Schmitt), Mbembe opens up the possibility of thinking democracy as a practice of cohabitation of the common. Proceeding from this, the research will seek to integrate Mbembe’s perspective with the pedagogical practice of the eco-theatre laboratory, seen as capable of resisting the museification of experience and, at the same time, of opening spaces for sensitive cohabitation with the more-than-human. Reframed through an ecological lens, the theatre laboratory – a phenomenological network of co-participation and co-creation – emerges as a form of applied theatre, i.e. a fabric of performative practices outside the mainstream, based on the ensemble and inhabiting the margins, which fosters immediate reflection on the present through shared experiences and knowledge. In this sense, through the analytic-reflective and creative-imaginative framing of environmental realities, as well as by interrogating material ecologies within collective performative geographies, the eco-theatre laboratory becomes a space for the pedagogical cultivation of a transpersonal consciousness. Moving beyond anthropocentric dichotomies and understanding transformation as a concrete possibility, this consciousness is a perceiving embodied awareness that learns and acts within relationships, that displaces itself and opens to the other within expanded ecosystems, creating better versions of the world that overturn existing structures of domination. At the intersection of animal, cultural, post-human, and performance studies, the eco-theatre laboratory practice, by fostering learning with rather than from, charts paths that reveal the epistemological limits of Western knowledge and cultures, captured in their complicity with neoliberal policies, and simultaneously promotes the exploration of alternative heuristic approaches by engaging with indigenous sciences that centres living as an interconnectedness among beings. It also encourages the participation of a fully integrated, active audience and the creation of networks and communities of spirit within utopian spaces of a just coexistence with the planet.

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).

The ecological paradigm proposes an open conception of human subjectivity in which the boundaries separating us from alterity, whether human, animal, plant, or artificial, become thresholds of mutual exchange that enable practices of conjugation. In order to understand the trajectories of subjectivation, it is essential to question the ways in which exchange with the other-than-self occur, problematizing the concept of the threshold as a nodal point of heterogeneous and highly complex dynamics.
Taking Gert Biesta's pedagogy of interruption and sociomaterial theories in education as a reference point, this contribution aims to reflect on the processes that characterize the threshold space, reinterpreting them in terms of a constant alternation between interruption and interconnection and focusing on how the interplay between these two movements shapes the becoming of subjects. From this perspective, it becomes crucial for pedagogy to consider how such interaction might be configured to promote the democratization of educational processes and individual learning paths. Reinterpreting the concept of threshold in the light of Biesta's thinking, it can be understood as an event in which an interruption occurs, meaning a discontinuity that calls on the individual to respond, allowing subjectivity to come into being. The exchange at stake is between humans, as the ‘other’ to whom one must respond is human.
Sociomaterial theories allow us to reinterpret Biesta's concept of interruption within the broader construct of networks. The network, as contextual and situated, may also be considered an event in which not only humans but also non-humans actively participate, both as internal referents, i.e., co-actors in the dynamics of exchange, and as external referents, i.e., bearers of interests with respect to the dynamics activated. From this perspective, thresholds can be identified as those (potentially infinite) nodes within the network where different forms of alterity interact, undergoing processes of interruption — understood as an encounter with what is other-than-self — interconnection, and transformation. In this sense, interruption and interconnection are co-implicated, since the condition of possibility for the latter is to go through the encounter with alterity.
A further point of convergence between Biesta’s perspective and sociomaterial approaches concerns the unpredictability of interaction. The configuration that interruption assumes, as well as the quality of the interconnections activated, cannot be defined a priori but are expressed on a contextual basis, also giving space to creative and unexpected forms of existence.
Starting from here, this contribution aims to question these dynamics, explore how they occur in widespread education and intentionally designed educational processes, paying attention to the articulation and quality of the connections activated. Such an exploration might helpo to critically interpret the educational events taking place in order to understand how to redesign them to promote democratic education.
In this sense, recognizing both humans and non-human entities as active referents – both internal and external to the educational process – giving rhythm to interruptions in order to activate new connections, leaving space for emerging subjectivities without imposing predetermined trajectories, may represent promising pedagogical moves to promote subjectivation, shared responsibility, and the emergence of democratic thinking.

This contribution argues that a critical transfeminist posthuman approach is essential for educational theory and practice if ecological paradigms are to be adopted in ways that are genuinely democratic and socially transformative. While current educational discourses increasingly invoke inclusion, sustainability, and justice, these concepts often remain rhetorically affirmed while the hierarchical structures that sustain exclusion and domination are left intact.

Building on critical posthuman and transfeminist perspectives, the contribution aims to problematize the humanist-anthropocentric model that has historically universalized a partial figure of the “human” (white, Western, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, bourgeois) while relegating other human and non-human entities to subordinate or less-than-human positions. From this perspective, education cannot be understood only as a human-centered process of formation; rather, it must be rethought as a sociomaterial, relational, and ecological field shaped by power, bodies, technologies, spaces, and more-than-human entanglements.

The central claim is that deconstructing hierarchies – between human and non-human, center and margin, expert and learner, normalized and marginalized subjectivities – is a necessary condition for an ecological educational paradigm. However, posthuman and neomaterialist turns in education are not sufficient on their own if they do not explicitly address the power relations, oppressions, and asymmetries (gendered, racialized, classed, ableist, speciesist, colonial) that organize educational institutions and practices. For this reason, a critical transfeminist orientation is crucial: it foregrounds positionality, situated knowledges, and epistemic justice, while exposing the myth of neutrality in educational research and practice.

The presentation therefore proposes an intersectional lens, in which social and environmental justice are inseparable. A critical transfeminist posthuman pedagogy makes it possible to rethink educational relationships beyond a paternalistic view of inclusion and beyond an anthropocentric perspective on sustainability, moving toward non-oppressive, interdependent, and mutualistic forms of coexistence. In this sense, an ecological-posthuman-transfeminist turn in education is not only a matter of environmental content or policy adaptation, but of epistemological, ethical, and political transformation that starts from the materiality of everyday relationships within educational settings.

By connecting posthuman critique, transfeminist epistemologies, and intersectional justice, the contribution offers a framework for reimagining education as a practice of shared vulnerability, distributed agency, and more-than-human responsibility.

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.

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

This presentation explores how pedagogical research practices that attend to the more-than-human can generate pedagogical experiences capable of destabilizing dominant and normative epistemologies, activating pedagogical worlds that make possible alternative and less anthropocentric relations.

Drawing on experiences developed through pedagogical and interdisciplinary projects, the presentation outlines an emergent research praxis that moves across social pedagogy, community knowledges, children’s ecological imaginaries, and artistic experimentation, explicitly refusing the anthropocentric assumptions that often underpin contemporary educational research.

Inspired by the decolonial thought of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the presentation begins from the understanding that knowledge is always situated, tense, and in motion: a ch’ixi space in which heterogeneous worlds can coexist without being reduced to a forced synthesis. From this perspective, knowledge is not a stable object to be extracted or translated, but an ongoing relational process that resists capture by colonial, developmentalist, or extractivist frameworks. Pedagogical research is thus conceived as a living ecology of relations, within which human, more-than-human, material, and historical forces come together to shape what can be perceived, known, and made meaningful.

The reflection is grounded in post-qualitative and posthuman research, understood not as a theoretical-methodological trend but as a creative departure from representational traditions that privilege language and the human subject as primary sites of meaning. This shift makes it possible to attend to the affective, material, and relational dimensions that traverse pedagogical experience, recognizing the active role of territories, bodies, elements, and more-than-human forms of life in processes of learning.

Through selected examples of project-based processes, the presentation argues that pedagogical practices oriented by a posthumanist perspective are essential for imagining pedagogical futures capable of honoring and responding to the complexity of the times we collectively inhabit. Such futures are not designed in advance, but cultivated through practices that nurture a relational responsibility toward the earth and more-than-human life.