Conference Program

Education has always straddled two relatively stable foundational narratives or ethical orientations. While these ethical orientations can be described in a number of ways, together they have to do with the agonistic opposition between the reproduction of knowledge and societal interests of a dominant culture/power versus the freedom to experiment and transform societies. Hannah Arendt (2006) perceived the complexity of this problem in her insistence of both conserving a shared inherited world for children, whilst recognizing the unavoidable natality of educatio—in that all children begin (in) this world anew and will inevitably innovate and change the world. While it is difficult to resolve this relational tension at the heart of education, it remains the case that education scholars have not fully grappled with what this means for a more vibrant and complex educational ethics that is well situated to engage our shared ecological crisis and growing authoritarianism with both courage and joy. One hopeful aspect is that such an ethics must ultimately emerge from educational settings, because ethics lies at the very heart of the discipline and practice of education (Bazzul 2023). No other discipline or field of practice engages ethics as much as education.

This presentation will outline a work in progress that attempts to situate a vital ethics of becoming as a viable alternative for education writ large. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988), along with other sociomaterialist thinkers such as Manuel Delanda and Rosi Braidotti, this presentation outlines a repositioning of an intensive relation ethics in ontological terms. The paper/presentation will first do this by stressing the important opposition between morality and ethics—one that directly applies to the opposition Hannah Arendt outlines—where one is based largely in acts of comparison to an already established code, and the other a much more comprehensive inquiry into how educators might facilitate an enabling ethics of becoming. The presentation elucidates some ethico-ontological concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) such as Bodies without Organs (BwO), planes of consistency, and the articulation of strata to demonstrate that the more-than-human ethics necessary to survive our ecological crisis and bring about a more joyous society is also a question of collectively composing a relational ethical-scape through education. The educator's role is to set the conditions for intensive relations and processes of becoming—a kind of becoming that ultimately cannot be privatized or restricted to human relations. This involves practices of creative composition and identifying strategic assemblages of resistance against forces of domination and control (Delanda 2016). The discipline and practice of education must take seriously its longstanding and important relation to ethics, as it is here that questions of being and becoming are encountered most intensely, comprehensively, and directly. Possibilities for ethical experimentation will be discussed.

We write within a geopolitical moment characterized by resurgent authoritarianisms, extractive capitalism, ecological precarity, and forms of disaster nationalism that mobilize crisis to consolidate power (Seymour, 2024). These formations reorganize life through overt political regimes and infrastructures that standardize and dominate in the name of protection and stability. Early childhood education (ECE) is one of the first institutional sites where such logics are introduced and rehearsed. In response, we propose three minor infrastructures—archive, mycelium, and cordage—as ethical conditions for shared world-making in ECE.

While Manning (2016) theorizes the minor gesture as a virtual and processual force, we extend the minor into the domain of infrastructure, rethinking it beyond state-led “major” systems tied to territorial consolidation, developmental logics, and social standardization. This reorientation brings into focus subtle and often overlooked networks of solidarity that sustain life in humble yet transformative ways. Following Murphy (2013), infrastructures are understood as constellations of relations that draw human and more-than-human worlds together into “patterned conjectures” (p. 10), distributing capacities for action, obligation, and care. In contrast to major infrastructures, minor infrastructures cultivate conditions that hold space for the unruly, emergent, and affective (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

The archive, drawing on Povinelli (2011), is approached as both a site of memory and an ongoing process of world-making. Beyond institutional repositories, the archive becomes a living pedagogical practice that transmits histories of struggle and survival and delineates the contours of collective imagination. As a minor infrastructure, it unsettles nationalist mythologies and re-situates children within contested histories, opening ethical relation as a “continual variation on experience” (Manning, 2016).

The mycelial figure names subterranean infrastructures of exchange, entanglement, and decomposition. Thinking with fungal networks interrupts ethical frameworks that privilege coherence, scalability, and control by attending to the infrastructures through which ideas become perceptible, knowable, and actionable. Following Yusoff’s (2013) account of the “politics of sense,” this infrastructure invites ethical relations that remain contingent and accountable to the more-than-human worlds children already inhabit.

Finally, cordage materializes solidarity as a doing: a process of twisting and binding. Cordage names the slow, repetitive, collective labour through which fragile strands become tensile structures. Drawing on Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor’s (2024) account of solidarity as a world-changing practice that must continually be built and rebuilt, cordage foregrounds how collective capacity emerges through tension, care, and repetition in ECE. Such practices cultivate forms of shared endurance that exceed individualized models of responsibility.

In the larger paper, we develop archive, mycelium, and cordage as minor infrastructures that reframe ethics as an infrastructural practice grounded in the relational labour through which shared worlds are sustained and remade (Benjamin, 2024; Berlant, 2016; Maynard & Simpson, 2022). Given the constraints of a conference presentation, this talk focuses on the archive, tracing how living pedagogical practices of memory and story in ECE participate in making world-sustaining—or world-ending—ethical relations at the intersection of the pedagogical and the political.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly confronted with the arrival of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in teaching and learning environments. With AI’s firm rooting in an inevitability discourse (Bearman et al., 2023) and GenAI’s promises of “assessment reform, personalisation, or inclusion” (Jensen et al., 2025), GenAI seems to be here to stay, even if it is yet contested what its role in knowledge production, representation and transfer can and should actually be.

The impact of GenAI on academic integrity and its potential for misconduct has been a particular concern for HEIs. Accordingly, HEIs around the globe have begun to develop policies and modes of institutional governance, oftentimes treating GenAI in a similar way as plagiarism or cheating (Mack & Byanjankar, 2025). In our contribution, we address the effects of GenAI on academic integrity less as a misconduct problem that needs institutional control but as a relational issue that requires institutional care.

We conceptualize academic integrity as matter of socialization into Responsible Academic Practice (RAP). Over the course of their studies, students develop skills and capabilities; they incorporate values, norms, embodied routines and affective states; and they do so via participation in academic practice, initially with more limited roles and responsibilities that gradually expand (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Learning, thus, is a fundamentally relational and transformational endeavor. It presupposes meaningful relationships with others within which one learns to act responsibly as one becomes part of a practice and its respective community (ibid.) These meaningful relationships are grounded in mutual recognition and care within sociomaterial assemblages of human and non-human actors (Gravett, 2024).

Drawing on qualitative engagements with undergraduate students at three Austrian universities (from STEM and SSH fields), we examine the effect of adding GenAI to this sociomaterial relational socialization process. We reconstruct how GenAI often serves as a response to a perceived lack of meaningful connection in HE. It creates attentive and seemingly personalized responses, thereby filling relational gaps where human guidance seems unattainable or absent, and students fail to establish affective relationships with tasks, topics, peers or educators.

We conclude that HEIs not only need to provide guidance for the appropriate use of GenAI and the governance of misconduct; much more, they haven an obligation to care for spaces where relationships can flourish, if they want to assure the socialization process into Responsible Academic Practice and, thus, academic integrity.

Social robotics is often framed as an efficient solution to face demographic crisis, an ageing population and a shortage of healthcare staff in contemporary care systems (Wright, 2023; De Togni, 2024). At the same time, the increasing adoption of these technologies in residential settings raises important questions about the democratic governance of intelligent technologies and about how humans and nonhuman actors learn to coexist within institutional care environments. The introduction of social robotics is reshaping the everyday organization of dementia care and the relational practices through which care is enacted.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and practice-based approaches, this paper examines how a social robot becomes embedded in the sociomaterial practices of care in residential facilities for people living with dementia, as part of the broader research project ANTICIPATE. Rather than conceptualizing the robot as a therapeutic tool, the research approaches it as a technology-in-practice, whose meaning and effects emerge through situated interactions among human and nonhuman actors (Orlikowski, 2007; Timmermans and Berg, 2003). In this perspective, care practices are understood as sociomaterial arrangements in which heterogeneous elements — caregivers, residents, technological devices and organizational routines — are continuously ordered and stabilized in practice (Gherardi, 2006; Nicolini and Monteiro, 2017; Mol et al., 2010) .

Empirically, the paper draws on an ethnographic study conducted in an Italian nursing home where a robotic cat is used as a non-pharmacological intervention in therapeutic activities for residents living with dementia. Data collection combined ethnographic observation during therapy sessions, interviews with professional caregivers (educators and care workers) and visual materials produced during fieldwork.

The analysis shows that interactions with the robot generate situated processes of learning through which caregivers develop practical competences for orchestrating affective encounters between residents and technological actors. Through practices of observation, storytelling and affective attunement, caregivers learn to interpret residents’ responses and to stage interactions that enable meaningful engagement with the device (Persson et al., 2024; Redmalm et al., 2025). In this sense, therapeutic sessions become more-than-human learning environments where knowledge, care and affect emerge relationally in practice.
At the same time, social robotics contributes to the emergence of a politics of coexistence in care environments. Caregivers cultivate forms of response-ability (Haraway, 2016) — understood as the capacity to respond to the affects circulating between humans and nonhuman actors (Massumi, 2017) — through which residents, professionals and robots learn to inhabit shared spaces of care. Social robotics thus participates in shaping sociomaterial practices through which care, knowing and coexistence are continuously negotiated in residential dementia care. By examining these dynamics, the paper shows how everyday care practices contribute to shaping the democratic governance of emerging technologies within care institutions.

Educational practices aimed at “bringing nature into the classroom” - such as school farms, plant or animal adoption programs, and environmental education initiatives - have become increasingly common. While intended to connect students with nature, these practices mediate and radically simplify its complexity. Nature is miniaturized and staged through isolated elements - a plant, a chick, a small controlled ecosystem - detached from the multispecies ecological networks to which they belong. This produces a pedagogical uncanny: removed from context and transformed into an educational object, nature appears simultaneously familiar and artificial. Its dimension is domesticated, and narratively stabilized, producing a reassuring, moralized image of the environment. Yet this very artificialization generates an effect analogous to Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley”: like artificial entities that resemble, but do not fully replicate, living beings, these pedagogical forms of nature provoke unease by imitating life without conveying its relational complexity. Through a feminist and multispecies lens, particularly drawing on Donna Haraway, these practices can be interpreted as devices of epistemic domestication. Contrary to Haraway’s vision of the world as a network of situated, non-hierarchical multispecies relations, such pedagogies risk reproducing an anthropocentric and simplified view of ecology. They may be read as forms of ecological simulation, akin to the “most photographed barn” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where the barn becomes a hypermediated simulacrum of nature. Similarly, pedagogical nature emerges as a hyperreal, mediated version of the living: familiar yet unsettling, domesticated yet revealing contemporary tensions between ecological experience, cultural mediation, and simulacra.

In contemporary digital ecosystems, the boundary between expert biomedical knowledge and lived reproductive experience is reconfigured by algorithms, platforms and infrastructures. Historically, many technological monitoring practices in pregnancy have developed from the representation of the female body as an inherently unpredictable system that requires technological control in order to ensure safety and risk prevention (Davis-Floyd, 1992). These dynamics are being reshaped by processes of health datafication and platformisation (van Dijck et al., 2018) through which bodily processes are translated into measurable data, with the risk to reinforce processes of biomedicalization (Lombardi, 2009; Lupton, 2012). Tracking apps and platforms not merely inform but actively govern the pedagogical ecologies of expectant parents and their partners trough biomedical information and training programmes. From posthuman perspectives, such transformations point to the active role of data infrastructures and digital platforms in reshaping the spaces of democratic learning. This paper examines how digital infrastructures and platforms participate in sociomaterial assemblages that reshape the epistemic cultures through which reproductive knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated (Knorr-Cetina, 1999).

Within this context, new forms of professional mediation emerge, such as the figure of the influ-activist doctor (Lovari & Lombi, 2024), who negotiates their authority between scientific expertise, public pedagogy, communicative accessibility, and algorithmic visibility, while also monetizing their expertise through courses and training programmes targeting both healthcare professionals and expectant parents. In these environments, platforms, algorithms, and data infrastructures participate in governing the pedagogical ecologies through which reproductive knowledge is produced, circulated, and authorized. The paper therefore discusses the ambivalences of these processes: while digital edutainment may reduce informational asymmetries and foster forms of cognitive empowerment, the growing media visibility of reproductive journeys also introduces risks of spectacle, polarization, and the commodification of health.

This research, currently in an exploratory phase, combines digital ethnography with a walkthrough analysis (Light et al., 2018) examining how reproductive platforms and influ-activist doctors and other healthcare professionals who use digital spaces to foster participatory forms of reproductive knowledge and democratic learning. Through educational content, training programmes, testimonies, and experiential narratives, these sociomaterial assemblages — composed of platforms, algorithmic infrastructures, digital communities, and influ-activist doctors — participate in the ongoing reconfiguration of epistemic boundaries between biomedical expertise and experiential knowledge. From this perspective, reproductive knowledge emerges through more-than-human assemblages of bodies, data, platforms, and professional actors, raising new questions about care, responsibility, and the democratic governance of reproductive knowledge.

In the contemporary postdigital context (Jandrić et al., 2018; Rivoltella & Rossi, 2024), the new technologies that increasingly shape educational and learning environments produce new interactions between humans and non-humans, transform relational and material spaces, and thereby give rise to new forms of education and knowledge that require novel conceptual categories and analytical tools to be investigated (Piromalli, Viteritti & Zampano, 2024).

A significant strand of research in robotics, bioengineering, and communication technologies has identified the human body, with its physical qualities, as a frontier for the implementation of new technologies (Barbanti & Barone, 2022). In the attention that these fields devote to the perceptual modalities and sensorimotor patterns of living systems, a systemic‑enactive logic appears to be emerging.

Enactive and embodied approaches (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991; Gallagher, 2023), rooted in some of the most innovative assumptions of cybernetics, biology, and twentieth-century constructivist epistemology (Damiano & Ceruti, 2013; Galimberti, 2024), today identify immersive technology-enabled learning environments, particularly Mixed Reality environments (Speicher et al., 2019), as a fertile area for investigating the role of the bodily dimension in learning processes (Gonçalves et al., 2024) due to the possibilities these environments offer for exploring in new ways the entanglement of bodies, technologies, and knowledge (Gallagher & Lindgren, 2015; Xu, Kang & Yan, 2022).

In the Italian school system, the “Scuola 4.0” Plan (Ministero dell’Istruzione, 2022), through investment line 3.2, set the objective of transforming approximately 100,000 classrooms into innovative learning environments by 2025. The most advanced level of transformation is described as one in which physical spaces can be freed and reshaped, and equipped with technologies that support immersive experiences, multiple projection surfaces, and strong connections with virtual environments.

From a post-critical perspective (Esposito & Landri, 2024), it therefore becomes necessary to further investigate and identify conceptual tools that can help examine how immersive technologies participate in educational assemblages. The study develops an ongoing literature review aimed at identifying and critically examining research that draws on enactive principles to design, observe, and assess learning experiences in immersive, technology-enabled learning environments.

The review is being conducted using major education databases (ERIC, Scopus, Web of Science, JSTOR, PsycINFO, Education Research Complete, Education Database, and SciELO), as well as search engines providing access to grey literature (e.g., Google Scholar). The key dimensions investigated are a) educational purposes and pedagogical objectives informing the design of immersive enactive experiences across different educational domains (e.g., biodiversity education, special education, STEM education); b) the conceptual tools useful for deepening the analysis and design of learning environments mediated by immersive technologies; c) the expected and actual effects reported in literature.

The contribution will outline the theoretical framework guiding the review and the methodological criteria adopted for materials selection and analysis. It will also sketch a pedagogical reflection on the educational implications and recurring patterns emerging at the intersection between the enactive approach and immersive technologies, presented as tentative results that will guide the next steps of this exploration.