[ DEADLINE EXTENSION: 21.04.2026 ]
\nMaking kin is first and foremost a gesture rather than a concept. Donna Haraway \; presents it as a gesture that reacts to a world organized by rigid separations: nature and \; culture\, feminine and masculine\, human and machine\, organism and technique. To \; make kin is to learn how to live together under the epistemological horizontality of \; habitable bodies in damaged landscapes\, accepting interdependence as an ontological \; and political condition. It is not a matter of restoring a lost nature\, nor of celebrating \; technology as a promise of salvation\, but of weaving possible relations within wounded \; worlds. This proposal emerges from the recognition of the most recent narcissistic \; wound in the human imaginary: technology.
\nAfter Copernicus\, Darwin and Freud&mdash\;who \; unsettled anthropocentric pride by demonstrating that the Earth is not the center of the \; universe\, that human beings are not isolated divine creations but part of animal \; evolution\, and that we do not exercise full control over our own mind\, being also \; governed by the unconscious&mdash\;technoscience\, particularly the digital and artificial \; intelligence\, once again displaces the human from the center by challenging its cognitive\, \; ontological\, and moral exceptionalism. For Donna Haraway\, this wound should neither \; be denied nor healed\, but inhabited through a profound reconfiguration of how agency\, \; responsibility\, kinship\, space\, and time are conceived in a shared and fragmented world \; composed of human and non-human cultural entities. Making kin therefore entails \; rethinking and reinhabiting bodies\, beginning by questioning which bodies are \; recognized and how they appear. Bodies that are sites of passage\, traversed by regimes \; of gender\, race\, class\, and species\; bodies exposed to toxicities\, extraction\, and \; infrastructures\; bodies amplified\, monitored\, and reconfigured by technologies. Bodies \; that are also habitats of resistance\, care\, and the invention of new ways of dwelling. The \; pressing question is not only how to survive\, nor even how to live\, but how to render \; bodies habitable. In this sense\, this congress seeks to bring together philosophical and \; interdisciplinary reflections that explore the unexpected alliances between ecology\, \; technology and feminism\, interrogating the conditions of possibility for habitable bodies \; within contemporary ecological techniques. In doing so\, it aims to contribute to \; imagining futures in which making kin is not merely a concept\, but an urgent ethical and \; political praxis.
\nThis way\, researchers are invited to submit presentation proposals within the \; three main strands of the congress&mdash\;feminism\, ecology and technology&mdash\;placing them in \; dialogue through perspectives such as ecofeminism\, transhumanism\, new materialisms\, \; the ethics of care\, decolonial thought\, among others. Theoretical\, critical\, or situated \; approaches from philosophy and related fields are welcome\, exploring\, among other \; possibilities:
\n➢ Contemporary transformations of the categories of subject\, agency and community \; in light of posthumanism\, new materialisms\, and relational metaphysics\;
\n➢ Practices of care\, hospitality and kinship as ethical and political questions\, analyzed \; from the perspectives of care ethics\, applied ethics\, bioethics and contemporary \; political philosophy\;
\n➢ The reconfiguration of the body as a site of experience\, agency and vulnerability\, \; considering dialogues between phenomenology\, philosophy of embodiment\, gender \; studies and philosophy of technology\;
\n➢ Interdependencies between humans\, non-humans and technologies and their \; epistemological implications\, addressed through the lens of philosophy of science\, \; feminist epistemology and technoscience studies\;
\n➢ Questions of justice\, responsibility and vulnerability in wounded ecologies\, \; examined from the optic of political philosophy\, critical theory\, postcolonial theory \; and environmental ethics\;
\n➢ Critiques of traditional hierarchies (nature/culture\, human/non-human\, \; masculine/feminine) and the exploration of alternative models of kinship and \; coexistence\, drawing on metaphysics\, ontology\, social philosophy and posthuman \; theories\;
\n➢ Reflections on technology\, artificial intelligence\, biotechnology and digitalities as \; forces that displace the subject\, transform agency and redefine modes of inhabiting\, \; from the perspectives of philosophy of technology\, critical cybernetics and AI \; studies\;
\n➢ The construction of shared worlds\, kinships and interdependencies through visual \; and performing arts and cinema\, considered in light of philosophy of art\, relational \; aesthetics\, and philosophy of film\;
\n➢ The role of language\, narrative and symbolic representation in mediating bodies\, \; technologies and ecologies\, investigated through philosophy of language\, narrative \; theory\, critical semiotics\, and philosophy of communication.
\nProposals must be submitted in English\, Portuguese\, Spanish\, French\, or \; Italian to makingkin@outlook.pt by April 21\, 2026. They should include an abstract \; (up to 300 words) and a brief biographical note (up to 150 words). Presentations should \; not exceed 20 minutes. The results will be announced on 7 May 2026. This International Congress is organized within the framework of PRAXIS &ndash\; Center for \; Philosophy\, Politics and Culture\, University of Beira Interior (Covilhã\;\, Portugal).
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