Making Kin as Practice of Care: Habitable Bodies or Unexpected Alliances between Ecology, Technology and Feminism

Making 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.

After Copernicus, Darwin and Freud—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—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.

This way, researchers are invited to submit presentation proposals within the  three main strands of the congress—feminism, ecology and technology—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:

➢ Contemporary transformations of the categories of subject, agency and community  in light of posthumanism, new materialisms, and relational metaphysics;

➢ 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;

➢ 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;

➢ Interdependencies between humans, non-humans and technologies and their  epistemological implications, addressed through the lens of philosophy of science,  feminist epistemology and technoscience studies;

➢ Questions of justice, responsibility and vulnerability in wounded ecologies,  examined from the optic of political philosophy, critical theory, postcolonial theory  and environmental ethics;

➢ 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;

➢ 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;

➢ 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;

➢ 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.

Proposals must be submitted in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, or  Italian to [email protected] by April 7, 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 – Center for  Philosophy, Politics and Culture, University of Beira Interior (Covilhã, Portugal).