CfP: Cohabitability: Ecologies and Technologies of Living on Earth - Prague, 8-10 October 2025
Cohabitability. Ecologies and Technologies of Living on Earth. 8th - 10th October 2025. Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
Keynotes:
Noortje Marres (University of Warwick, UK)
Jussi Parikka (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Joanna Żylińska (King’s College London, UK)
Organisers: Iwona Janicka, Mark Coeckelbergh, Petr Urban
Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague (CETE-P)
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
We are living in a climate emergency. As the reality of climate change begins to bite, the question of the Earth’s habitability has become a major concern in contemporary philosophy, ethics and politics. Yet, the effects of the climate crisis, are not shared by all equally. Indeed, inequalities in habitability conditions are becoming more and more marked, notably across the Global South-Global North divide. At the same time, current developments in emerging technologies—such as AI, bioengineering, geoengineering, and nanotechnologies—introduce an additional level of complexity to ascendant narratives of habitability on planet Earth. On the one hand, these technologies can address and mitigate climate change. On the other hand, however, such promising technologies often have an ecological ‘dark side’ of their own: the environmental cost of their development and deployment is often downplayed, and remains sorely under-researched. In this way, the climate crisis and our technological response to it force us to question our convictions about the nature of politics and ethics. What does it mean to be a subject? How can we act ethically and politically in the world today? And perhaps most fundamentally, how can we redefine our communities to meet this moment effectively: who is included in a personal-political ‘we’? This conference offers a forum to tackle such questions collaboratively. More specifically, in this conference, we ask how we can conceptualize habitability on Earth in light of the dramatic changes in our existential conditions in the twenty-first century, and what concepts, practices and imaginaries will produce a more habitable world, not only for humans, but also for more-than-human worlds.
By focusing on the question of cohabitability, this conference aims to articulate the deep interweaving of ecology and technology. Traditionally, ecology and technology have been relegated to two different spheres—ecology to the sphere of nature and technology to the sphere of artifice—with a strict disciplinary separation enforced between the two. Such a clear-cut distinction is no longer tenable, nor desirable if we are to effectively tackle climate change. This conference aims to dissolve the binary delimiting ecology from technology, serving as an example of what we gain in doing so. As such, the conference moves beyond mere critique of our current modes of living, and functions instead as a step forward in the search for constructive alternatives that will help us build better collective futures.
With this conference, we approach cohabitability within the theoretical framework of environmental humanities. The conference welcomes contributions from scholars working within environmental philosophy and ethics, political ecology, more-than-human approaches, posthumanities, ecocriticism, affect theories, medical humanities, science and technology studies (STS), sustainable AI, philosophy of technology and other disciplines working on environmental issues. We also encourage reflections on collective organising and political change in the face of ecological crisis by activists as well as contributions from artists concerned by such questions.
The conference invites papers from international contributors and encourages submissions from scholars from underrepresented groups and regions covering topics such as:
● More-than-human politics and the ethics of cohabitability
● Habitable futures (design, architecture, institutions, collective practices, future scenarios)
● Alternative habits as practices of cohabitability (e.g. anarchist, solarpunk)
● Feminist and ecofeminist approaches to cohabitability in theory and practice
● Minoritarian, intercultural and non-hegemonic approaches to cohabitability (e.g. indigenous, critical race, crip, intersectional)
● The aesthetics of more-than-human cohabitability
● The role of art, storytelling, and fabulation in reinventing our ways of inhabiting the world
● Central and Eastern European perspectives on cohabitability
● New technologies and/of cohabitability
Please submit the following materials to cohabitability2025@gmail.
1. An anonymised abstract of 250-500 words for blind peer review. Please use the following naming convention to title the file: ‘Anonymous_Title of your contribution_Cohabitability Conf’.
2. A brief biography, affiliation, contact details (maximum 100 words). Please use the following naming convention to title the file: ‘Your Name_Title of your contribution_Cohabitablity Conf’
Notifications will be sent out by 30th May 2025.
Contributions should not exceed 20 minutes in length and should be in English. Selected papers from the conference, if heretofore unpublished, will be considered for inclusion in an edited collection, to be published with a reputable academic publisher.
Conference website with a downloadable CfP: https://cetep.eu/