24. Bodies, Ecologies, Networks: Reclaiming Agency in the Technoscientific Complex

This panel invites contributions that examine how contemporary art, design and visual culture engage with the biopolitical regimes that govern bodies, populations and land, and that test alternatives to the current colonial and capitalist technoscientific complex resulting from the conditions of ecological and political polycrisis. We ask what role artistic practice can play in reclaiming shared agency over technologies, information networks and science, and in reasserting self-determination over bodies and the environments that sustain them. In this sense, can media-based artistic practices render visible this layered complexity while also proposing alternatives to its logics of control and extraction?

We particularly welcome proposals that foreground perspectives from beyond the Global North mainstream discourses, and that draw on activist, posthumanist, ecofeminist and new-materialist methodologies, as well as works situated at the intersection of art, science and technology. Topics might include open-source and DIY cultures, tactical media and biohacking, and feminist data practices and other forms of critical engagement with technoscientific infrastructures.

Rather than privileging a single medium, this panel brings together processes and methodologies emerging from the broader artistic research – performance, installation, virtual environments, speculative design and beyond – that aim to construct “not-yet” spaces: provisional and critical formations that interrogate the current reality without resolving into fixed solutions. We are interested in how such work might generate collective forms of knowledge and resistance, and in how it might open alternative imaginaries for bodies, ecologies and networks under conditions of biopolitical control and environmental depletion.

Proposals may take the form of traditional papers, artist presentations, or hybrid formats that reflect the experimental spirit of the panel’s inquiry.

Themes: Biopolitics; technoscientific complex; ecofeminism

Additional format comment: Half day format.

Lead Convenor: Simona Maria Pagano, University of Bologna, Italy

Co-convenors: Beatrice Sartori, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.