Agenda

9-11 June 2025

This interdisciplinary conference aims to advance the conceptual development of geoanthropology, an emerging epistemological framework in which Earth system science encounters the humanities and social sciences. Grounded in the Anthropocene debate, which has highlighted the urgency of overcoming antagonisms between disciplines, geoanthropology accepts the importance of such concepts as planetary boundaries, geological markers, and earth states while integrating them with the theory and history of phenomena such as extractivism and technology, biopolitics and exploitation, and modernity and legal thought.

Although this is a promising and ambitious epistemological undertaking, further conceptual development is needed before geoanthropology can become an established research paradigm. The conference’s objective is to explore the relevance of three concepts for the geoanthropological framework:

Metabolism

• What is the genealogy of metabolism and its cognates, such as “Stoffwechsel” and metamorphosis, in different fields (e.g., ecology, industry, cybernetics)?
• How can we understand the metabolism between the technosphere and the biosphere (and, perhaps, the ergosphere)?
• What alternative metabolisms can be developed to maintain the Earth within habitable boundaries? 

Legal imagination

• What kind of legal imagination is needed in an age of catastrophes?
• How can we develop the concept of climate as a legal good to be protected and construct a new framework of responsibility for climate disasters?
• How can legal techniques address “geo” problems without simply restating natural law theories, which claim that norms derive from “nature”? 

Geopraxis

• How can we articulate transformative praxis and responsible science for a planet under pressure?
• What agencies inhabit the Earth, to which ends do they strive, and how can these agencies become political subjects?
• What is the relationship between the extraction–production–circulation cycle and the knowledge economy?

Keynote speakers
Nigel Clark, Lancaster University
Xenia Chiaramonte, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Conference organizers
Xenia Manuela Chiaramonte, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Justas Patkauskas, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Conference committee
Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Giuseppe Bianco, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Giovanni Fava, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

For further information: unive.it/geometa

Funded by the European Union (GA number: 101105880). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Co-funded by the Department for Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, call for Research and Third Mission Events 2025.