As part of the first international conference organized by STS-CAT on 3rd-5th February, 2027 titled “STS Encounters in the Mediterranean”, Pablo Alonso, Alejandro Limpo and myself will be hosting a panel called Devicing Ecologies: How to Care for the Mediterranean Anthropocene? (see more info below)
If interested, you can submit your proposal via the official call for abstracts’ submission form (deadline: 23rd September)
Panel 11: Devicing Ecologies: How to Care for the Mediterranean Anthropocene?
Authors: Tomás Criado, Pablo Alonso García, Alejandro Limpo
Modernity transformed the world into a site of intensive exploration and exploitation, rendering the atmosphere, oceans, and the complex infrastructural networks we inhabit into mere backdrops for human political and cultural life. In the Anthropocene, however, these landscapes have erupted as active, unpredictable agents. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the Mediterranean basin. Once conceptualized as the Mare Nostrum—a structured space of human transit and trade—the contemporary Mediterranean sea and its encompassing landscapes are rapidly mutating into a Mare Monstrum: a volatile, feral geography where socio-ecological «monsters» emerge. From severe urban and marine heatwaves to toxic atmospheric suspensions, mega-fires, and anthropogenically altered water bodies, these phenomena disrupt inherited political, cultural, and epistemic institutions. They demand not only new bestiaries to map them but also experimental, collective practices to learn how to become with and care for them.
This panel proposes to confront this challenge by introducing and testing the conceptual framework of “devicing ecologies.” Drawing inspiration from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the expanded notion of mediation developed by Environmental and Elemental Media Studies, we approach a conversation around the study and practice of specific techniques, arrangements, and material operations that actively articulate, sustain, and render sensible troubled landscapes, or what we wish to call “devicing ecologies.” Moving beyond generic environmental discourses, devicing ecologies emphasizes the situated, technical, and artistic / creative processes through which particular landscapes are both made palpable and ecologically viable. It underscores a double meaning: analyzing the material infrastructures that make ecologies legible, while actively devising new practices to render them habitable for different beings.
We invite a variety of empirical and conceptual takes on creative interventions that explore how diverse communities and collectives are devicing ecologies to inhabit, map, and care for the Mediterranean Anthropocene otherwise. We welcome papers addressing, but not limited to:
- Localized responses to extreme heat.
- Practices for living with flooding and urban stormwater infrastructures.
- Everyday coexistence with toxic micro-particles and atmospheric suspensions.
- Responses to environmental warfare, genocide / ecocide.
- Community preparedness and practices surrounding mega-fires.
- Collective responses to sacrifice zones or the effects of areas of industrial activity.
- Initiatives engaging with anthropogenically altered bodies of water.
- Multispecies reconfigurations of social life beyond human language.
By centering these as forms of “devicing ecologies”, this panel aims to foster a shared inquiry into the epistemic and political mediations and dispositions required to care for Anthropocene landscapes. More concretely, we ask: How can we inhabit the irreducible plurality of the Mediterranean region and landscapes while taking material responsibility of vital mediations that could continue rendering them inhabitable, therefore, not only ours but of many others.