The 3rd annual Conference, hosted by the European University of Technology and organized by the ECT Lab+, brought together experts from different fields to explore ways of inquiry that enrich (non-)positivist ways of knowing and post-structuralist critiques of them.
Given the political, representative and epistemic crises of the current times, there is a need for transdisciplinary responses to overcome siloed thinking of academic fields of study and offer solutions by revisiting questions of speculation at the basis of science, engineering, design and the arts. Speculation can provide analytical, imaginative, political and experimental means as well as inspire the production of artifacts (engineering, design, arts, crafts) to get beyond the current epistemic Krisis. At the very same time, given its role in economics, colonialism and war, speculation (both as Speculatio and Speculum) itself, can and ought be under critique.
Under these premises the interventions at the conference addressed the relationship between technology, epistemology, and design. The interventions were about topics of:
Speculative Fabulations and Future Technological Imaginaries
Alternative histories of Enlightenment
Left/Right-wing Accelerationism / Techno-socialist/Techno-capitalist imaginaries
Anti-epistemologies / Hybrid Epistemologies / Post-truth
Speculative Archaeology / Archaeology of Speculation / Punk Archaeology / Media Archaeology
Alien phenomenology / post-phenomenological frameworks
Non-representational Theory / Non-representational Method
Collapsology / Dark Ecology / Neg-Anthropocene
Queer Ecology and the Post-natural
Techno-religious frameworks / Technological Occultism / Magic
