Worshop series

Learning With…
November 2025-August 2026

The ERC project HealthXCross at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca' Foscari University of Venice, through the Radical Epistemologies research cluster at NICHE Institute for Environmental Humanities, organizes an experimental workshop series curated by Antonia Majaca in collaboration with Roberta Raffaetà.
The series investigates epistemological conditions that enable or foreclose just ecological futures.
Building on HealthXCross’ exploration of how microbiome science reconfigures health through microbial entanglements, this series deepens the investigation across scales, from microbial to planetary scales. It examines how colonial modernity and metabolic rifts structure environmental knowledge production, asking what can be known, by whom, and through which legitimating apparatuses. Venice’s lagoon becomes a living laboratory for this inquiry. Its brackish waters host complex microbial communities mediating between marine and terrestrial worlds, while the city’s historical wealth confronts contemporary dissolution – embodying the metabolic circuits connecting social reproduction, waste flows, and environmental politics that the cluster investigates.

The “Learning With…” workshop series follows a recursive protocol where conceptual traces from each gathering transform subsequent inquiries, creating an alluvial process of collective theorization. This methodology of “epistemic communing” parallels HealthXCross’ multi-sited and transdisciplinary approach, recognizing how variations in methods, contexts, and colonial histories produce fundamentally different ways of knowing and being in entangled worlds. Through this process, the series interrogates how colonial categories of nature and the human continue structuring environmental governance while articulating counter-foundations for political ecology.
Convening political ecologists, artists, theorists, community practitioners, and international scholars, the programme advances frameworks for prefiguring transformative political ecology. This experimental format extends HealthXCross’ investigation into how scientific knowledge transforms cultural concepts, proposing transversal methodologies that recognize health, resilience, and environmental futures as fundamentally entangled across scales from the microbial to the planetary, along lines of gender, class, race, and coloniality.

More information on dates and programme will be published soon.

Dialogues Across Microbiology, Art and Anthropology
November-December 2024

The ERC project HealthXCross at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice organises a series of dialogues, lectures, and panel discussions that probe the entangled relationships between microbial life, scientific practice, and transdisciplinary ecological thought. The program maps a trajectory from bio-geological interdependencies to the pluralistic integration of Indigenous and Western scientific traditions, before delving into the under-examined creative dimensions of scientific practice itself. In its final session, the series crystalizes around microcosmic approaches to planetary ecology, staging an encounter between diverse modes of worldmaking. By convening microbiologists, philosophers, artists, and designers in sustained dialogue, the program advances new frameworks for conceptualizing health, resilience, and environmental crisis. This experimental format manifests the HealthXCross project's broader investigation into emergent intersections between scientific research, artistic practice, and philosophical and anthropological inquiry, proposing alternative methodologies for confronting the urgent planetary transformations.