Endless Possibilities in the age of climate collapse

Description

Thematic session

Description: Today’s investment in ecological potential sidelines the labour theory of value. That is, economic value does not stem from labour turning Nature into a product but emerges through the casting of ecological futures by gauging potentiality framed as innovation and/or risk. The speculative engagement with potentiality hinges on computational and calculative techniques, along with their underlying infrastructures facilitating datafication and modelling. This panel investigates articulations between technology, performative regimes of valorization, and the value of sustainability placed at the limit of the calculable. We attend to computational infrastructures and techniques that govern the dynamic relationship between ‘resource’ and ‘risk,’ which is both animated and haunted by more or less open-ended ecological, biophysical, and geochemical potentiality. Furthermore, we explore the operation and transformation of ‘sustainability’ in the context of regimes of valorization that bypass labour. Reappropriating speculation, we imagine sustainability in relation to potentiality that is surely more-than-human but also more-than-digital and requires work from humans.
This thematic session combines critical approaches with speculative methods and provocation. It solicits audience interaction by means of a co-produced heat map. The session ends by reflecting on how speculative devices influence the kinds of futures that we imagine and the possibilities that manifest.

Period	4/06/2026
Event title	Future Earth : Sustainability Science Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	SwitzerlandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International