On November 28–29, scholars from philosophy, cognitive science, and anthropology will gather at the University of Parma for a two-day workshop dedicated to Habits, Tools, and Material Environments. The workshop aims to address how habits—the iterative sensorimotor interactions between human organisms and their environments—gradually sediment into tools, practices, and material structures that then reshape the very ecologies in which those habits develop. In this view, materiality is not a peripheral backdrop to human cognition but one of its central conditions: cognition is socially distributed, ecologically embedded and enacted through material engagements.
PROGRAM
November 28, Friday
Venue: Aula K2, Polo Kennedy, Via Kennedy 8
9.40 Welcome speech Italo Testa (Parma)
10.00-11.30 Emmanuel Renault (Paris Nanterre), Dewey’s Account of Tools and of Humans as Tool-Making Animals
11.30-12.00 Break
12.00- 13.30 Andrea Gambarotto (Luxembourg), An Enactive Account of Labor
13.30-15.00 Lunch break
15.00-16.30 Giulia Di Rienzo (Antwerp), Temporalizing Affordances in the Wild: Some Ethnographical Notes
16.30-17.00 Break
17.30-19.00 Corinna Guerra & Alina Merzliakova (Venice, Ca’ Foscari), Habitsas a Tool for Greenwashing
November 29, Saturday
Venue: Aula K8, Polo Kennedy, Via Kennedy 8
9.30 -11.00 Giovanna Colombetti (Exeter), Habits of Affective Self-scaffolding: a Phenomenological Account
11-11.30 Break
11.30-13 Vittorio Gallese (Parma), The Flesh of the Medium: Towards a Theory of Radical Embodied Mediation
13-14.30 Lunch break
14.30-16.00 Lambros Malafouris (Oxford), EnvironMental Inhabitation: Mindful Material Engagement and the Situated Person Perspective
16-16.30 Break
16.30-18.00 Maria-Danae Koukouti (Oxford), From Shamanic Mirrors to Smartphone Screens: How Changing Mirror Habits Reflect Transformations in Perception, Embodiment, and Selfhood
17.30 -18 Discussion
Participants: Matteo Bianchin, Marco Piazza, Elisa Diambri, John Sykes, Giovanni Mariotti, Giulia Lasagni, Francesca Sofia Alexandratos, Laura Gherardi, Gian Luca Maestri, Gemmo Iocco, Fausto Caruana.
Scientific Organization: Italo Testa (Parma)
For information: giovanni.mariotti@unipr.it
