ACADEMIA

Barcelona Critical is an initiative established with the aim of fostering a scholarly community dedicated to the critical study of International Relations, centred around an annual conference of international standing. Its primary objective is to create an interdisciplinary space for debate and knowledge production that generates meaningful impact in addressing the major challenges of our time at their intersection with global justice. These challenges include the climate crisis, war and its colonial legacies, and the dynamics of extractive technocapitalism, approached through a critical perspective committed to social transformation.

This project brought together artists, public policy experts, journalists, and academics in a space for experimentation to analyze and understand how the intersection of art, public policy, and academic research can generate new, useful proposals for addressing current environmental challenges. The project culminated in an interdisciplinary symposium at the Congress Center in London, designed to offer an informed perspective on the current planetary crisis, with a particular focus on how it affects human societies, non-human ecosystems, and material environments with varying degrees of intensity. While questioning overly optimistic technological solutions—such as geoengineering—the symposium proposed alternative ways of tackling these challenges by exploring the convergence of critical and interdisciplinary sensibilities.

To mark the centenary of the first publication of The Concept of Nature (1921) by the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the Critical Humanities and International Politics Research Group, based in the University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, organised a roundtable to explore the continuing relevance of Whitehead’s thought for understanding the contemporary world. The panel brought together renowned professors, including Luciana Parisi, Hannah Richter, Steven Shaviro, Keith Robinson and Ignasi Torrent (moderator).