Concluding Conference: From Relations to Politics - Pathways Toward a Planetary Praxis | November 18-20, 2025
The three-year fellowship program "Planetary Scholars and Artists in Residence Program," coordinated by the Panel on Planetary Thinking, culminated in the concluding conference From Relations to Politics: Pathways Toward a Planetary Praxis at Castle Rauischholzhausen in Ebsdorfergrund. Throughout this three-day event, 'Planetary Agency/Politics 2025' fellows Danilo Olivaz, Ingvild Syntropia, Sophie von Redecker, Eva Meijer, Erle Ellis, Milja Kurki, Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings and Stefan Pedersen, entered into dialogue with former fellows Claudia J. Ford (Planetary Materials 2022), Jason Waite (Planetary Spaces 2023) and Lukáš Likavčan (Planetary Times 2024), alongside with invited scholars, artists and practitioners from diverse fields.
Rather than merely responding to pressing challenges, participants of the conference were inspired to thinking across a broader horizon: How might we ask better questions, build new knowledge, and develop practices that nurture enduring human planet relations? What modes of inquiry, imagination, and collaboration are needed to safeguard or even enrich planetary habitability?
Day 1
The event unfolded with a junior scholar colloquium featuring three PhD students at the University of Giessen discussing their research with the Planetary Fellows. Argyro Gavrilaki introduced her research on how Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are shaping public debates and visions of nuclear energy in Germany. Siyu Li explored microbial agencies in expired food, and Silas Edwards showed how the nineteenth-century fascination with collecting butterflies led to both scientific knowledge and colonial ways of seeing the world.
In the afternoon, the Panel’s Co-Founder Frederic Hanusch officially welcomed the participants with an introduction to the ‘planetary’ as a shared platform for thought and practice, leading into an impulse talk by Patrizia Nanz on Universities as Anchors of Societal Change in the Planetary Age. She reflected on universities as places where responsibility, imagination and public life gather for a planetary future. Afterwards, ten pathways unfolded throughout the three days of the conference, each led by a Fellow and their guest(s) in highly interdisciplinary panels.
Pathway 1: Cooperation: Towards Symbiocracy – Nature’s AI Avatars was woven through an artistic intervention with the Lahn River Avatar that was an active participant of the panel led by Danilo Olivaz & Ingvild Syntropia with contributions from the Panel's Co-Founder Claus Leggewie and Jonathan Ledgard (Interspecies Money). The Avatar is a collaborative creation developed during Olivaz & Syntropia’s residencies and giving voice to the river Lahn in Giessen. The session experimented with how humans, ecological rhythms and digital systems might communicate. At times the Avatar fell silent and revealed how delicate such cooperation still is.
Day 1 wrapped up with Pathway 2: Localization: The Planetary as a New Cosmology. Astrophysicist Adam Frank expounded on Planetary Intelligence and Mature Technospheres: What Comes After the Holocene? by introducing the idea of "planetary intelligence". He suggested that we live inside an "immature technosphere" that may one day grow into a mature system capable of sustaining life. Responding, Lukáš Likavčan showed how these ideas intersect with debates on planetary systems and technology, drawing from his own work on cosmology and governance.
Day 2
Day 2 started with a snowy morning that opened with Pathway 4: Recognition: Planetary Multispecies Politics led by Milja Kurki and Miranda Whall. As Whall lay outside in the castle grounds with sensors beneath her, where she listened and interpreted numbers coming from the soil, Kurki invited participants to consider democracy as something shared among humans and other beings. The duo encouraged the participants to see soil and other life as part of the political community and not something that exists in the background.
A session on recognition naturally flowed into one on embodying the soil beneath us - Pathway 3: Embodiment: Human–Soil Relations. Sophie von Redecker opened the panel by reading from her work and reflected on soil as part of family and belonging. She paused on the etymology of the word “commun_i_cation,” showing how it contains both 'community' and 'I'. Giving a tactile experience, she passed around soil from her garden for everyone to hold. In response, her guest Alexandra Toland invited participants to recognize soils and stones as "kin" through simple acts of attention and listening. Accordingly, Claudia J. Ford described soil as the “skin of the Earth,” a place where life, culture and spirit meet, and spoke of "grandmother wisdom" as a way of reminding us that tending to the soil and tending to justice are enmeshed together.
Moving from soil to ice, Angela Snæfellsjökuls Rawlings opened Pathway 5: Communication: Glacial Vocabulary with Ólafur Páll Jónsson, Ole Martin Sandberg and Patrick Flamm. Rawlings introduced her work Snæfellsjökull fyrir forseta, a movement where a glacier was nominated as the President of Iceland. With a trailer of her upcoming documentary on this campaign, she shared her “Motion to Chill,” calling for að jökla, or becoming-with glacier, as a way to think with ice. Together, the panel considered how glaciers and other beings might take part in democratic life. The panel moved outdoors with Pathway 6: Contemplation with a castle garden tour guided by Martin de Jong, offering time to slow down and reflect on how landscape, history and ecology come into intersection.
The interactive session Pathway 7: Interaction: Multispecies Assemblies was led by Eva Meijer, with contributions from Angie Pepper & Jason Waite. Meijer reminded the audience that animals, plants, and even landscapes have voices in political life. However, Pepper noted the difficulties in attuning our institutions to the more-than-human when they cannot enter these spaces or speak our languages. Waite added from his work in the Fukushima exclusion zone, showing how varied animal communities adapt in damaged environments, suggesting that these sites could be starting points to teach us about more-than-human futures.
This set the stage to reflect on the reciprocity between humans and nature with Erle Ellis leading the panel Pathway 8: Relations: Relating to Earth in Both Directions with contributions from the Panel's Scientific Manager Liza Bauer & Bronislaw Szerszynski. Ellis posed the question, “Can human aspirations shape a better future for nature?” which contrasted the usual focus from “nature’s contributions to people”. Bauer drew on bioacoustics, noting that although it might feel intrusive on the life of more-than-humans to have technologies that listen to damaged ecosystems, it may also help them heal. On a philosophical note, Szerszynski shared several theses, among them that “humans get their power by joining with inhuman planetary forces” and that “earthly multitudes” are needed to survive planetary shifts.
Day 3
After two days of exploration, the final day of the conference returned to politics and responsibility. The panel discussion, Pathway 9: Negotiation: Imagining Earth Politics Beyond Failure was led by Stefan Pedersen, who invited us to see humans as a “biospheric community” and argued for “planetarism,” where the "flourishing and perpetuation of life" becomes the guiding priority. Maarten A. Hajer followed by stating that “environmental politics as we know it, will not deliver” and described current systems as “a captured politics” bound by vested interests and a crisis in imagination. Drawing on his book Captured Futures, he suggested that different "political dramaturgy" is needed.
The conference came to a conclusion with Pathway 10: Invention: An Agenda for Planetary Praxis & Politics led by Frederic Hanusch and with contributions from Azucena Morán, Frank Biermann & Anthony Burke. Hanusch opened by situating the discussion within the conference’s search for planetary praxis. Morán highlighted the puzzle of representation, asking who is able to speak and be heard. Burke asked “How do we know the Earth?” and argued that law, power and ecology must be rethought together to navigate planetary risk. Biermann drew from earth system governance to call for new frameworks and planetary justice. As the final pathway, the session brought together themes from earlier days and oriented them toward future action.
In his farewell remarks, Claus Leggewie offered thanks and showed the "Planetary Portal", a collaboration with the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, to map the institutes/movements working on planetary thinking across the planet. He noted how scarce such institutions/movements are and suggested that if planetary politics is to grow, it needs places where ideas can be tested and shared beyond the boundaries of a conference.
The conference closed with an authors’ meeting for Planetary Politics: 10 Puzzles for Political Science, where contributors reflected on the insights of the three days. This final exchange allowed the contributors from various disciplines to consider how these discussions might become shared scholarship. It was a fitting end as it developed from conversation into collaboration, with the possibility of a collaborative, future publication. Across three days, the conference offered the space to ask questions and think beyond boundaries. What emerged was not a single conclusion, but a shared vision. Planetary thinking requires creativity, humility and companionship across different disciplines, politics, species, systems etc. While the conference marked the conclusion of the Planetary Scholars & Artists in Residence Fellowship Program, its pathways remain an open invitation to help shape the intellectual architecture of planetary politics in the future. Justus Liebig University’s Panel on Planetary Thinking will continue to take part in this collective endeavor.
The conference was realized with financial means generously provided by the Hessian Ministry for Science and Research, Arts and Culture and by the German Research Foundation. We extend our gratitude to these essential funding bodies, as well as to all staff members of castle Rauischholzhausen and to all other helpers who have turned this event into a memorable experience.