Research

TBA21–Academy organizes its work around four transversal research lines: Convivial Conservation, Rights of Nature, Ecologies of Technologies, and Governing Otherwise. Together, they provide the conceptual backbone of the Academy’s programming and advocacy initiatives, developed across our laboratories and partnerships. Rather than fixed themes, these lines function as evolving frameworks with multiple strands that connect situated practices and relevant case studies to wider planetary debates.

This research and advocacy line challenges conservation models that treat “nature” as a separate, manageable object. Confronting the extractivist and colonial logics that still organize protected areas, marine reserves, and climate policy, it approaches conservation as ecopoiesis: the collective making and remaking of shared habitats through relations of care, justice, and multispecies coexistence. Through alliances with communities, artists, scientists, and legal practitioners, it supports projects that operate both within and against existing regimes, opening space to rewire the economic, legal, and epistemic frameworks that govern conservation today.

This research line explores how legal, cultural, and artistic practices can recognize natural entities not as objects to be managed, but as political subjects with their own agency and rights. Beyond advocating for the juridical inclusion of nature within existing legal frameworks, Rights of Nature promotes interdisciplinary practices as both a tactical tool and a conceptual provocation to open up new cosmologies, imaginaries, and modes of world-making.

Positioned at the intersection of legal reconfiguration and decolonial thought, this line seeks not only to defend nature within Western political models but to challenge the very foundations of law, politics, and ecological thought.

This line challenges the modern separation between technology and nature, approaching the technosphere not as an external or artificial domain, but as an integral part of planetary life. Drawing on the notion of technodiversity, it investigates how technologies—whether linguistic, digital, cultural, or material—mediate our ecological relations and condition how we perceive, inhabit, and transform the world. An important detail is that rather than accepting dominant models of technological development as universal, this line explores the plurality of technical forms that emerge from different ecological, social, and cosmological contexts. It asks how technology can be reimagined not as a tool of extraction or control, but as a means of composing more diverse, situated, and regenerative ways of living.

This line of research explores how power, responsibility, and representation can be reorganized in the face of ecological and democratic erosion. Rather than taking existing models of governance—state-based, market-driven, anthropocentric—as given, it investigates experimental, situated, and more-than-human forms of decision-making. From institutional prototypes to unorthodox advocacy interventions, it asks how we might govern with, rather than over, complex ecological systems. It seeks to imagine governance not as control or administration, but as a practice of care, accountability, and co-existence—rehearsed across legal, cultural, scientific, and artistic domains.