Eco-digital Posthumanism: Definition, Genealogy, and Research Agenda within the EcoAI Framework

The concept of Eco-Digital Posthumanism stands as a theoretical horizon within the EcoAI (Rubino, 2025) Framework, envisioning a posthumanist orientation through which humanity, non-human entities, and technological infrastructures co-constitute shared worlds. Grounded in a relational ontology, this perspective refuses ontological separations between ‘human’, ‘environment’, and ‘technology’; instead, it frames them as intra-acting, constitutive elements in dynamic assemblages. Drawing on Karen Barad’s notion of intra-action (Barad, 2007), Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016), and Rosi Braidotti’s affirmative ethics of relationality (Braidotti, 2013), Eco-Digital Posthumanism offers a robust ontological and ethical basis for reconsidering human-technology-environment relations as fundamentally entangled.The related EcoAI framework proposes that emergent eco-technologies — including sensing infrastructures, AI-driven environmental monitoring, and digitally mediated communal platforms — are not mere tools, but active mediators that shape both material reality and collective subjectivity. In this light, humans are reconceived as eco-technological intra-agents: their agency is neither purely individual nor detached but arises in dyadic and poly-nodal entanglements with environments and technologies. The ethical imperative intrinsic to this view is to design infrastructures and learning ecologies that foster mutual care, multispecies attentiveness, and distributed co-agency.A vital tension animates the formation of the Eco-Digital Humanism theory: on one side, the ecological system demands renewed forms of relationality between humans, environments, places, and presences. This demand emphasizes physical co-presence, material engagement, and practices that re-embed subjectivities in place-based knowledge, embodied awareness, and ecological responsiveness. Here, educational media play a key role: Antonio López defines ecomedia literacy as the critical capacity to comprehend and engage with the reciprocal ecological “footprint” and cultural “mindprint” of media systems (López 2020, DOI:10.4324/9780203731109). This socio-pedagogical pillar grounds the theory in media-ecological practice. It calls for pedagogies and practices that re-embed subjectivities in place-based knowledges, somatic awareness, and ecological attunement.On the other hand, stands the rise of an immaterial relational geographies: social media, algorithmic platforms, influential digital narratives, ephemeral trend dynamics, and hyper-mediated connectivity craft relational spaces that lean toward an individualistic massification which often replace embodied interaction with curated digital self-expression and mediated connectivity with risks of disembedding relationality. These forces often substitute co-present engagement — with its embodied gestures, proxemics, and spontaneous nonverbal communication — with curated digital self-expression and algorithm-driven interaction. The communication shifts from embodied co-construction to performative self-branding, from tangible immediacy to mediated simulacra. José van Dijck and colleagues analyse how these platforms shape public life and values through infrastructural power (van Dijck, Poell & de Waal 2018, DOI:10.23860/MGDR-2018-03-03-08). Moreover, scholars like Couldry and Mejias warn of data colonialism, where personal data are appropriated in ways akin to digital exploitation (Couldry & Mejias 2019, DOI:10.1177/1527476418796632). These critical sociological perspectives highlight how algorithmic systems can erode embodied co-presence and place-based relationality. This tension must be at the heart of Eco-Digital Humanism: it calls for technologies, pedagogies, and AI systems that restore and augment embodied, place-rooted relational ethics, rather than further eroding them.Eco-Digital Posthumanism therefore envisions a middle path: techno-ecological designs and curricular frameworks that honour the ecological imperative for reciprocity, material co-presence, and affective attunement, while resisting the flattening of relationality that results from algorithmic mass individualism. In this, Eco-Digital Posthumanism embeds both philosophical depth and sociological grounding (López, van Dijck, Couldry & Mejias), extending ecological posthumanism (as developed by Oppermann, 2016;) and material ecocriticism (Iovino & Oppermann, 2014), by providing a mediation-centred, operational lens for guiding education, ethical design, and the governance of AI-mediated environments.In sum, Eco-Digital Humanism posits that humans, non-humans, and technological systems co-create worlds; that ecological instances of sustainability necessitate relational, place-embedded forms of being and that the rising immaterial relational geographies without proper literacy threaten to separate us from those embodied ecologies. The theory thus demands a reconfiguration — through EcoAI Framework — of pedagogy, policy, and design, so that the digital infrastructures serve ecological relationality rather than displace it.