4TU-ESDiT conference blog series 2026

Welcome to the 2026 4TU-ESDiT Conference Blog Series. Jointly organized by the 4TU.Ethics and ESDiT, the 4TU-ESDiT Conference builds on a strong tradition in the ethics and philosophy of technology. It brings together philosophers, ethicists, and other scholars and practitioners to explore some of the most pressing technological challenges of our time.

The conference provides a dynamic space for critical reflection and dialogue. Through this blog series, we aim to extend those conversations beyond the conference itself, sharing insights, ideas, and reflections with a broader audience.

In 2026 the conference theme is: Technology Ethics in Turbulent Times: Expanding the Moral Agenda for Transformation. What do philosophy and ethics of technology mean in turbulent times? The impact of new technological developments in domains such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and quantum technologies is enormous. These developments are interconnected with global challenges such as climate change, authoritarianism, and geopolitical tensions. Such turbulent times demand targeted philosophical and ethical inquiry, which this conference aims to stimulate.

Share Insights with a Broader Audience

The discussions that take place during the conference should not end when the event concludes. The ethical and philosophical issues raised by technology deserve ongoing reflection and public engagement. This blog series provides a platform to continue these conversations on topics such as artificial intelligence, healthcare, environmental sustainability, intercultural perspectives, democracy, etc.

If you are a visitor or participant of the 4TU-ESDiT conference 2026 you are welcome to submit a blog. Whether you were inspired by a certain session you like to share your thoughts on, whether you like to share your own presentation, or whether you have any other ideas you would like to share concerning the conference, on this special conference blog series we invite both presenters and attendees to contribute!   

Blogs will be published on our website and shared through our newsletter and social media channels, giving your ideas visibility well beyond the conference and its participants.

Feel free to contact us with any questions via blog@ethicsandtechnology.eu

Examples and Submission guidelines

If you like some guidance. You can find examples of conference blogs of our previous conference here https://www.4tu.nl/ethics/blog/?series=4tu-esdit-conference-series 

You can find the submission guidelines here https://www.4tu.nl/ethics/blog/Submit%20to%20the%20blog/

Overview of the Tracks

1. Conceptual Disruption: Theoretical Issues and Practical Approaches

Coördinators: Jeroen Hopster (UU), Samuela Marchiori (TUD)

• Is AI truly intelligent? Do deepfakes involve identity theft?
• Can autonomous robots be held responsible?

These are not just questions about emerging technologies, but also about the concepts of ‘intelligence’, ‘identity’, and ‘responsibility’. Rethinking core philosophical and normative concepts is a topic of cutting-edge research in technology ethics, which has been discussed in the emerging discourse on ‘conceptual disruption’.

This track seeks to advance this discourse with relevant case-studies, methods, and theoretical insights. Contributions may include – but are not limited to – explorations of the political dimensions of conceptual disruption and conceptual engineering, analyses of the role of concepts in relation to socio-technical systems, critical reflection on the presuppositions of the discourse, and the articulation of new case-studies and research avenues.

2. Environmental Philosophy and Technology in Turbulent Times

Track Coordinators: Michel Bourban, Bernice Bovenkerk, Dominic Lenzi

This track explores the role of environmental philosophy in navigating ecological problems amid the perfect environmental, political, and technological storm in which we find ourselves. It brings together normative, conceptual, and interdisciplinary perspectives to examine how environmental values, human–nature relations, and affective responses are being reshaped in turbulent times.

The track is structured around three thematic sessions:

A. Green Political Theory in Turbulent Times: Democratic Discourse, Security, and Justice

Environmental values such as sustainability and climate/environmental/energy justice are shaped by shifting political priorities, including heightened concerns with security and rising military expenditures at both national and international levels. These developments raise urgent normative and practical questions:

• What role can environmental values play under conditions of political and geopolitical turbulence?
• In what ways does technology (such as social media and AI) affect individual and collective capacities to address environmental problems?
• How do recent geopolitical developments reshape debates in climate and environmental ethics, and what are the implications for energy justice?

B. Technologies and the Environment: Disruption, Human-Nature Relations, and the Lifeworld

Technological innovation can be disruptive in many ways: not only socially and conceptually, but also environmentally. It can reconfigure human–nature relations and challenge established ethical frameworks. This session addresses questions such as:

• What are the environmental and conceptual disruptions associated with emerging technologies, including biomimicry, geo-engineering, energy technologies, biotechnologies, and digital technologies such as AI and digital twins?
• How do these technologies transform human relationships with the environment in terms of control, management, stewardship, and care?
• Do these technologies require rethinking ethical frameworks guiding human relations with the lifeworld, non-human animals, other species, the climate system, and biodiversity?

C. Emotions and Global Environmental Changes: Ethics, Depoliticization, and Repoliticisation

Global environmental changes are increasingly accompanied by affective responses such as anxiety, grief, and hope. The emotional dimension of environmental problems is a growing topic of research at the intersection of philosophy of emotions, environmental philosophy, and epistemology. This session explores questions including:

• What are the ethical implications of emotional responses to global environmental changes?
  How do technologies mediate or shape ecological emotions?
  Do emotions such as eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and eco-hope contribute to the depoliticization or the repoliticisation of the environmental crisis?

3. Health, Well-Being and Emotions in an Age of Socially Disruptive Technologies

Coordinator: Janna van Grunsven (TUD)

A plethora of emerging technologies are changing health care practices, sociotechnical health care systems, as well as ideas about what it means to be healthy and to live well. Moreover, new technologies and sociotechnical changes are capable of evoking powerful and perhaps conflicted emotional responses, confronting people with experiences of, for instance, powerlessness, apathy, anger, hope, and excitement. This track invites papers that shed philosophical light on the ways in which emerging and/or socially disruptive technologies are affecting experiences and conceptions of health, well-being, and emotions. Possible questions to be addressed are:

1. How do (emerging) digital and biomedical technologies that claim to support ‘health’ and ‘well-being’ have a differentially disruptive impact on people in virtue of their embodied and situated differences (e.g. age, neurodiversity, gender, socio-economic)?
2. How do technologies (for example, algorithmically shaped social media platforms) disrupt current conceptions of well-being, human flourishing and vulnerability?
3. How are well-being and health disrupted by global technologically mediated forces, e.g. pandemics, climate change, the spreading of neo-fascism?
4. How are novel biomedical technologies (like cell therapy, gene therapy, appetite-suppressing, organoids, anti-ageing tech) disrupting health care systems, practices and -ethics?
5. What normative ethical frameworks and value-concepts are needed to adequately assess the developments of technologically-mediated changes to health care and/or well-being across the globe.
6. Which conceptualizations of health and well-being are most suitable to grasp what is at stake in technology-induced changes to existing health-care practices.
7. How do our emotions inform our conceptualizations and ethical evaluations of the impacts of climate change?
8. How does Big Tech and its increasing alignment with anti-democratic ideals and policies affect our emotional-experiential life? Do people’s emotional lives warrant certain forms of protection from technologies and technological interests?

4. Technology and Solidarity

Co-organised by Aliah Yacoub (Utrecht) and Juri Viehoff (Utrecht), in coordination with Adam Henschke (Twente) and Marcel Verweij (Utrecht).

This track, organised under the ESDiT line on Democracy, Justice and Solidarity (DJS), examines how socially disruptive technologies are reshaping solidarity as a moral and political practice. Solidarity has re-emerged as a central category across activist movements, political theory, and AI ethics guidelines, yet its conceptual contours remain less than fully clear — and the digital infrastructures that increasingly mediate solidaristic relations only sharpen the question. The track brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives to ask how a concept developed in the context of co-present collective action travels (or fails to travel) when publics, labour, and shared informational worlds are reorganised by platforms, algorithmic systems, and AI.

Contributions will combine conceptual work with case-based engagement — content moderation labour, platform-mediated activism, AI-driven disinformation, hybrid online/offline movements — drawing on themes such as the strain that algorithmic curation and synthetic media place on the epistemic trust that solidaristic judgements presuppose, and the question of whether digitally mediated movements satisfy the substantive demands of solidarity or only its outward form. 

5. Towards a Hybrid Ethics of Technology; Bridging Ethics of Technology and Intercultural-Comparative Ethics

Coordinators: Gunter Bombaerts (TUe), Behnam Taebi (TUD), Kristy Claassen (UT), Tom Hannes (TUe)

This track invites scholars from two ethics subfields – ethics of technology on the one hand, and intercultural, global and comparative ethics on the other hand – to contribute to a shared project: not merely supplementing existing approaches, but fostering a mutual transformation to better address the ethical demands of socially disruptive technologies in an interconnected and technologically mediated world.

We invite contributions to start from the strengths of both ethics subfields to explore and develop ethics of technology as hybrid and entailing dialogical, decolonial, and anti-essentialist approaches. “Hybrids” are entities that cut across conventional divides – such as nature and culture, human and non-human, and boundaries between cultures, disciplines, methods, concepts … – revealing that these divisions are themselves constructed. This, however, acknowledging the tremendous challenges involved in crossing borders.

Applied to ethics of technology, this means treating different fields of ethics (ethics of technology and intercultural/comparative ethics, technological practices and moral frameworks, ethics and other disciplines or methods …) not as separate domains, but as co-constituted through networks of practices, actors, and meanings.

Examples of potential contributions (but certainly not limited to this list):

• How do insights on participatory procedures in ethics of technology (participatory design, co-creation …) help understand intercultural dialogue to enable proposed solutions to technologies such as inclusive AI governance or energy justice;
• How can theories on plural moral epistemologies contribute to responsible innovation?
• How can studies on global power asymmetries and global technological evaluation support each other?
• What can intercultural-comparative ethics scholars advise to incorporate their subfield better in ethics of technology journals?
• How can transdisciplinary research in STEM provide insights in comparative philosophy?
• How can intercultural reflexive governance models respond to rapid technological change while remaining normatively grounded?
• How can practices or methods in one academic field support practices in the other field?
• How can insights in the ethics of socially disruption technologies and intercultural-comparative ethics in general strengthen each other?
•  …

After the conference, contributions can be further elaborated to a full manuscript and submitted for review to a topical collection of Science and Engineering Ethics on Hybrid Ethics, deadline January 31th, 2027.

Download call for contributions for the topical collection of Science and Engineering Ethics

6. Ethics at Scale: Systems, Infrastructures, and Societal Impact

Coordinators: Philip Brey (UT), Adam Henschke (UT), Haizea Escribano (UT)

This track focuses on ethical analysis at the level of large-scale sociotechnical systems, infrastructures, and institutional arrangements. It invites contributions that move beyond individual actions and cases to examine how technologies are embedded in and reshape broader social structures. Emphasis is placed on methods for assessing distributed and long-term impacts, including issues of power, coordination, and normative orientation. The track aims to advance approaches for evaluating institutionalized, platformized, data-driven, and infrastructural societies.
The track covers:

• Methods for assessing large-scale sociotechnical systems
• Platform governance, data infrastructures, AI ecosystems
• Ethical issues concerning sociotechnical systems and infrastructures
• Ethics at the intersection between large-scale social and institutional structure and technology
• Ethics of socially disruptive technology at macro-scale
• Moving beyond individual and case-based analysis

7. Transdisciplinarity: Value, Challenges, Methods and Tools

Coordinators: Julia Hermann (UT), Kaush Kalidindi (TUe)

Transdisciplinary research is gaining popularity, as complex real-world problems such as climate change or the ethical development of AI require an approach that aims at integrating methods and knowledge not only from different academic disciplines but also from societal actors. While expectations are high – unique insights and solutions, epistemic justice, and transformative power – transdisciplinary research is often experienced as challenging.

This track seeks to advance our understanding of the value, challenges, and methods of transdisciplinary research, related to the ethics of technology and beyond. Contributions may include – but are not limited to – examples of transdisciplinary collaborations, best practices, proposals for how to deal with power asymmetries between collaborators, methods for knowledge integration and synthesis, the productive role of friction, philosophical tools, artistic interventions, and the benefit of transdisciplinary research for philosophy.

Joint organization by 4TU.Ethics and ESDiT

The 4TU.Center for Ethics and Technology is a collaboration between four technical Universities in The Netherlands: Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, Wageningen University & Research and University of Twente. It is a community of researchers that aims to stimulate and perform research in the field of ethics and technology, both fundamental and applied. 4TU.Ethics aims to address societal challenges in the context of a globalized and inter-connected world,  and to advance understanding of ethical issues in engineering and technology development. 

The overall aim of the ESDiT research programme is to develop a comprehensive philosophical understanding of the socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) of the 21st century, and in particular their challenge to the very concepts and values that we normally appeal to in our moral thinking. These concepts and values form the basis of our current moral, political, and anthropological order. There is an urgency to this aim, as we need to develop new moral frameworks to guide these technologies for the betterment of humanity.