Understanding to Act: Transitions, Responsibilities, and Imagination

Masterclass organized as part of the "Understanding to Act" program of the PTL Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Sustainability initiative.

The “Understanding to Act: Transitions, Responsibilities, and Imaginaries” masterclass series offers a space for interdisciplinary reflection dedicated to ways of understanding the contemporary world and the conditions under which this understanding can become a resource for action. Set against a backdrop of profound ecological, technological, and social transformations—often grouped under the term “transition”—the series chooses to shift the focus:
the aim is less to describe the changes underway than to examine the frameworks through which they are perceived, interpreted, and made intelligible.

Understanding is not viewed here as a stable state or as a mere act of description. Building on work that emphasizes the situated, relational, and historically constructed nature of knowledge (Weber, 2003; Bourdieu, 1980; Haraway, 2018, 2020), understanding is conceived as a dynamic process, shaped by frames of perception, mediating mechanisms, and power relations. It involves forms of attention,
regimes of visibility, and ways of attributing meaning (Flüsser, 1983, 2004; Mondzain, 2017; Rancière, 2000), which often implicitly shape the possibilities for individual and collective action (Audi, 2005; Habermas, 1987).

The program places a central emphasis on practices that help transform these frameworks of understanding. The relationships between the arts and sciences, the ecological and political issues surrounding the image, as well as research-creation approaches, allow us to examine how certain forms of knowledge are constructed, transmitted, and legitimized, while simultaneously making essential dimensions of ongoing transformations visible or invisible (Ruano-Borbalan, 2017). These practices are not viewed as “on the margins” of academic knowledge, but as privileged spaces for reconfiguring ways of knowing and perceiving the world.
Other sessions shift the focus to the effects of technologies, institutional mechanisms, and political frameworks on collective action. Contributions from science and technology studies (STS) enable us to analyze the production of knowledge as a situated activity, marked by controversies, trade-offs, and normative choices, and attentive to possible divergences from dominant trajectories (Callon, 1986; Latour, 2005; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Finally, issues of democracy, education, and territories invite us to examine the social and political conditions of shared understanding and the power to act.

Speaker

An artist and researcher, and founder of the Art & Science Laboratory at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Olga Kisseleva has been developing collaborative projects since the 2000s that bring together scientists, engineers, lawyers, and local residents. Her works, exhibited notably at the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, and the Fondation Cartier in Paris, at the National Museum of 21st-Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, at ZKM in Germany, and at the Venice, Istanbul, and Berlin Biennales, take the
form of experimental platforms: sensory cartographies, interactive installations, biotechnological environments, or artificial intelligence systems.

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