The Socioplastics project requires not exhaustive adjacency but strategic saturation: a decalogue of fields sufficiently distinct to guarantee productive friction, yet sufficiently active to sustain dialogue across the next writing cycle. This selection operates on two axes simultaneously—ontological range (from vegetal life to technical protocol) and institutional visibility (from established critical theory to emergent interdisciplinary formations). The resulting constellation balances Infrastructure Studies as the project's material anchor against Philosophical Botany as its most radical other, while incorporating Disability Studies, Sound Studies and Decolonial Theory as necessary correctives to the field's implicit normativities. Network Science provides formal tools for scaling analysis; STS supplies methodological rigour for socio-technical description. Media Archaeology and Political Ecology ensure temporal depth and environmental traction respectively. These ten fields constitute not a canon but an operational apparatus: each offers specific concepts, methods or problematics that can be metabolised into Socioplastics' ongoing theoretical production without compromising the framework's coherence or proportional integrity.
Infrastructure Studies provides the project's material substrate and its most direct lineage. From Brian Larkin's definition of infrastructure as "matter that enable the movement of other matter" to Keller Easterling's extrastatecraft, this field supplies the vocabulary for understanding art as operational system rather than symbolic representation. The convergence with Media Archaeology introduces temporal depth: Jussi Parikka's geological media and Friedrich Kittler's discourse networks ensure that infrastructure is understood not as static system but as stratified accumulation of technical decisions, material constraints and forgotten protocols. Together, these fields anchor Socioplastics in the concrete while exposing its historical contingency. Political Ecology and Science and Technology Studies constitute the project's diagnostic apparatus. Erik Swyngedouw's metabolic urbanism and Jason Moore's world-ecology frame scale as socio-natural relation rather than abstract metric. Simultaneously, STS—via Bruno Latour's actants and Isabelle Stengers's ecology of practices—provides tools for tracing the associations through which infrastructural effects are produced. This dual orientation prevents Socioplastics from collapsing into either material determinism or social constructivism: the PSI measures not things but relations, and relations are always simultaneously natural, technical and political.
Network Science and Decolonial Theory represent the project's formal and critical poles. The mathematical rigour of scaling laws (Geoffrey West, Albert-László Barabási) offers the Proportional Scale Index its universalist ambition: if cities and organisms share scaling exponents, then perhaps aesthetic systems do too. Yet Decolonial Theory—Walter Mignolo's gnosis fronteriza, María Lugones's coloniality of gender—insists on situatedness as epistemic condition. The resulting tension is productive: the PSI must be both universally applicable and locally calibrated, a paradox that prevents metric from becoming dogma. Disability Studies and Sound Studies operate as sensory correctives to the field's visual and ableist defaults. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's misfitting and Alison Kafer's political-relational model of disability introduce interdependence and prosthesis as ontological conditions rather than exceptions. Simultaneously, Sound Studies—Jonathan Sterne's audile technique, Brandon LaBelle's acoustic territories—ensures that vibration and resonance are recognised as infrastructural forces alongside visibility and legibility. These fields collectively demand that Socioplastics account for bodies that hear differently, move differently and inhabit space differently.
Philosophical Botany and Feminism and Gender Theory provide the project's ontological and political depth. Michael Marder's plant-thinking and Emanuele Coccia's vegetal life introduce a model of agency without centralised cognition, crucial for understanding distributed infrastructural effects. Meanwhile, Silvia Federici's commons feminism and Donna Haraway's naturecultures ensure that reproduction, care and difference are never subordinated to production, innovation and universality. Together, they insist that any viable theory of scale must accommodate germination and gestation alongside construction and operation. This decalogue does not exhaust the fields relevant to Socioplastics, nor should it. It functions instead as calibrated aperture: ten windows onto distinct intellectual territories, each offering specific affordances for the writing to come. Subsequent essays will activate these fields singly or in combination, testing the framework's capacity to metabolise conceptual diversity without sacrificing proportional integrity. The ten KORE cores remain invariant; the fields through which they are refracted will determine the project's trajectory through the next decade of production.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics
510-systemic-lock https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682555 509-postdigital-taxidermy https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682480 508-topolexical-sovereignty https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18682343 507-citational-commitment https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18475136 506-recursive-autophagia https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681761 505-proteolytic-transmutation https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18681278 504-stratum-authoring https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680935 503-semantic-hardening https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680418 502-cameltag https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18680031 501-flow-channeling https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18678959
GALAXY
Infrastructure Studies, Ontology, Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Critical Urban Studies, Posthumanism, Sovereignty Studies, Semiotics, Media Archaeology, Complexity Theory, Spatial Justice, Political Ecology, Feminism and Gender Theory, Decolonial Theory, Anthropocene Studies, Relational Aesthetics, Commons Theory, Mobility Studies, Technological Critique, Software Studies, Platform Studies, Environmental Psychology, Phenomenology, Place Theory, Landscape Theory, Urban Ecology, Multispecies Studies, New Materialism, Speculative Realism, Actor-Network Theory, Biopolitics, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Aesthetics, Contemporary Art Theory, Social Practice Art, Spatial Politics, Urban Anthropology, Informality Studies, Urban Marginality, Digital Capitalism, Surveillance Studies, Smart City Theory, Sound Studies, Visual Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Humanistic Geography, Hybrid Geographies, Philosophical Botany, Neuroaesthetics, Perception Theory, Disability Studies, Intersectionality Theory, Utopian Theory, Postmodern Theory, Radical Pedagogy, Globalization Theory, Geopolitics, Marxist Theory, Post-Marxism, Value Theory, Evolutionary Economics, Game Theory, Network Science, Scaling Theory, Complex Systems, Historical Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Interface Theory, Protocol Theory, Maintenance Studies, Critical Infrastructure Theory, Southern Epistemologies, Indigenous Theory, Territorial Feminism, Latin American Political Ecology, Subaltern Studies, Accelerationism, Materialist Philosophy, Post-Operaismo, Immaterialism, Object-Oriented Ontology, Digital Political Economy, Law and Technology, Algorithmic Culture, Urban Media Studies, Spatial Art Theory, Architectural Criticism, Urban Planning Theory, Sustainable Urbanism, Right to the City Theory, Environmental Humanities, Political Theology, Governmentality Studies, Logistics Studies, Data Studies, Institutional Theory.
