Research · R, the lighthouse
One question, followed across fields: how machines, industries, institutions and competences are shaped while they are still emerging, and how intervening at those formative thresholds can redirect where they go. It began with the being of machines; the competence programme is its latest strand.
Each strand opened where the previous one reached a threshold. Together they make one agenda: see things while they are beginning, and keep a way back to the point where they branched.
2010–2021 · Machines and communication
Humanoid robots in France and Japan, and the communicational being of machines. The doctoral thesis (Université Paris Cité, 2021) moves the question from what technical objects are used for to how they operate.
2022–2025 · Artificial immanence
A series in episodes, from Antiquity to modernity, on how metaphysics denied artefacts a mode of existence of their own, and on machines as individuating beings whose norms and tendencies should inform design and governance. The arc in full.
2025 · Inchoative design
A heuristic between symbiosis and coercion for industries still able to change course, worked through on steel, ammonia, cement and plastics.
2025–2026 · Climate, Europe and green politics
Europe’s climate geopolitics and the COP29–COP30 cycle, up to the inchoative failure of climate governance in the post-COP30 Amazon (2026).
2022–2026 · Gender and somatic politics
The Gender Reversed Bootcamp and the ecofeminist research around it: making competence barriers observable by living them, not only by counting them.
2026 · Skills and competences
Competence is counted on individuals and prescribed by Europe, but it forms in between: the territory, the firm, the training centre. The current programme observes that level in territories under energy transition, with narrative as primary data, and tracks the drift of Europe’s skills classification.
Developed by the founder and used together. Each carries its provenance: where and when it was first run.
NECx
Workers, trainers and employers of one territory narrate, in structured circles, how their competences were formed, blocked or redirected. The transcripts form a comparable corpus across territories.
Proof of concept · Ukunda, Kenya · May 2025
SMP
A designed encounter between researchers and decision-makers around evidence still in progress, with a recorded restitution.
First run · Kenya · 2022
GRBC
An experiential format that reverses gendered role assignments so that the barriers to a competence become observable.
First run · Madagascar · August 2022
EETx
The family that binds the formats: collect, analyse, translate. Research results become situations people go through, not only documents they read.
Named 2026 · groups SMP, GRBC and exhibitions
In Ukunda, four circles ran in Swahili and English with local insiders as moderators; the researcher stepped back a little more at each round, to measure what his own presence changed.
Pause · return · begin again
Every line of work, drawn back to where it branched. The trunk is the doctoral line on machines and communication; each later line leaves it in the year of its first output.
As of September 2026
What is under evaluation, just out, or in writing.
Under evaluation
The programme above is the scientific core of a Cluster 2 lump-sum Research and Innovation Action submitted in September 2026. Outcomes are expected in early 2027. The project name is withheld pending partner consent.
Published · 21 Aug 2026
Artificial immanence and the ontological challenge of the post-COP30 Amazon, with Jessica de Mendonça Alves Mota. Novos Cadernos NAEA 29(3).
Preprint · Jul 2026
And the case for European skills intelligence. HAL, hal-05704227.
Dataset · Jul 2026
Membership of the green concept scheme in ESCO v1.2.1, and every concept-level change from v1.2.0. Zenodo, CC BY 4.0.
Published · Jun 2026
Beyond capacity-building traps: lessons from the Gender Reversed Bootcamp in Madagascar. ENoP chapter, on HAL.
In writing
A measure between 0 and 1 of how far a technical object or an institution can still begin: at 0, informed once; at 1, still capable of beginning.
