Vol. 22 No. 1 (2025): Fuori Luogo Journal of Sociology of Territory, Tourism, Technology - Special Issue Engineering the Future Sociologically: a Call to Delve into Environmental Education Enhanced by Technological Innovations
The special issue frames scientific reflections within the ambivalent horizon of “smart” technologies: AI, XR and IoT are portrayed as powerful enablers of immersive simulation, real-time analysis and personalised learning, yet never as socially innocent devices. Innovation is treated as socially constructed and embedded in asymmetrical distributions of resources, competences and voice; consequently, the digital turn in environmental education may reproduce—if not intensify—pre-existing inequalities. The editorial thus calls for a rigorously sociological gaze capable of linking technical affordances to power relations, infrastructural materiality and the politics of knowledge.
The guest editors Norberto Albano, Sandro Brignone, and Carmine Urciuoli outline an eco-humanistic paradigm intended to govern technological ambivalence under conditions of planetary crisis. They situate environmental education at the crossroads of sustainability agendas and social justice, arguing that advanced technologies can broaden access and foster ecological awareness only if coupled with critical literacy, institutional safeguards, and a rights-based orientation. The overarching claim is that sustainability is not an external constraint to be appended to technology, but an emergent property of socio-technical systems shaped by governance, design choices and collective responsibility.
Within this architecture, the interview with David J. Gunkel functions as a conceptual hinge rather than a mere closing dialogue. By urging readers to move beyond inherited dichotomies—subject/object, anthropomorphism/determinism—Gunkel reframes AI as a philosophical and political problem of categories, accountability and relational ontology. The resulting pedagogy is one of disciplined problematisation: educating with and about AI entails making assumptions explicit, recognising uncertainty, and re-designing the dialogue between engineering and the social sciences so that ethical and ecological stakes are addressed upstream, not retrofitted downstream.
