Publications
The IFCC Publications series brings together original essays, working papers, and research studies produced within the Institute’s Research Axes. Each contribution advances critical inquiry into the ethical, aesthetic, and political conditions of contemporary life.
Aesthetics of the Unseen
A research series examining how disappearance, erasure and regimes of opacity structure contemporary life. Through essays, interviews and critical reflections, the series explores the aesthetic, political and ethical stakes of what slips from view, tracing how violence, extraction and environmental collapse transform the conditions of perception. The series investigates how practices of seeing, sensing and remembering can contest the forces that render lives, bodies and histories invisible.
Featured Publications
Aesthetics of the Unseen 1 (3)
Long-form Interview with Miguel Moctezuma (FOUND Project / Oxford University) on disappearance as a political and environmental practice, tracing how community knowledge and forensic technologies reshape the search for the missing and challenge the opacity through which violence operates.
Aesthetics of the Unseen 1 (2)
Essay by Henry A. Giroux analysing the authoritarian erosion of historical memory, focusing on how censorship, curricular restrictions, and the politicisation of cultural institutions reshape public understanding of the past. The piece examines the strategic use of forgetting in contemporary neo-fascist movements and underscores memory’s role in sustaining democratic life.
Florence Papers on AI and Democracy
The Florence Papers investigates how digital infrastructures and data-driven systems are redrawing the political, ethical and perceptual conditions of democratic life. Through philosophical and interdisciplinary reflection, the series examines shifting forms of autonomy and civic agency shaped by emerging regimes of technological power.
Featured Publications
The Florence Papers on AI and Democracy 1 (1)
Essay by Ulises A. Mejias examining how the consolidation of state and corporate surveillance infrastructures reshapes the conditions of democratic life. Through an analysis of data extraction, digital militarisation and the political economy of platforms, the piece traces how algorithmic governance normalises authoritarian tendencies under the guise of innovation. Originally published in English as an editorial for Al Jazeera, it appears here in Italian translation for the Florence Papers, expanding the reach of Mejias’s critique to new publics concerned with autonomy, agency and the future of civic participation
All Publications