IAS Conference: Languages of the Future

The Languages of the Future Conference invites scholars from within and beyond UCL to think through the complex relationships between language(s) and future(s) from a number of disciplinary perspectives and to consider what a language of the future might look like. How can languages of the future encapsulate the specificities of individual disciplines, embrace knowledge systems of all types, convey the urgency of future problems today, and honour the voices of the more-than-human world? Our participatory and appropriately future-facing approach aligns with the UCL Grand Challenges of ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Intercultural Communication’, and we look forward to bringing thinkers from across academia and broader society together to consider the challenges and potentials of languages of the future.
For more context on the subject, please read the Call for Paper: Call for Papers: 'Languages of the Future' Conference | Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) - UCL – University College London

The conference organisers, IAS Postdoctoral Fellows Peter Browning, Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks, have suggested a number of guiding questions for discussion including (but not limited to): 

- What are the relationships between languages and futures? 
- How might we excavate the languages of the past and the present in search of a language of the future? 
- To what extent are futures dependent on language; to what extent are languages dependent on the future?

- In what ways do future-oriented affects (e.g. anticipation, dread, anxiety, and hope) inform our linguistic orientations towards possible futures? 
- What does it mean to create urgency in language to communicate the problems of the future? 
- What languages might emerge as significant in the future? 

- What could the future of language(s) in academia look like? 
- How might specific registers (e.g. legal language, programming language, arts-based practice) be instrumental in creating more just futures?

Register for Day 1 (in person): IAS Conference: Languages of the Future (Day 1) Tickets, Thu, Jun 5, 2025 at 9:00 AM | Eventbrite
Register for Day 2 (online): IAS Conference: Languages of the Future (Day 2) Tickets, Fri, Jun 6, 2025 at 9:00 AM | Eventbrite

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Day One – 5 June 2025
Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL

09:00 – 10:00
Registration and welcome 

10:00 – 12:00        Narrative and Linguistic Interventions 
Chair: Flora Sagers (UCL)

“Reclaiming Chersonese: Making the Case for a Future-Perfect Archive”
Nelli Shkarupina (Architectural Association School of Architecture) and Renate Lurdesa Baumane (Architectural Association School of Architecture)

“Strange Tools: The Uses of Irrational Thinking”
Matthew De Abaitua (University of Essex)

“It is Possible to Imagine Communism at the End of the World”
John Preston (University of Essex)

“Title TBC”
Josh Weeks (UCL)

11:30-12:00        BREAK

12:00 – 14:00        Speculative Visions from the Arts
Chair: Josh Weeks (UCL)

“Title TBC” 
Kieren Reed (UCL)

“Language [as] Meta-Technology”
Joe Banks (Artist & Researcher)

“Institutional Transformation: Growth and Change in Post-Pandemic Theatre”
Sarah Sigal (Associate Researcher, National Centre for Academic and Cultural Exchange) and James Rowson (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)

“The Future of Learning”
Davin Quinlivan (University of Exeter)

14:00 – 15:00        LUNCH

15:00 – 17:00        Reconfigured Wor(l)ds 
Chair: TBC (UCL) 

“Co-Designing the Future in a Society Obsessed with Change”
Joseph Cook (UCL)

“AI or Die?”
Bronac Ferran (Independent Writer and Curator)

“Financing Research Across, Above, and Beyond the Disciplines”
Helen Buckley-Woods (UCL)

“Title TBC” 
Javier Andreu-Perez (University of Essex)

Day Two – 6 June 2025 
Online (Teams link to be sent prior to event)

09:00 – 09:15 
Registration and welcome 

09:15 – 10:45        Material Poetics of the Future
Chair: Flora Sagers (UCL)

“Writing Otherwise: Languages in the Mouth of the Machine”
Marina Iodice (Ulster University) 

“Exoplanetary Poetry” 
Bart Kuipers (SETI Institute) 

“Fixed Forms, Fluid Futures: The Sonnet as Temporal and Linguistic Constant”
Scott Ennis (Independent Researcher)

10:45 – 11:00         BREAK

11:00 – 13:00        Genres of Future-Making
Chair: Josh Weeks (UCL)

“The Environmental Imagination and Environmental Action: Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum”
Emily Baker (UCL)

“Title TBC” 
Matt Finch (University of Oxford)

“Care-ful Reading: On Women, Futurity, and Radical MetaFORMosis of Self-Care” Sonakshi Srivastava (Ashoka University)

“Title TBC”
Flora Sagers (UCL)

13:00 – 14:00         LUNCH BREAK

14:00 – 15:30         The Politics of Futurity
Chair: TBC (UCL)

“How to Future-Proof an Endangered Language?”
Riitta Valijarvi (UCL) 

“Hindutva Linguistic Streamlining and the Future of Regional Languages in India”
Mohammed Shafeer K P (Joy University) 

“Þetta Reddast: The Disappearance of Icelandic in the Culture of Iceland”
Evelyn McCure (Independent Researcher)

“Typing the Future: Language Change in Indian Digital Spaces”
Varshita Dhanda (Wilson College, Mumbai)

15:30 – 17:00        Remembering the Future
Chair: TBC (UCL) 

“Refiguring Diplomacy: Multilingualism, Cultural Memory, and the Poetics of Future Words”
Beatrice de Salles (Independent Researcher) 

“Materialism and the Future of Language”
Jason Goldfarb (Leuphana University)

“Material Mnemonics: Building Fabric as a Future-Language for Operational Continuity”
Joseph Murray (Carnegie Mellon University)