Sandpit Session II: Languages of the Future

About this event
The aim of this online session is to bring together scholars from across the faculties of UCL to discuss the theme of Languages of the Future. Think of it as a collaborative workshop in which different ideas around this vital theme can be considered side by side, creating the interdisciplinary conditions for dialogue, feedback and cross-pollination.

Please join us for an enlivening discussion about the future of languages and the languages of the future. This event is open to speakers and audience members alike. We are actively seeking contributions of five-minute informal project or paper presentations for discussion. Please email languagesofthefuture@gmail.com with a short abstract if you would like to be included in the programme of presenters. Deadline for abstract submissions is Monday 28th April.

About the Research Cluster
The language that we use to speak about the future matters: prospection can help us to lead more generous and fulfilled lives (Sjåstad, 2019), our ability to imagine future consequences can shape our actions today (Gaeser, Keeler, and Young 2018), and our capacity to imagine alternate futures is necessary for problem-solving (Shao, 2023). Further, most significant challenges facing societies in the future globally are complex and interconnected—from climate change and poverty to terrorism and health pandemics. To address these issues, and to imagine alternate futures and work towards them in our present, we must move beyond discrete disciplinary divisions and towards a collaborative interdisciplinary mode, a commitment which forms the foundation of the work of this research cluster.

In addressing our objectives we suggest a number of guiding questions 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?