Call for Papers: 'Languages of the Future' Conference

We would love to hear from you. Whether you would like to suggest a panel discussion, you would like to present a 20 minutes formal paper, or if you would like to propose a different format. Deadline for abstract submissions is 15 May.
Below, we include our formal call for papers, with prompting questions. We look forward to hearing from you and working with you.

Please email: languagesofthefuture@gmail.com and/or one of the leaders of the cluster –

Dr Flora Sagers – f.sagers@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Josh Weeks – josh.weeks@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Peter Browning – peter.browning@ucl.ac.uk

Call for Papers – ‘Languages of the Future’ conference
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 this conference. We therefore take a post-apocalyptic approach as the starting point for the construction of both new worlds and new words. As an etymological deconstruction of the word ‘apocalypse’ reminds us, it is an  ‘unveiling’ or ‘revelation’, and thus an opportunity to begin again. By taking a de-/con-structionist interdisciplinary approach to the interrelationship between language and the future, we seek to establish  both the ways in which language limits conceptions of the future and, inversely, how it might shape the  future itself. By exploring the histories of the future in language, we seek to understand how these structures, now unpicked, might be reshaped, reformed, or redeemed. After all, language is not only referential, used to describe reality, but in its poetic dimensions it creates and calls into being.  Understood as a metapragmatic system (Silverstein, 1993), language orders and organises the ways in which we make sense of the world. An attention to language as social action (e.g. Austin, 1975; Del  Hymes, 1964; Goffman, 1953; Gumperz, 1992) also calls us to focus on language as a situated practice traversed by socio-cultural and political-economic realities. The management of language is deeply  connected to colonial and capitalist structures (Heller & McElhinny, 2018), thus any enterprise of  discussing the future through the lens of language must be a critical one that is attuned to the politics of  language (Bourdieu, 2006). In thinking of languages of the future, we must hold the multiple interwoven  temporalities of the Anthropocene together to honour both the deep time implications of the reorganization of nature, and simultaneously consider the ‘violent history of geology’ which saw fossil  fuel capitalism built on the brutalization of black and brown bodies (Yusoff, 2018; Karera, 2019). Turning to languages of the future therefore invites a reflection on the ways in which language re- and  pre-figures future worlds, and indeed the extent to which language itself can be re- (and pre-) figured to consider and create future worlds otherwise. By deconstructing both language and futures together, we seek to explore how we might respond to calls from thinkers from past and present to create wor(l)ds  otherwise, to ‘begin a new life’ by beginning from the end (Yusoff, 2018; Dante, 1294). 

This 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. 

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?