Close
Led by IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellows Dr Flora Sagers and Dr Josh Weeks, with support from former IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow Peter Browning
In thinking through the problems, possibilities, and promises of a language of the future, Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks seek to create a dialogic space of potential through their research cluster, a reading group, workshops, writing, and conferences. The research cluster invites scholars from across the faculties of 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 a language of the future encapsulate the specificities of individual disciplines, embraces 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 scholars from across the university to consider the challenges and potentials of languages of the future.
Contact Flora Sagers (f.sagers@ucl.ac.uk) and Josh Weeks (josh.weeks@ucl.ac.uk) for more information about how to get involved in the Research Cluster and Reading Group.
BACKGROUND
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.
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 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 a language 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 a language 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).
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 narrate the future in the present?How does language convey, create or predict social inequalities in the future?
- 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?