EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Introducing:
Languages of the Future
by Flora Sagers
Issue 3, Winter 2025
Over the course of our postdoctoral year, we have explored the concept of ‘Languages of the Future’ through a variety of research activities, including a two-day conference in June 2025, a reading group, innumerable discussions with friends and colleagues and, of course, through the creation of this journal issue. The topic, ‘Languages of the Future’, has always sparked debate and intrigue whenever it has been mentioned, but the first question that was invariably asked, was: “What does that mean?”
We began our inquiries into ‘languages of the future’ trying to answer that question and a short piece outlining our ideas, approaches, and the central questions associated with this topic. Primarily, why might we need a language of the future? And, what might the limitations and provocations of such a language be? And how might the language we use to speak about the future, influence our futures? We argued that 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). We further argued that a language of the future must be interdisciplinary and inclusive in scope as 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 concluded that we must move beyond discrete disciplinary divisions and towards a collaborative interdisciplinary mode, and this commitment formed the foundation of the work of this research cluster, and is reflected in both the number of disciplines that were represented at our conference in June, and the variety of disciplinary approaches in this journal issue.
In deciding on a theoretical approach to frame our work, we looked towards recent discourse in post-/apocalypse studies, deciding to 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 have been able to explore both the ways in which language may limit conceptions of the future and, inversely, how language might shape the future itself. 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 called us to focus on language as a situated practice traversed by socio-cultural and political-economic realities. Acknowledging and examining how the management of language is deeply connected to colonial and capitalist structures (Heller & McElhinny, 2018) allowed us to frame our research cluster critically, ensuring that it has been attuned to the politics of language (Bourdieu, 2006). In thinking of languages of the future, from both a critical and temporal standpoint, we established that we must hold the multiple interwoven temporalities of the Anthropocene together to honour both the deep time implications of the reorganisation of nature, and to simultaneously consider the “violent [human] history of geology” which saw fossil fuel capitalism built on the brutalisation of black and brown bodies (Yusoff, 2018; Karera, 2019). Our conception of languages of the future therefore has invited (and continues to invite into the future) reflections 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 have sought to consider ‘languages of the future’ from a perspective of hope, contemplating 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 thinking through the problems, possibilities, and promises of languages of the future, we have aspired to create a dialogic space of potential through our research cluster, reading group, workshops, conference, and this journal issue.
Our reading group has addressed a wide range of topics under the theme Languages of the Future. These have included the future of the past – a research thread which examined the complexities, omissions, and political dimensions of the archive, and how archival practices come to shape futures that have not yet arrived. We also explored the spirits of the future, focusing on speculative hauntings and the narrative device of the prologue, in which a tale is told from the outset of a text, imbuing it with a sense of fatalism. We also examined the affects of the future – including future-oriented affects such as: hope, desire, fear, anxiety, and doubt – before turning to the question of how the future might be protected. This led us to consider ecological thought, more-than-human narratives, and the role of law in securing futures, through works such as Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (2025), the artistic-legal collective MOTH (More Than Human), and legal test cases that, for example, endeavoured to endow an Ecuadorean forest (Los Cedros) intellectual property rights over a song incorporating its ambient soundscape. Finally, we turned to the languages of digital technology: computer programming, augmented reality, and the concept of ‘digital twins’ – virtual counterparts that create and preserve spaces online, seemingly secured against the ravages of decay and climate collapse.
Alongside these thematic investigations, we have also reflected on the nature of scholarship itself as a future-oriented practice – one shaped by the systemic challenges facing academia today, but also cultivated in hopeful collaboration with the scholars of the future through writing retreats for early career researchers. In this spirit, our conference and this special issue have welcomed abstract submissions from master’s students as well as doctoral and early career researchers, affirming our commitment to fostering emerging voices and expanding the horizon of academic participation.
Our hybrid conference in June extended our discussions on ‘Languages of the Future’ beyond the walls of UCL and we welcomed academics, practitioners, students, and artists from a wide range of disciplines across the globe. A full conference report is included in this issue, offering a window into those exchanges and inviting you, too, to take part in this ongoing dialogue.
Just as the conference expanded our conversations outward, the contributions to this journal issue continue that momentum, offering diverse and thought-provoking engagements with the idea of Languages of the Future. The articles collected here reflect a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, methodologies, and positionalities, each taking up the challenge of thinking of language as both a medium and a maker of futurity. Articles span from an examination of geopolitical memory to cellular ecologies; from architectural speculation to machine-made verse; from language education to future-oriented librarianship. These pieces do not seek to define Languages of the Future but instead open new interpretive paths – through theory, critique, practice, and imagination.
The articles by Renate Lurdesa Baumane and Nelli Shkarupina (“Reclaiming Chersonese” and “Architecture as a Manifesto”) interrogate architecture as a political medium, examining its function as a form of geopolitical memory and propaganda, as well as its capacity to provoke imagined futures through speculative aesthetic interventions. Also investigating the promise of creative practice as language of the future are Marilyn Allen and Bart Kuipers who interrogate new or speculative languages (Non-human Poetry: Eighty Days” and “Becoming Aliens”). Allen uses the geolocation app what3words to generate place-based verse by inputting the travel destinations of Jules Verne’s fictional protagonist, resulting in a creative/critical interrogation of digitally-mediated notions of spatiality and language. Kuipers reviews the history of universal language for extra-terrestrial communication, arguing for the need for a cross-sensory multi-species communication method.
Meanwhile, both Jinzhao Kan and Mallika Sekhar interrogate the futures of the language of medicine, examining how biomedical and psychiatric discourses condition the futures available to embodied subjects. While Kan examines Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis (2000) to demonstrate how the clinical language of psychiatry forecloses alternative temporalities of healing and care revealing the ways in which language might limit futures, Sekhar explores how language may imagine futures. Sekhar reviews Japanese anime which reimagine the body through speculative narrative through its portrayal of anthropomorphised blood cells which, she argues, enact and portray ecologies of labour, care, and mortality.
Further scrutinising the limits and imaginaries of a language of the future are articles by Dany Jacob, Flick Kemp, and Ishan Tripathi who consider how institutional spaces – classrooms, libraries, and academic scholarship – function as sites for linguistic limitation and imagination. Jacobs reflects on the tensions of teaching French in an Anglophone context that privileges consumerist cultural associations over linguistic and historical depth, in their article “Teaching French, not French Toast”, arguing that perceived cultural capital and socio-cultural-politics limit languages, identities, and cultures available to us. Kemp speculates on the future of librarianship through a critical engagement with cataloguing practices and how these are shaped, arguing for a reorientation of library work around pluralism, care, and community. Meanwhile, Tripathi interrogates the limits of academic language in capturing the speculative, affective, and vernacular forms of meaning-making found in Indian meme cultures, proposing the figure of the ‘speculative academic’ as one who writes not just about but through memetic forms to imagine alternative scholarly futures. Together, these pieces call for sustained interrogation and reimagination of institutional languages and structures that limit who can write the languages of the future, how, and for whom.
We hope this special issue, assembled through such a range of perspectives, goes some way to answering that question, “What does ‘Languages of the Future’ mean?” but, most of all, we trust this special issue will demonstrate how rich, varied, and interdisciplinary responses to that question have been, continue to be, and will be.
N.B. Please note that this editorial introduction draws significantly on the work of all three scholars who have held the position of IAS Quirk Postdoctoral Fellow over the last academic year (2024-2025): Dr Peter Browning (before he was awarded a lectureship in January 2025), Dr Flora Sagers, and Dr Josh Weeks. All three of us remain grateful to the Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment which has supported our research.
FLORA SAGERS (PhD, York; MA, Cantab) is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, where she held the position of Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Languages of the Future in 2024-2025. She is a researcher and writer working across literature, cultural heritage, and environmental humanities. Her first monograph, Serialism: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Anthropocene in Contemporary Literature (under submission), examines how contemporary literary serials produce new forms of political and temporal world-building. Building on this, her current research explores how serial structures recur in the sedimentary and sculptural logics of the climate-altered world, particularly through practices of erosion, extraction, and preservation. She is currently developing a body of work on Venice as a site of entangled cultural and ecological memory, working across writing, sound, and digital mapping. Flora also engages in public-facing digital heritage projects, including a funded creative mapping initiative at Here East, and she has contributed field recordings of Venice to the acclaimed Sonic Heritage sound archive. Her work investigates how literary and material forms alike can help us register, reimagine, and live within the temporalities of environmental crisis.
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Edited by MARTHE LISSON
Lead image via Unsplash.
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