The Languages of the Future Conference

REPORT

The Languages of the Future Conference.
5-6 June 2025

by Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks

On 5 and 6 June earlier this year, we hosted the Languages of the Future conference at the Institute of Advanced Studies. The conference invited scholars and practitioners from across disciplines, universities, the arts and culture sectors and tech design firms to share their research, and to meet and connect with others interested in the relationship between language(s) and the future. By bringing together diverse voices and perspectives, the conference was an opportunity to discuss, develop and pluralise ideas and perspectives around the central question of the research cluster: What role does language play in imagining and shaping the future? And conversely, in what ways can imaginaries of the future inflect and reconfigure language?

Day one of the conference was in-person at the IAS. It was an inspiring and eye-opening day in which we heard about the challenges of future-making as a linguistic and cultural endeavour, as well as the hope, creativity and resilience that are necessary to face up to those challenges. Presentations ranged from the socio-political utility of speculative fiction to the demystification and critique of AI; from the future-oriented poetics of art and architecture to the new worlds being engendered through co-design, knowledge exchange and public policy.

The first panel of the day was titled ‘Narrative and Linguistic Interventions.’ Nelli Shkarupina and Renate Lurdesa Baumane, at the time still students at the Architectural Association School, kicked things off, offering a clear-eyed account of how architectural space can hold various meanings in tension, instilling the possibility of multiple potential futures. The pair focused on the archaeological site of Tauric Chersonesus in Crimea, Ukraine, using the Russian revisionist project, New Chersonese, as a case study for thinking through the physical and linguistic (re)construction of space. This was followed by a presentation from Matthew De Abaitua, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Essex and Head of the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies. De Abaitua – who is also a science fiction writer – discussed the affordances of strangeness and irrational thinking, particularly as “an intermission from the rational discourse” of government agencies and scientific institutions. This included a brilliant anecdote about a scientist who literarily ‘dropped a clanger’ in attempting to prove why sci-fi has no place in scientific discourse.

John Preston, Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Essex, continued the speculative theme. Drawing on Barry Hines’s 1984 film Threads and the work of the Posadists – a Trotskyist group that believed that class struggle would endure in the aftermath of nuclear war – Preston hypothesised the “extrapolation of Marxist thought into interstellar geographies, interspecies dialogue, and apocalyptic temporalities.” Finally, Postdoctoral Fellow at the IAS and co-convenor of the Languages of the Future research cluster, Josh Weeks, brought the panel to a close by discussing the politics of blurred temporalities in the work of the Chilean author, Nona Fernández.

The second panel session, ‘Speculative Visions from the Arts,’ focused on visual art, sound art, theatre and creative non-fiction. To begin, Professor of Fine Art at UCL’s The Slade, Kieren Reed, discussed some of the work being conducted within UCL Arts Futures: a multi-disciplinary initiative that connects UCL academics with artists, creative practitioners and cultural organisations, with the aim of fostering collaborative innovation in both the academic and creative sectors. Further emphasising this cross-pollination between academia and the arts, auto-didact artist and researcher, Joe Banks, was next to present, exhibiting and discussing his sonic artwork, Language [as] Meta-Technology, which centres on “the power of language as both a repository of traditional knowledge and as a tool of personal and political self-empowerment”. We then heard from writer, dramaturg, director and researcher Sarah Sigal and Lecturer in Theatre at The Royal Central School of Speech Drama, James Rowson, who explored the findings of their co-authored project report, ‘Institutional Transformation: Growth and Change in Post-Pandemic Theatre’. To finish the panel, we heard from the award-winning author and educator, Davina Quinlivan, who gave a reading from the final chapter (titled ‘The Future of Learning’) of her forthcoming book, Possessions: A Memoir of Transformation in the Era of Precarity.

Following lunch and an opportunity for networking, the third and final panel of the day was titled ‘Reconfigured Wor(l)ds’. Joseph Cook, an anthropologist who helps lead the UCL Science Citizenship Academy at the Institute of Global Prosperity, was first to present, discussing his recent work in Tower Hamlets, East London “training and supporting a group of care leavers to undertake qualitative research to inform local policymaking”. As part of his presentation, Cook was joined by the citizen social scientist Mohammed Rahman, who gave a lucid insight into his work with the Science Citizenship Academy. Next up was the writer, researcher and curator, Bronac Ferran, with a paper titled, ‘AI or Die’. Bronac drew on Noam Chomsky’s notion of ‘generative grammar’ and Octavio Paz’s writings on poetry to consider if and how poetry will survive in the age of artificial intelligence. “Is there now a dehumanised poetic that emerges autonomously from a machinal unconscious?” she provocatively asked. “And what exactly is there left to transgress?”

This was followed by a presentation by Helen Buckley Woods, Senior Research Fellow in Metascience at the UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy. Drawing on her experience of working with the Research on Research Institute, Buckley Woods combined data with personal reflections to consider how transdisciplinary practice and collaborative research can best be facilitated. Finally, to round off the panel and the day, we heard from Reader in Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence at the University of Essex, Javier Andreu-Perez, who gave a presentation titled ‘The Language of Machine Perception’ that traced some of the dissonances between human and algorithmic ‘thinking’.

The second day of the conference was held online, allowing audience members and presenters to listen, lecture, and debate from all over the world. Presentations ranged from examinations of literary genres and the socio-politics of preserving endangered languages, to an exploration of bio-chemical signatures as poetry and the meaning making of memes. This was a rich, explorative day with lively panel-discussions and over 55 conference attendees.

The first panel of the day was entitled ‘Material Poetics of the Future’ and Marina Iodice, a southern Italian artist and PhD researcher at Ulster University, explored textile practices as speculative linguistic technologies. Iodice shared films of her recent work entitled writing otherwise and explored the rhythm and ‘punctuation’ of puncturing fabric, and how textile practices may form speculative languages of their own that inscribe and improvise. Bart Kuipers, who also maintains an art practice, explored his research in conjunction with others at the SETI Institute, sharing his paper ‘Exoplanetary Poetry’. In his presentation, Bart outlined the work he is undertaking, with colleagues, at SETI, in which they are programming AI to function as an extraterrestrial speaker, who communicates through the universal (?) language of bio-chemical signatures, and works with this AI to create poetry. From here, we were joined by U.S.-based poet and writer Scott Ennis, who argued for the timelessness (and therefore futurity) of the sonnet form.

The second panel of the day saw a continuation of our discussions of materiality and text in ‘Genres of Future-Making’. During this panel, speakers meditated on the potential of the material archive and the literary form to drive environmental consciousness and change, as well as interrogating the ways in which discussion and planning for the future is resisted by increasingly ambivalent or short-term thinking. Emily Baker, Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Latin American Literature at UCL, began the panel with her paper on The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman (2023). In her paper, Baker contemplated the link between environmental imagination and environmental action, exploring the affective power of narrative, language, and culture in shaping environmental concern and commitment. Secondly, Matt Finch, Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, shared his insights about the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach. In his discussion, Finch argued that the present may be the most significant site for the future, as it is in the ‘thick’ present that we can challenge current assumptions and explore scenarios in order to impact our futures. Finally, Flora Sagers, Postdoctoral Fellow at the IAS and co-convenor of the conference, examined Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s Scultura Lingua Morta as a sculptural language of futurity, framing Venice’s eroding infrastructures as living archives that speak to the metabolic processes shaping planetary futures. Through the Clessidra series, Sagers argued that Calò’s transformation of decaying bricole into hollow bronze forms performs the slow violence of the Anthropocene, offering a methodology to rethink endurance, decay, and the material poetics of future worlds.

The penultimate panel of our conference, ‘The Politics of Futurity’, featured studies of regional languages, endangered languages, and language change across the digital sphere, India, Iceland, and Finland. Firstly, Riita Valijarvi, Associate Professor of Finnish and Minority Languages at UCL, discussed the ways that an endangered or minoritised language might be made future-proof. Her paper explored the Finno-Ugric language Meänkieli and interrogated the politics of state-driven active attempts to preserve and future-proof languages through enforced curriculum study, versus organic future-proofing through language-learning in the home, community, and popular culture. Following this, Mohammed Shafeer K P, Assistant Professor in the School of Arts and Natural Sciences at Joy University, Kanyakumari, Tamilnadu, critically examined how right-wing cultural nationalism in India has driven linguistic streamlining, positioning Hindi as a singular national language rooted in Hindutva ideology. He highlighted the consequences of this shift, as it marginalises languages and endangers the plural linguistic legacies that have historically shaped India’s cultural and social identity. Evelyn McCune, recent masters graduate from the University of Iceland, explored the ways in which English was perceived as a ‘language of the future’ within Iceland, due to its rising prominence in popular culture. She reported on dialogic exchanges about language and identity within Iceland and how these revealed mixed feelings about English’s cultural role. Finally, Varshita Dhanda, master’s student at Wilson College, Mumbai, presented her study on students at Shiv Nadar University, which investigated how digital environments shape the future of language, showing that online communication not only accelerates semantic shifts but also reconfigures the boundaries between formal and informal expression. By treating language as both a political and aesthetic act, the study argued that digital registers create fragmented yet formative linguistic futures – raising critical questions about inclusion, identity, and who gets to articulate the languages of tomorrow.

Our final panel was aptly titled, ‘Remembering the Future’, and was an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which our conceptions, optimism, and imaginings of the future are impoverished in the present in contrast to our past imaginings. Jason Goldfarb, Research and Teaching Fellow at Leuphana University in Germany, examined how the perceived impoverishment of utopian language reflects not a failure of imagination but deeper socio-material conditions shaping our present. Challenging dominant diagnoses of ‘cancelled’ futurity, Goldfarb proposed a linguistics of the ordinary – one that reconsiders bleak and dystopian language not as endpoints, but as potential sites of immanent transformation. Joseph Murray, PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, asked how our built environment might embody operational knowledge and communicate across time? In his paper, Murray explored the contrast between the limitations of this practice in the present, as building practices are increasingly reliant on software and therefore subjected to cycles of software obsolescence, compared to building practices of the past which often incorporated future-oriented practices, such as the planting of trees to replace structural beams in the grounds of buildings.

Across the entirety of this conference, conference organisers and participants alike were struck by the generosity of speakers and quality of discussion, the optimism that pervaded the conference despite the challenges explored, and the sheer variety of approaches and topics that fell under the umbrella of ‘Languages of the Future’.

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FLORA SAGERS and JOSH WEEKS, during their time as IAS Postdoctoral Fellows in 2024-25, convened the research cluster ‘Languages of the Future,’ as part of which they guest-edited the Think Pieces journal issue of the same name. Sagers and Weeks are now IAS Visiting Research Fellows.

FLORA SAGERS (PhD, York; MA, Cantab) 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.

JOSH WEEKS was previously a 2022 Finishing Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam. His writing has appeared in the Observer, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books and Wellcome Collection. He is currently working on two book projects: the first is a revision of his PhD thesis, titled Roberto Bolaño and the Labyrinthine Mode: Navigating Neoliberal Modernity. The second is a trade book about tattoos and healing.

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Edited by MARTHE LISSON

Lead image (detail) by Maksim Samuilionak via Unsplash.