Imaginaries of the Future: Call for Presentations
7-8 May 2026, University of Stuttgart
How do you envision the future? Reflect on what you would want the coming times to look like and how thoughts about tomorrow influence your research. We invite you to frame your current research around these questions in a collaborative environment for those interested in digital culture in a world facing global challenges: climate change, democratic instability, social injustice, technological oligarchies, and the pervasive and rapid expansion of artificial intelligence in society. Consider how elements of present and past digital culture, through their affordances, might contribute to shaping a more desirable future.
The workshop will bring together students and researchers to discuss (positive and negative) potentials of digital culture, emphasizing its effects on literature and literary studies, and to present project outlines and current works-in-progress.
We especially encourage MA/MEd and PhD students, who are already working within digital culture or would like to conduct research in this field to share their ideas. Topics may include but are not limited to:
• (Resistance to) Social media dominance and its effects in/through digital narratives
• The capacity of digital narratives to represent complexity, on both the micro scale of the individual and the macro scale of the global
• Nostalgia for the old internet and ‘dumb’ tech, the misconceptions that these views entail, and literary responses that reflect on these fallacies
• Future possibilities: how we can enact them, how we might resist those we do not wish to see realized, and how literature and literary studies participate in creating and negotiating imaginaries of the future
• The democratic potentials and pitfalls of the Internet as well as born-digital fiction in the context of protests
• Speculative interfaces, accessibility practices, and the frictions they might create – both desired and undesired – and the potential of (digital) narratives
This workshop offers a collaborative space to reflect on and collectively explore your role and responsibilities as a researcher, your openness to your own assumptions and fallacies, and the impact you hope to make through your research.
As the keynote speaker of the workshop, we are pleased to welcome Prof. Dr. Astrid Ensslin from the University of Regensburg.
If you wish to join the workshop and present your own research, please send an abstract (approx. 250 words) for a short presentation (15 minutes max.) to kerstin.kurz@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de by 1 April 2026. There will be funding available for travel and accommodation costs for students from the University of Bergen.
This event is organised as part of the project Born Digital, funded by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. The BWS plus project „Born Digital“ is carried out by the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung as part of the Baden-Württemberg-STIPENDIUM programme for university students.
| Kontakt | Nadja Hieber (nadja.hieber@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de). |
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