ImA(I)gining the Future: How Digital Technologies Rewrite Our World

Digital technologies are no longer merely instruments that support human activity. Datafication, platformization, and a growing algorithmic culture are shaping how we think, govern, decide, remember, create, and research. In doing so, they reproduce structural inequalities, redefine and redistribute power, and blur ontological boundaries between the real and the virtual. Today, digital technologies do not simply reflect society; they alter it. Artificial intelligence (AI), especially, has become the defining buzzword of recent years, as its use is now unavoidable in our personal lives, education, and academic work. Alongside its promises of efficiency, boosting economic productivity, solving complex global issues, and offering speed, scale, and new capabilities beyond human limits, it raises urgent multi-sectoral issues at all levels. At the same time, the mystique surrounding these technologies is not new. What is distinctive today is the acceleration and scale at which digital technologies operate and are reshaping mental health, labor, political discourse, and concepts of creativity, authenticity, justice, and community. 

The HGGS Summer Forum 2026 invites researchers at various stages in their academic careers (doctoral candidates, postdocs, professors) working at the intersection of technology, society, and culture to engage with these transformations under the theme: ImA(I)gining the Future: How Digital Technologies Rewrite Our World. With a particular, but not exclusive, emphasis on AI, this forum seeks to explore the future of a hyper-digitalized world in a (growing) context of geopolitical change. Rather than asking whether technologies like AI should be used, this forum asks how they transform the present and future of scholarly voices, labor, creativity, and human understanding across languages, disciplines, and epistemic traditions. By foregrounding dialogue across disciplines, the forum aims to foster reflective and critical engagements with digital technologies, not only as a force of change but as a lens through which enduring questions about the future of humanity and society can be re-examined. 

Participants will take part in a two-day academic and interactive forum, featuring:

• Two keynote lectures by internationally renowned experts in the Humanities and Social Sciences
• Interactive workshops bridging theory and practice
• An interdisciplinary community of researchers from around the world
• Creative and collaborative spaces 

Keynote Lectures

This year, the forum team has succeeded in securing two internationally renowned experts, namely Prof. Dr. Sahana Udupa from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Prof. Dr. Tobias Rees from the Berggruen Institute and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, who will deliver keynote lectures and also contribute to the subsequent workshops.

Prof. Udupa will be lecturing on “Human Futures in the Age of AI: Anthropology and the Politics of Speech in Digital Worlds” on 16^th July and Prof. Rees will ask the question on 17th July: “Will the future be different?”

Prof Dr Sahana Udupa  Prof. Dr. Tobias Rees 

Programme 16-17 July 2026:

Forum Programme 2026 

We invite contributions that examine how digital technologies, particularly AI, restructure power relations, governance mechanisms, decision- and policy-making processes, and economic systems at multiple levels; how ethical, legal, and regulatory frameworks are responding to the expansion of AI-powered digital domains, and how these regimes/systems shape accountability, fundamental rights, and power relations, with particular attention to gendered or otherwise intersectional inequalities; and how digital technologies reproduce, intensify, or transform gender divisions and social relations.

Contributors are also encouraged to explore how creativity, artistic practice, and authorship are reconfigured in contexts of ubiquitous digital mediation, and how the escalating energy demands of data infrastructures might be addressed through sustainable technological and policy visions. Further areas of inquiry might include philosophical engagements with “reality” in an era of synthetic media and AI-generated worlds, the role of AI in mental health, therapy, and preventative medicine alongside its implications for identity and community formation, as well as the ways emerging technologies are altering how history is documented, interpreted, and preserved.

• Creativity, authorship, and cultural production: reconfigurations of creativity, artistic practice, authenticity, language, voice, and silencing in contexts of generative and AI-assisted systems.
• Philosophical and cultural questions of reality and the human: reality, truth, simulation, and synthetic media; posthumanism, transhumanism, and shifting human-non-human boundaries.
• Memory, history, and knowledge production: digital archives, historiography, documentation, and the reinterpretation and preservation of history in technologically mediated worlds.
• Health, identity, and community: the role of AI in mental health, therapy, and preventative medicine, and its implications for identity formation, social relations, and algorithmically mediated communities.
• Democracy, public discourse, and information ecosystems: content (de)regulation, disinformation and misinformation, opinion formation, and the role of algorithmic systems in shaping publics and democratic processes.
• Digital infrastructures and sustainability: connectivity, ICT infrastructures, data centers, cybersecurity, surveillance, and e-governance; environmental costs of digital technologies and visions for sustainable digital futures.
• Power, governance, and political economy of digital technologies: restructuring of power relations, decision- and policy-making processes; geopolitics of Internet/digital governance and the growing influence of Big Tech.
• Law, regulation, and accountability in AI-powered societies: ethical, legal, and regulatory responses to automation and algorithmic systems; protection of fundamental rights; gendered and intersectional dimensions of accountability and governance.
• Inequality, gender, and intersectionality: reproduction and transformation of gender divisions and global inequalities through AI, platform economies, and data-driven systems at local and transnational scales.
• Labor, work, and value creation: digital economies, platform labor, digital trade and e-commerce; deskilling, reskilling, precarity, and shifting concepts of work and labor markets in digitalized and automated economies.

The Forum is open to interested members of the public. All HGGS members usually participate in the Forum, also if they do not present papers themselves. Doctoral candidates and advanced MA students from all faculties at Heidelberg University as well as external guests are also invited to attend the Forum lectures and workshops. 

Registration link

The HGGS awards five travel grants to doctoral scholars who are selected to present their work at the 2026 Forum. The grant presumes participation in both days and can cover (train) tickets and accommodation in Heidelberg. 

• Doctoral scholars from Germany can apply for a grant of 500.- Euros, including a hotel booked through the HGGS.
• Doctoral scholars from Europe or elsewhere can apply for a grant of 700.- Euros, including a hotel booked through the HGGS.

When sending your proposal, please clearly indicate if you are also applying for a travel grant at the HGGS. 

July 16-17, 2026, at the Heidelberg Institute of Medical Psychology, Bergheimer Str. 20 (entrance at the corner of Hospitalstr.), 69115 Heidelberg.