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

What happens when reality becomes editable, creativity is automated, and our daily decisions are led by algorithms? Who gets to imagine the future, and who is excluded from it?

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

Guiding Questions

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.

Themes include (but are not limited to)

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.

Formats and Contributions

We welcome fresh, inventive, and interdisciplinary proposals, including:

Conference Papers (15-20 minutes): presentations offering theoretical, empirical or critical analyses related to the forum theme.
Creative Contributions: artworks, photography, paintings, video installations, illustrations, etc. We particularly encourage contributions that push beyond conventional academic presentation formats and open new spaces for dialogue.

Submission Guidelines

We invite applicants to submit an abstract of no more than 300 words including:

Title
Academic abstract (including research question(s), methods, results and keywords)
Preferred format (presentation, creative contribution)
Short bio of author(s) (max. 300 words) including name, surname, research interests, subject area, and institutional affiliation

Key dates

Call for Papers Deadline: Please send your abstract to
HGGS-FORUM@hggs.uni-heidelberg.de
by the submission deadline on (29/04/26). We only require the abstract by this date.
Notification of acceptance: (12/05/26). The final paper can be submitted after participants have received a formal invitation.
Deadline for confirmation of participation: (19/05/26)
Conference dates and place: July 16-17, 2026, at the Heidelberg Institute of Medical Psychology

Join us in critically testing the myths surrounding digital technological progress, questioning its scope and power, and collectively imagining (alternative) futures. We are looking forward to receiving your contributions!