Professor Arijana Luburić-Cvijanović | Assoc. Professor Milena Kaličanin | Assoc. Professor Dušan Stamenković

Danijela Petković, Associate Professor, University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy (Serbia)

LIT 1: Electric Sheep and Fury Roads: The Future of Human, Animal, and Plant Life in Contemporary Literature and Culture

The panel discusses the representations of the future of human, animal, and plant life in contemporary literary and film narratives, as well as comics, graphic novels, TV series, and cultural production in general: their politics, poetics, and their unavoidable commentaries on the past and the present, inter alia.

From the Old Testament vision of the coming of the Messiah, during whose reign “the cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox” (Isaiah 11: 7), to the wide shots of desertified, post-apocalyptic landscapes in the latest spin-off from the Mad Max franchise, the natural world and nonhuman animals have been an inseparable part of human imagining of the future – both hopeful and frightening. This is especially noticeable in the twentieth and the twenty-first century, due to the mass pollution and devastation of the environment; the rising awareness of the climate change, and the development of the new fields of study such as ecocriticism and critical animal studies, and the literary genres like ecofiction and climate fiction. In contemporary narratives about the future, human and non-human destinies are intertwined in a variety of ways: animals and nature may appear as a threat to humanity, as an enemy that has to be defeated (yet again) – the new ice age in Snowpiercer, or the intelligent chimpanzees in the Planet of the Apes franchise. Conversely, animals and the natural world may be recognized as the victims of anthropocentrism, technocapitalism, and climate change, their fetishization or absence haunting the remaining human beings. It is in this intertwining that certain texts and interpretations find the basis for the creation of different, non-hierarchical relationships between people and the rest of the planet, with the aim of surviving the Anthropocene, and ensuring a livable future. On the other hand, certain dystopias, futuristic horror, and dark science fiction develop the implications of the collapse of the human-animal hierarchy in a different way, and their visions of the future are dominated by cannibalism (Tender is the Flesh, Under the Skin), or keeping human beings as pets (Perfected) – thus confirming the ideology of human exceptionalism and human supremacy.

Potential topics include: Post-human, post-animal and post-natural futures; Ecocentric futures; Hungry futures/cannibalism; Human-animal relations/human-nature relations in the context of technological development, genetic modifications, and ecological catastrophe; Environmental and/or anti-human policies of the future. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

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 Bryan Banker, Assistant Professor, TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Ankara, Turkey)

LIT2: Writing “Futural” Histories: Social, Political, and Cultural Narratives from/of the Future

Science fiction often explores future history to examine the potential trajectories of human civilization by projecting cultural, technological, and political developments into the future. This imaginative approach attracts French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who, in Difference and Repetition (1968), argues that we can only think about the future at the edges of our understanding. He turns to science fiction to develop a “futural” philosophy, where meaning is derived from speculative futures. This intersection of futural thinking with literature and culture invites the question of what science fiction’s conjectured futures can teach us about the rapidly approaching future for humans and non-humans alike.

This panel invites focus from imagined futures to the cultural, political, and social realities of the present, to examine how literature and popular culture represent the future to reflect contemporary hopes, fears, and ideologies. From eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias to twentieth- and twenty-first-century dystopias, these visions provide insights into societal anxieties and aspirations. The panel also explores how language and narrative techniques shape these futures, considering their implications for identity, ethics, and social organization. Additionally, we will look at science fiction’s role in questioning the boundaries of the human and non-human in an evolving world, analyzing how different historical and cultural contexts shape and are shaped by future imaginaries. Potential topics may include: Utopian and dystopian popular culture; Future philosophies in science fiction; Human, non-human, and environmental relationships in futuristic popular culture; Technological futures and ethical dilemmas; Identity (gender, race, class, sexuality, et. al.) in science fiction media; environmental futures and ecological narratives; speculative fiction and social critique. (Only submissions in English will be considered.)

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Viktorija Krombholc, Associate Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad (Serbia)

LIT3: Bodies in/of the Future in Literature and Culture

The panel seeks to explore the various approaches to embodiment and corporeality through a futuristic lens. As humankind witnesses unprecedented technological advances whose consequences and outcomes may be near impossible to anticipate, our biological, mortal bodies are lagging behind these huge technological leaps. It is hardly surprising then that the body and the transcendence of its physical and mortal limitations lie at the heart of our visions of the future. On the other hand, these visions frequently take a dystopian turn, where the body remains one of the last seats of humanity. The goal of the panel is to investigate these ambivalences and contradictions.

Potential topics include: the future of the body in literature and popular culture (fiction, poetry, drama, graphic novels, film and TV narratives, video games); the body in speculative fiction; future intersections between technology and the body; the future of biopolitics; the future of medicine and the future of health and disease; the future and aging; the future of sex, gender and sexuality, queer futures; the myth of immortality and eternal youth; neurotechnology and the future of the mind; maternal and reproductive futures; the future and disability; corporeal dystopias; posthumanism and the body. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

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Marija Lojanica, Associate Professor, Faculty of Philology and Arts, University of Kragujevac (Serbia)

LIT 4: Future Spaces in Literature and Culture

The panel aims to explore the future of humanities from the viewpoint of spatial turn and resulting shifts in understanding not only art and culture but also identity, humanity and ontology. Potential topics include: Dystopian Visions – Utopian Nightmares: how our visions of utopian spaces modeled our dystopian realities (Le Corbusier’s machines for living in, Khrushchevkas, American suburban utopias, postmodern micro-urbs, CCTV, etc.); The Future of Urban Spaces: transcending postmodern geographies, Virillio’s futurism of the instant, Baudrillard’s integral reality cybercities and cybrepunk; The Future of Literature in Cyberspace – electronic literature, digital poetry, interactive narratives, digital storytelling, AI generated literature; Representations of Future Spaces in Popular Culture: film, TV, comics, pulp SF; Narration and Virtual Space: figurations of future spaces in video games, game world and ludonarrative strategies. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

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Nataša Tučev, Associate Professor, University of Niš, Faculty of Philosophy (Serbia)

LIT 5: Literature and Historical Extrapolation

The panel focuses on historical or temporal extrapolation as an organizing principle in fiction. Based on their perception of certain trends and tendencies in empirical reality, the authors of such works offer a vision of the possible future outcomes. Such predictions are most often sociological in nature, and have resulted, for instance, in well-known dystopias written in the first half of the twentieth century. Extrapolations in literature may also concern global catastrophes, cybernetic developments and various anthropological issues. In addition, the narratives which offer a predominantly bleak, negative vision of the future, may also hint at positive and more hopeful alternatives, which should also be considered in examining these literary works. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)

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Milica Spremić Končar, Associate Professor, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade (Serbia)

LIT 6: The Interdependence of Past and Future

In his poem Four Quartets T. S. Eliot famously writes, “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past,ˮ while Jacques Le Goff in The Birth of Europe similarly claims that “Today comes from yesterday and tomorrow emerges out of the past.ˮ Many pre-1800 literary works discuss the future, anticipate and even fashion it. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is considered to be the very first feminist, medieval romance - a predecessor to the modern novel. Shakespeare is seen as a psychologist before the birth of psychology, while More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis are visions of the future with a strong influence on contemporary literature and society. This panel explores the ways in which pre-1800 literary works envision and anticipate the future in terms of content and form. It seeks to answer the questions of how the future is conceived of in the early texts, which of those ideas have come true, whether the future is something to be looked forward to or to be afraid of (as unknown and thus unsettling), and which medieval and Renaissance genres have survived their own age and continued to thrive in future periods. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.) 

Predrag Kovačević, Assistant Professor, University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy (Serbia)

LING 1: Navigating Linguistic Futures: Combining Traditional and Cutting-Edge Approaches to Predicting Language Change

Predictive power is widely recognized as the highest aspiration of scientific inquiry. Unlike the natural sciences, many of the social sciences struggle to formulate testable predictions of future developments in their domains of investigation. However, linguistics has shown remarkable potential in predicting directions and, to some extent, even the pace of language change by extrapolating trends observed in synchronic and diachronic data. With the advent of new data sources (large corpora), more sophisticated data-collection techniques (online surveys), and statistical tools, the expectation is that predictions about future developments in the areas of morphosyntax, phonology, and lexicology will become more accurate and easier to test. We invite submissions that will seek to advance predictions about the trajectories of future change at all levels of linguistic analysis based both on traditional and novel methodologies. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.) 

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Borko Kovačević, Associate Professor, University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology (Serbia) 

LING 2: Serbian and other languages in the context of the modern digital era and artificial intelligence

This panel researches on different aspects of the use of Serbian, as well as other languages, in the modern media, in the first place on the internet (communication on various social networks, forums and similar; text message communication; or specific multimodal communication, as internet memes are). It welcomes for example papers that analyze language innovations (at all levels of structure), but also papers on influence of one language to another language, and specifically on the influence of global languages (English in the first place) to smaller languages. In the time when there is a great discussion about advantages and disadvantages of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, very important are researches that deal with the use of artificial intelligence in linguistic investigations, as well as with the use of artificial intelligence in all areas where a specific linguistic and/or philological knowledge is necessary – translation, development and use of different language corpora, internet search, creation of software and similar. (Submissions in Serbian and in English will be considered).

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Dragana Cvijović, Senior Researcher, Institute for the Serbian Language, SASA (Serbia)

LING 3: The Future of Morphology and Related Disciplines

The panel encompasses research focusing on the status of morphology and related disciplines in contemporary linguistics. Within this panel, various examinations are considered: morphological characteristics of word types, changes in the case system, accent changes in morphology, morphological features in Serbian language dialects, the impact of semantics on morphological categories and their representation in descriptive dictionaries, the morphological norm of the Serbian language, morphological traits in the literary works of contemporary writers, and morphology and word formation in Serbian language textbooks. The goal of the panel is to analyze and examine the changes that have affected morphology and related disciplines at the end of the 20th and into the 21st century. It raises the question of whether these changes will impact and to what extent the status of morphology and related disciplines in the future, and how, among other factors, technological innovations, electronic media, social networks, etc., are reflected in the linguistic sphere. (Only submissions in Serbian will be considered.) 

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Miloš Tasić, Associate Professor, University of Niš, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (Serbia)

LING 4: The Future Is Now: The use of advanced digital technologies in language studies

The growing popularity of various chatbot software packages, above all, of course, ChatGPT, but also other applications such as Copilot and Gemini, based on large language models, has led to a reassessment of the very process of generating and analysing text and speech, until recently exclusively linked to human beings. The main aim of this panel is to observe the ways in which researchers can employ different advanced digital technologies, including the above applications, in studying language, from examining grammatical phenomena, via corpus linguistics and translation theory, all the way to (critical) discourse analysis. Furthermore, the discussion will also focus on the positive and negative aspects of using these technologies, both in everyday life and scientific research, as well as on possible guidelines for their exploitation in the near future. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.) 

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Miloš Tasić, Associate Professor, University of Niš, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (Serbia)

LING 5: Text, Image, Sound: Future directions in studying multimodal communication

Human communication is multimodal in its nature, be it a conversation between two people that involves speech, facial expressions and gestures, a film or a play that combines image and sound, or an illustrated book or a comic in which text and drawings interact in different ways. Moreover, with the development of digital social networks, it is easily observable that people have moved on from the once dominant monomodal form of communication via text messages towards video calls and clips, which often include written text in addition to sound and image. This panel will attempt to present the current methods of studying multimodal communication, regardless of their primary theoretical framework or the actual subject matter. By examining state-of-the-art multimodal analysis, one of the main objectives of this panel will be to offer an insight into potential future directions in multimodal research. (Submissions in English and Serbian will be considered.)