Heidelberger Graduiertenschule für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften HGGS Summer Forum | ImA(I)gining the Future: How Digital Technologies Rewrite Our World
- Donnerstag, 16. Juli 2026, 09:00 - 19:00 Uhr
- Institut für Medizinische Psychologie, Hörsaal, Bergheimer Str. 20, 69115 Heidelberg
- Prof. Dr. Sahana Udupa, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Institut für Ethnologie
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. The HGGS Summer Forum 2026 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, it asks how they transform the present and future of scholarly voices, labor, creativity, and human understanding across languages, disciplines, and epistemic traditions. The forum is open to the public, please register to attend.
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Institut für Medizinische Psychologie
Hörsaal
Bergheimer Str. 20
69115 HeidelbergVeranstalter
Heidelberger Graduiertenschule für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (HGGS)
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Keynote Lecture
16 July 2026, 9.15am | Prof. Dr. Sahana Udupa, LMU München: “AI Violence: Speaking Machines and the Sovereignty of Speech”
Abstract
In the latest phase of digital mediations in the communicative sphere, AI technologies have emerged as the new contentious “speaking machines.” AI is not only a subtle mediator of speech and a symbolic sewer for tweaking, framing, and purging discursive tropes in everyday or organized communication. It is also an endless and tireless hose of human-like text and “creative” audiovisuals that gets activated upon user requests, while voraciously consuming billions of instances of manifest communication and machine-generated synthetic content as training data. Generative AI models are the new interactional interfaces for everyday talk that are visible and affective. As they expand, AI models are also becoming the subject of discussion and everyday appraisals, acquiring second-order significance and remediating valences. Public contestations over model behaviors recursively connect with AI systems through the moderation of model makers. Set within this technological moment, technocracy and far-right ideologies have developed new synergies and mutual dependencies. Is technofascism the actual face of AI? Is far-right speech AI’s inevitable corollary? What futures does AI-inflected speech portend and how is critical scholarship – anthropology in particular – prepared to address them?