Heidelberger Graduiertenschule für Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften HGGS Summer Forum | 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. 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.