interfaceing 2026

Creativity before and in the Age of AI: Literature, Languages and Cultures in Times of Instability

 

It is often claimed that we live in an era of compounding crises: geopolitical conflicts, ecological precarity, and rapid technological acceleration have fundamentally destabilized our shared reality. At the eye of this storm is Artificial Intelligence, an intervention that, as claims have it, challenges the foundational definitions of human expression.

At the same time it can also be argued that what distinguishes the different eras of human history is not so much the absence of compounding crises as the configuration of these crises, and often some technological advance can be considered to lie at the epicentre of the particular disruptions that characterize each of the eras.

INTERFACE, as a multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual journal, feels particularly suitable to convene a conference that will attempt to investigate and articulate how literatures, languages, and cultures navigate, reflect, and resist these multi-layered dimensions of instability. By examining creativity both before and during the rise of generative AI, we seek to understand not only how disruption reshapes human imagination, but also whether the disruptions in earlier eras were seen at their own time differently than our present day disruptions are seen by us. Is technology a symptom of each current instability, an amplifier of it, or a tool for navigating it? We invite scholars to explore how creative practices serve as sites of resilience, critique, and survival in a fractured world. Therefore, we call scholars working in fields such as anthropology, philosophy, history, education, literature, art, politics, sociology, religion, and cultural studies to submit proposals either for panels or individual papers.

Topics for consideration might include (but are not limited to):

  • Literary representations of apocalypse, precarity, and systemic collapse.
  • The destabilization of authorship, intellectual property, and creative labour.
  • Historical parallels: how literature responded to past technological and social crises.
  • Speculative fiction as a tool for mapping anxious futures.
  • The erosion and preservation of minority languages under global digital hegemony.
  • Machine translation, automated bias, and the disruption of linguistic identities.
  • Language evolution, polarization, and political rhetoric in AI-mediated spaces.
  • Pedagogy in crisis: restructuring language learning amidst automated tools.
  • Artistic activism and cultural production in zones of conflict and displacement.
  • Deepfakes, post-truth politics, and the deliberate destabilization of cultural memory.
  • Algorithmic surveillance, censorship, and subversion of the digital state.

 

Proposals for panels (instructions here) or individual papers of 25 minutes or less (instructions here) should be submitted at interfacejell@ntu.edu.tw by September 26, 2026.

The papers should be presented in any of the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian.

The conference will take place on November 27-29, 2026 at National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. It is organized as a hybrid conference, and submissions for both in-person and online presentations are equally welcome.

Papers presented in the conference can be submitted for publication in the Special Topic issues of INTERFACE to be published in 2027 (subject to double-blind peer review).

INTERFACE would like to thank Trier University (Centre for Advanced Studies "Poetry in Transition”), Kobe University (Graduate School of Humanities), University of Bristol (Department of Classics), and Seoul National University (Institute of Classical Studies) for their kind support and co-operation in organizing this conference.