We recommend arriving by 5:30pm in order to check in and sit down for the welcoming address.

• Stephen Best, CHCI President
• Amanda Anderson (Brown University)
• Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University)

• Introduction: Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University)

Alondra Nelson holds the Harold F. Linder Chair and leads the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. More information.

Details forthcoming. The call for breakfast conversation topics is open.

• 9:00am - 9:15am | A State of the Consortium
  A brief report from CHCI staff
• 9:15am - 10:30am | Directors Meeting
  A member-led dialogue on leading a humanities center or institute. All attendees, particularly those leading centers and institutes, are welcome to attend this session.

• Chair: Grace Diabah (University of Ghana)
• Ife Adebara (University of Alberta)
• Akua Ansantewa Campbell (University of Ghana)
• Caroline Running Wolf (First Languages AI Reality)
• Nishant Shah (The Chine University of Hong Kong)

Digital technologies – especially artificial intelligence – are rapidly transforming the ways we communicate, archive, and imagine knowledge. Yet most of these systems are designed around a narrow set of dominant global languages, leaving many others at the margins. This panel asks: What would it mean to build digital presents that recognize and empower marginalized or less dominant languages as part of “the present we want”? Building such presents requires both naming and analyzing the exclusions embedded in current digital infrastructures and highlighting present-tense interventions — practices, experiments, and collaborations already underway that reshape digital worlds despite inequality, crisis, or constraint. It therefore asks: What are we doing now, and what more can we do, with the resources and crises at hand to shape the world we inhabit? Panelists will highlight projects in which marginalized or less dominant languages are actively shaping new digital ecologies, while also interrogating the systemic barriers that constrain their visibility and viability. The conversation will further foreground collaborative approaches where communities, scholars, and technologists co-create tools and platforms that reflect diverse epistemologies and cultural contexts. By situating linguistic diversity at the center of digital innovation, the session makes the case that marginalized or less dominant languages are not simply waiting for future recognition but are already reshaping our digital present, even as they continue to confront structural exclusions.

Details forthcoming

• Chair: Amanda Anderson (Brown University)
• Egemen Özbek (Technische Universität Dortmund)
• Hollis Robbins (University of Utah)
• Melvin Rogers (Brown University)
• Adam Sitze (University of Massachussets-Amherst)

The question of academic freedom and freedom of speech has become acute at present, with increasingly aggressive attempts to delimit speech and areas of research. Scholars and students have cited pervasive “chilling effects,” of various sorts, affecting classroom settings and programmed events; and the threat of becoming a target in social media campaigns can also operate as a major disincentive to open discussion. In response, calls for pluralism and debate, and series on “difficult conversations,” have been made in many university settings, but often these programs come across as blandly administrative. How might we think about disagreement, dissent, and division in the present time, in terms that are attuned to institutional, legal, political, and ethical questions? How might humanists help in this moment to promote and protect an open society?

• Pre-registration required
• $120/person

Details forthcoming. The call for breakfast conversation topics is open.

Details forthcoming. Visit this link to learn more about CHCI Initiatives.

• Chair: Wendy Chun (Simon Fraser University)
• Mel Gregg (University of Bristol)
• Petra Dolata (University of Calgary)
• David Murakami Wood (University of Ottawa)
• Imre Szeman (University of Toronto)
• Sophie Toupin (Université Laval)

‘The Present We Want to Build: AI, Energy, Environment, Security’ addresses the four most urgent and important challenges facing us today. These issues are daunting and have moved from “future possibilities” to current crises: AI is profoundly changing how and what we teach, as well as the viability of certain professions; struggles for energy independence underlie national and global threats to democratic institutions; we feel the impacts of global climate change daily; and personal, communal, national, and global security are constantly under attack. The sheer scope of these problems seems overwhelming, and we need innovative approaches and global networks to take them on.

‘The Present We Want to Build’ will be one of these needed partnerships. It will open a path forward by researching the intersections of AI, Energy, Environment, and Security. Humanities knowledge is central because although these problems are technology-based, they and their consequences are cultural, social, ethical, and political. We thus need to engage humanities-based research that has long focused on global issues such as the crises of democracy, advocacy for climate justice, the legacies of extractivism, the complexities of migration, and issues of language and translation, and how we craft meaning in a digital world.

Details forthcoming. The call for breakfast conversation topics is open.

Details forthcoming. Visit this link to learn more about CHCI Initiatives.

• Chair: Christopher Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation)
• Dennis Hogan (Harvard University)
• Colleen Lye (University of California, Berkeley)
• Chris Nealon (Johns Hopkins University)
• Asheesh Siddique (University of Massachusets-Amherst)

This panel responds to the conference’s premises that the future is here and many agents inside and outside universities are already building it. The academic disciplines grouped in the humanities are experiencing special pressures, and yet are also actively developing new responses to them. Panelists will focus on the situation in the United States, and have been invited to see departments, classrooms, research sites, and other professional spaces as places where professional and civil society insights come together in an effort to remake institutions and scholarly practices together. They will analyze key examples of current responses.

Details forthcoming

• Introduction: Amanda Anderson (Brown University)

Bonnie Honig is Brown University’s Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science, and (by courtesy) Religious Studies (RS) and Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS). More information.

Details forthcoming.

Details forthcoming.

Details forthcoming.

Details forthcoming.