Call for Participation /// Anticipation 2026, 1–3 July 2026, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Anticipation 2026

1–3 July 2026

Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

https://anticipationconference.net/

Anticipation 2026 is an interdisciplinary conference for rethinking how ideas about futures operate within conditions of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and unknowing. Bringing together researchers, designers, philosophers, policy makers, and practitioners, the conference opens space for exploring how futures are shaped through aesthetics, ethics, epistemologies and material practices. From the politics of speculation to the situated knowledges of anticipation, Anticipation 2026 foregrounds design as a transdisciplinary engagement with what remains unresolved, unspoken, or yet-to-emerge.

Call for Participation

Our Call for Participation welcomes thoughtful, radical, and experimental contributions across disciplines, identities, geographies, and practices. Anticipation and Design are key lenses through which we welcome research that explores how practices of making and imagining can engage with uncertainty, hold paradox and the unknown. Informed by post normal conditions, we invite contributions that resist closure, question dominant foresight logics, and cultivate transdisciplinary approaches attuned to complexity, contradiction, hope, and care. We seek proposals that challenge, stretch, and reorient the futures we are told are inevitable. 

As part of this edition, we invite participants to respond to thematic questions (outlined below) as provocations. These prompts are intended to spark new connections, situated inquiries, and imaginative engagements with the many dimensions of anticipatory practice. 

Contributions may take the form of papers, curated sessions, workshops or alternative formats, at least one contributor must be registered as conference participant. For more details on formats and submission guidelines, see below. 

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Themes

The conference is organized around a set of broad themes accompanied by guiding questions. These are offered as invitations to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange. The Call for Participation encourages contributors to use these questions as prompts for exploring how anticipation can be imagined, practiced, and understood. Anticipation 2026 provides a space to share and reshape ideas across disciplines, forms of expertise, and creative practices. We invite participants to approach these themes from their own perspectives while engaging with others, and to take advantage of the diverse formats that support experimental, challenging, and collaborative ways of working.

1. Temporalities in Tension 

Working with time against the grain of linear futures

How do different disciplines and epistemologies configure time across scales, individual to planetary, local to systemic, and how do these affect anticipatory practice?

How can temporality be rethought as plural, contested, and relational within anticipatory practices? 

How can macro-scale strategies be translated into local daily actions? 

How does intergenerational dialogue enable new capacities for acting across temporal scales? 

How can we navigate paradoxical tensions between short- and long-term horizons? 

How do time–space relations shape anticipatory practices? 

How do queer perspectives challenge temporalities of anticipation? 

What forms of time are silenced or erased by coloniality and modernity, and how can they be reactivated? 

2. Critical Capacities and Futures Literacy 

Learning, unlearning, and making futures accessible

How are anticipatory capacities cultivated, and by whom? 

What literacies, methods, or practices expand how futures are sensed, taught, or critiqued? 

How can design practices be reshaped to make futures more accessible? 

How do educational, community, and organizational infrastructures foster futures literacy and anticipatory capacities? 

How do affect, emotion, and desire shape processes of anticipatory learning and unlearning? 

What can futures literacy learn and unlearn from feminist and queer pedagogies? 

What role does unlearning play in dismantling harmful or limiting imaginaries of the future? 

How can futures literacy be reframed as a collective, situated, and relational process rather than a set of individual capabilities in post normal times? 

3. Governance, Justice, and the Public 

Anticipation as situated political practice

How do norms emerge or dissolve in crisis-driven futures? 

Who is included or excluded in public futuring, and how can anticipation reproduce or reimagine governance? 

How can communities be empowered to create and act on their own futures? 

How do geopolitical narratives shape dominant future imaginaries? 

How do borders, whether territorial, cultural, digital, or epistemic, shape the visibility, accessibility, and legitimacy of different futures and those who imagine them? 

How can futures practice respond to displacement, conflict, and migration? 

How can decolonial and queer perspectives shape ethical, plural, and just futures? 

How can anticipatory practices be mobilized to imagine post-border futures in response to conflict, migration, or ecological breakdown? 

4. Embodying and Sensing Futures 

Affects, aesthetics, and modes of sensing the not-present not-past

How can affect and aesthetics help us dwell with uncertainty rather than resolve it? 

How are hope, anxiety, wonder, or estrangement entangled in anticipatory practice? 

What does a feminist ethics of affect and embodiment bring to anticipatory practice? 

How can we rework or deconstruct utopian and dystopian frames? 

How does belonging and positionality influence anticipatory processes? 

How might design, art, and narrative become speculative tools for staying with the unknown? 

What role does aesthetic practice play in challenging technocratic future-making? 

In what ways can transitions be felt, narrated, and embodied? 

5. Futuring by Designing 

Making worlds as a mode of thinking

How can design act as inquiry into the unknown? 

What kinds of speculative, participatory, or counter-hegemonic practices unsettle dominant futures? 

How can anticipatory design address systemic challenges across scales and stakeholders? 

Lost in translation, what gets lost, or found, in the act of scaling futures? 

How can design foreground situated, embodied, or more-than-human futures? 

How can design futures resist colonial logics of extraction, domination, and universality? 

In what ways can design enact hope as a method of anticipation? 

Can design foreground sustainability as a relational and anticipatory practice? 

6. Caring Futures 

Hope as material and relational practice

In what ways does care and hope expose the uncertainties and paradoxes of futures? 

What ethical frames emerge from caring and collaborative approaches to futures? 

How might situated hope act as a generative force for cultivating more livable futures? 

Can we build systemic futures that center justice, care, or posthuman entanglements? 

What do feminist perspectives reveal about the politics of care, repair, and maintenance in futures work? 

Are there any new imaginaries and transitions able to reshape the planetary beyond dominant technocratic paradigms? 

What new modes of transition, material, spiritual, narrative, are being crafted beyond dominant technocratic paradigms? 

What responsibilities arise when caring for futures across asymmetrical and colonial histories? 

What happens when visions of hopeful futures diverge, conflict, or compete? 

7. Open Explorations 

For contributions that don’t fit established themes

This theme is open to contributions that surprise us, resist categorization, or explore anticipation in ways not captured by the outlined topics.

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Formats

Paper Sessions

You may submit an abstract which will be organized into similar themes by the conference committee and discussed collectively in a chaired session. Contributors will have 15 minutes for a presentation. Abstracts can be submitted on any topic addressed by the call and identified through keywords to be selected during the application process. Proposals should be of no more than 1000 words and should include: an abstract outlining the substantive issues to be explored in the paper, a discussion of how the abstracts relates to the existing research, literature and/or practice in the field, and the connection with conference themes. 

Curated Sessions

These 90 minute sessions are intended to share new knowledge and generate interdisciplinary discussion. These sessions should address one (or more) of the questions outlined above and actively involve a number of different disciplines. Session Curators should gather 3-4 other registered speakers to co-create a cohesive session, designed to be interactive. We are keen to encourage more diverse formats in these curated sessions.

They might include, for example, a participatory experience that invites embodied exploration of different concepts or practices of anticipation; a symposium of four papers and a discussant; a set of multiple inputs of different forms, designed to elicit conversation and reflection. The remit is to facilitate deep conversation and reflection amongst the conference participants. The choice of format lies with the Session Curators. 

Proposals should be of no more than 1000 words and should include: an abstract outlining the substantive issues to be explored in the session and how these relate to the conference themes, a summary of the format being proposed (as well as any specific technical/space requirements where necessary), a (short) summary of the contributions of each of the curators as well as of any underlying research, scholarship or practice upon which the session is based, and contact details for the named curator.

Workshops and Experiential Formats

These sessions are designed to enable practitioners and researchers to test out or share new techniques in the practice or study of anticipation. These are hands-on experiences with high levels of interactivity explicitly designed to garner feedback to improve the approach. They may also take more flexible or speculative forms, allowing space for process-based, performative, or otherwise experimental engagements with anticipatory practice. Workshop organizers will specify the duration (30’ minimum and 90’ maximum) for the workshop and indicate the maximum number of participants, who will be required to register beforehand. 

Proposals should be of no more than 1000 words and should include: details of the processes and format of the session, the intellectual or artistic foundations of the workshop, and the nature of participant experience. Workshop organizers will be expected to provide their own materials (but should indicate any special technical or space requirements).

Anticipation 2026 PhD Summer School

This format is specifically dedicated to doctoral researchers, early-career scholars and practitioners wishing to take part in the Anticipation 2026 PhD Summer School: Designing within Paradox, 29-30 June. The summer school offers a unique setting in which participants will combine inspirational talks from invited speakers with hands-on activities and collective reflection. It is designed as a space for in-depth discussion, peer-to-peer exchange, and experimentation around the role of design in reconfiguring governance amidst paradox, institutional unfitness, and ethical dislocation. PhD candidates are invited to submit an abstract of 500–700 words (excluding references). Submissions should include: a brief description of the PhD topic under exploration; the methodology used for the investigation; the expected or emerging results; a clear articulation of how the research connects with the PhD Summer School theme “Designing within Paradox: Reconfiguring Governance in Times of Institutional Unfitness and Ethical Dislocation.” In addition, participants are encouraged to formulate provocations that can open ground for dialogue and debate during the school. These provocations should highlight tensions, questions, or critical perspectives that might enrich collective exploration. The results of the summer school will be shared by participants in a dedicated panel at the conference and may also be collated for future publication opportunities. Further details will be provided directly to selected participants. If submitting your abstract to the PhD Summer School, please make sure to select the appropriate option during submission phase in both topic and format. 

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