Mission Statement

The one-day interdisciplinary conference “Inhabiting Uncertain Futures: The Humanities Between Faith, Data, and Imagination” brings together leading scholars and emerging researchers to examine how the humanities can respond to the rapidly shifting conditions of the contemporary world. In an era defined by climate disruption, algorithmic reasoning, political precarity, and post-secular debates, the symposium asks how temporal experience, epistemic practices, and modes of interpretation are being transformed—and what new methodological tools the humanities must develop to remain intellectually generative and socially relevant.

A central element of the event is the doctoral panel “Epistemic Experiments: Rethinking Method through Interdisciplinarity, Relationality and Embodiment,” which showcases innovative approaches developed by PhD researchers representing history, musicology, cultural studies, anthropology, archaeology, theology, philosophy, and art history. Their contributions reveal how the humanities are being reshaped through collaborative knowledge-making, contextualism, the material turn, neurotheological inquiry, multispecies perspectives, and activist methodologies rooted in co-labor and situated participation.

Through keynote lectures by Rodrigo Turin (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro) and Berber Bevernage (Ghent University), as well as a hands-on training session led by Marta Kurkowska-Budzan (Jagiellonian University in Cracow), participants will explore emergent temporalities of the Anthropocene, the ethical and epistemic stakes of post-secular critique, and the potential of innovative qualitative methods—from situational analysis to embodied research practices—to better understand how the past is constructed and how futures are imagined.

The conference aims not only to analyze the shifting epistemic foundations of the humanities, but also to activate and empower doctoral researchers, foster collaboration across disciplines, and cultivate new experimental forms of inquiry that bridge analytical rigor, ethical reflection, and creative imagination. By bringing together scholars at different career stages, the event promotes a model of the humanities grounded in relationality and responsible speculation—an intellectual community capable of thinking with, and living through, uncertain futures.