Call for Papers

SCOPE

The Apocalypse is Not Coming (TANC) transdisciplinary conference invites paper submissions to its thematic panels, which examine both the destructive and transformative energies of crisis, aiming to unpack apocalyptic imaginaries while also exploring regenerative responses across diverse fields and practices. Each panel offers a distinct analytical lens and welcomes theoretical contributions from any relevant discipline. 

PANEL LIST

• Can we transcend collapse by making accessibility foundational to regenerative world-building?
• Is technology the answer to loneliness?
• What is geological agency?
• Artificial Intelligence: friend or foe?
• How do apocalyptic imaginaries feed authoritarian environmental futures?
• (Un)Worlding: What futures do children and youth imagine?
• How can cities be just and regenerative?
• (How) can environmental education make space for uncertainty, community and radical care?
• What is left of the ruins of progress in (post)apocalyptic times?

Panel details below.

FORMAT OF PANEL SESSIONS

Panel sessions will last 90 minutes. Panel organizers will define the internal structure of the session, combining paper presentations and collective discussion. 

SELECTION PROCESS

After the submission deadline, all proposals will be forwarded to the panel organizers. Organizers will review proposals directly and will select 2 to 5 papers for inclusion in their panel session. Selection will be based on the proposal’s relevance to the panel theme, clarity of argument, and contribution to the theoretical aims of the conference.

SUBMISSION PROCESS

Proposals should be submitted through the online form. Please submit your paper to only one panel. Panel descriptions are outlined below. Abstracts can be presented in English, Catalan or Spanish as indicated at the end of each panel description. 

Deadline: 11 January 2026

Extended deadline! 18 January 2026

Notification of acceptance: 31 January 2026

The TANC conference does not charge registration fees. Participation is free with prior online registration.

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Can we transcend collapse by making accessibility foundational to regenerative world-building?

Is technology the answer to loneliness?

This panel explores how contemporary technologies reshape cultural, psychological, and political understandings of connection and isolation. Rather than assuming that digital systems naturally reduce loneliness, the panel positions technology as a space in which loneliness is produced, intensified, or reconfigured. Drawing on interdisciplinary work across digital sociology, psychology, philosophy of technology, and media anthropology, we examine the paradox that tools designed to connect people frequently deepen the structural, relational, and existential loneliness characteristic of the present.

To orient this inquiry, the panel introduces the technosocial paradox: the condition within which technologies offer unprecedented ‘connection’ and visibility while simultaneously fragmenting relational life, accelerating attention scarcity, and eroding the temporal depth required for meaningful connection. Within this landscape, loneliness becomes both a public health concern and a commercial opportunity, increasingly reframed as a problem to be optimised or automated. Yet lived experiences of loneliness point toward the broader deterioration of communal infrastructures, collective identity, and embodied forms of belonging. 

Debates about whether technology alleviates or amplifies loneliness gather around what this panel terms the loneliness triad:

• Solutionists, who view digital companions, robots, and virtual environments as scalable loneliness interventions;
• Critics of platformisation, who highlight how attention economies and algorithmic systems commodify intimacy and fragment social worlds;
• Relational ecologists, who emphasise hybrid, community-grounded forms of connection where technology plays a supporting (and positive) rather than substitutive role.

The panel invites contributions from any discipline that interrogate how technologies mediate loneliness, whether as remedy, accelerant, or structural driver. Topics may include digital companionship (including AI romantic relationships), parasociality, platform capitalism and disconnection, cultural imaginaries of loneliness, communal and ecological modes of belonging, the political economy of care, hybrid relational practices, and slow or post-digital approaches to connection. Ultimately, the panel argues for moving beyond the reductive notion of “technology as solution”, using loneliness instead as a lens for rethinking social infrastructures, digital ethics, and the conditions of belonging in an increasingly technologised world.

The panel will accept papers written in English.

Session organizers

Nicholas Norman Adams. Permanent Research Fellow at Robert Gordon University, Scotland. His work examines the intersections of masculinity, mental health, technology, and capitalism, with a focus on collective anxiety as a structural condition. He recently published The Beau Idéal Has Been Disconnected: A Technology-Capitalist Realism Perspective on Immediate Modernity’s Anxiety Pandemic (2025, Culture Unbound) and is developing a monograph on Immediate Modernity, Investigatory Accelerationism, and The Decline. His research spans psychology, gender theory, sociology, cultural theory, and political philosophy, exploring crisis and collapse as cultural hegemonies while investigating how such ruptures can also generate new forms of connective regeneration.

Salpi Özgür. Works in non-formal education with a focus on civic learning, democratic participation, and social transformation. She is currently leading a project on isolation, exploring how educational practices can counter fragmentation, disconnection, and the erosion of solidarity. Her approach treats learning as a political act that rebuilds the capacity to relate, deliberate, and act together. With experience in human rights education, intercultural dialogue, and youth empowerment, she develops participatory environments that link personal experience to collective responsibility. Her current work examines loneliness as a lens for rethinking belonging, care, and accountability in democratic cultures.

What is geological agency?

In recent decades, debates on climate change, the environmental polycrisis, and fossil capitalism have amplified apocalyptic imaginaries and underscored the urgency of adopting planetary perspectives capable of grasping the scale of human impacts on Earth. This panel proposes geological agency as a conceptual lens for interrogating the entanglements of society, nature, and nonhuman actors in times of crisis. Situated within the emerging field of geoanthropology, our approach critically rethinks the epistemic and political configurations that shape planet–society relations and the imaginaries of collapse and regeneration they engender. 

From a historiographical standpoint, we trace shifting forms of geological agency through four emblematic motifs, each of which the panel’s talks will develop: (1) the Steno motif, which inaugurates stratigraphic understandings of time and nature; (2) the Cartesian motif, which consolidates a mechanistic and anthropocentric worldview alongside counter-currents that advocate a holistic, organic conception of the planet; (3) the Vernadsky motif, which reframes the biosphere as an energetic system and advances holistic ecological perspectives; and (4) the Crutzen motif, which crystallizes Anthropocene debates and the recognition of human-induced planetary transformations. We place these Eurocentric, historically male-dominated genealogies in dialogue with historiographies from the Global South—particularly Latin America—to decenter canonical narratives. 

By juxtaposing these motifs with geopolitical events and ecological thought, our contributions highlight the dynamic, contingent, and politically situated character of geological agency. This comparative framework not only illuminates historical narratives of crisis and collapse but also opens space for regenerative responses across cultural, scientific, and political domains.

This panel will accept papers in English.

Session organizer

Giulia Gandolfi. Postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her work focuses on the role of biology and medicine in the Anthropocene. She has combined her interest in historical epistemology with the study of artificial intelligence in her project on interpretability in clinical and diagnostic contexts, within the framework of the AI FORENSICS project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Artificial Intelligence: friend or foe?

This panel examines how emerging forms of artificial intelligence reconfigure contemporary imaginaries of apocalypse and utopia.  In order to do so, the panel will build on the notion of artificial ultra-intelligence, understood as an artificial (synthetic) cognitive architecture whose capacities extend not merely beyond human performance in isolated domains, but beyond the boundaries of anthropocentric comprehension altogether (Gonzales Martinez, 2025a). Central to this notion is the concept of the technological singularity: the hypothetical threshold at which artificial systems surpass human-level general intelligence and initiate recursive, self-directed improvement, producing forms of cognition that accelerate away from human oversight. The singularity marks a horizon of epistemic and ontological rupture where prediction, meaning, and reasoning no longer operate within familiar frames for the human mind.

Debates on the apocalyptic or the utopian role of AI unfold within what this panel terms the artificial intelligence triad: the three dominant and often polarized intellectual orientations shaping discourse around advanced AI: 

• Accelerationists, who embrace rapid technological progression and often view the singularity as desirable, inevitable, or emancipatory; 
• Safetyists, who foreground existential risk, alignment, and control, seeking to slow or regulate AI development to prevent catastrophic harm; 
• Skeptics, who doubt the plausibility of superintelligence or the singularity, resisting both techno-utopian and techno-apocalyptic narratives.

This panel aims to foster rigorous dialogue across these epistemic communities and to interrogate the tensions generated by their conflicting imaginaries, assumptions, and political commitments. We welcome contributions from any field of knowledge and in any format that can contribute to explore how AI may act as a catalyst, amplifier, or disruptor of  apocalypse and utopian projections. 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Clarifying the singularity: artificial general intelligence (AGI), synthetic superintelligence, and non-anthropocentric cognitive regimes.
• AI-driven synchronization of both catastrophic and utopian processes: financial, ecological, social, or informational collapses.
• Utopian and dystopian imaginaries of AI in literature, philosophy, film, and digital culture.
• Techno-mythologies, prophecy, and speculative futures that shape public perceptions of AI.
• Epistemic and political tensions among the triad of accelerationist, safetyist, and skeptical AI communities.
• Ethical, ontological, and affective dimensions of human–machine coexistence. 
• Posthuman agency and post-apocalyptic reconstruction in a world of artificial ultra-intelligence beyond human comprehension.

Ultimately, this panel invites participants to step beyond analytical boundaries and into a zone of radical speculation, where artificial ultra-intelligence becomes not merely an object of study but a prism for reimagining the potential apocalyptic fate of worlds (Gonzales Martinez, 2025b).

References

Gonzales Martinez, R. M. (2025a). ULTRA: Dystopian Nightmares and Utopian Dreams of Artificial Intelligence. University of Groningen Press. Available at: https://books.ugp.rug.nl/ugp/catalog/book/238 

Gonzales Martinez, R. M. (2025b). Apocalypsis and Apocalyptic Events: The Morphogenetic Ontology of Synchronized Catastrophes. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.25431 

This panel will accept papers in Spanish and English.

Session organizer

Rolando Gonzales Martinez. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Groningen and a researcher at Oxford University, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, catastrophe theory, and apocalyptic studies. His research combines machine learning with satellite and survey data, grounded in Deleuzian post-anarchist epistemology and South American existentialist ontology. He holds a PhD from the University of Agder and an MSc in Applied Statistics from the University of Alcalá. His work spans sustainable development, vulnerability analysis, Bayesian methods, and biologically inspired AI. He is the author of Ultra, a study on the epistemology and ontology of synthetic superintelligence. Dr. R.M. Gonzales Martinez also received a Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at Heidelberg University (Germany).

How do apocalyptic imaginaries feed authoritarian environmental futures?

This panel explores how apocalyptic imaginaries—visions of ecological collapse, scarcity, and planetary ruin—nourish the rise of authoritarian environmental futures. Discourses of impending catastrophe increasingly underpin calls for centralized authority, ecological austerity, and technocratic control.

Rather than treating the resurgence of eco-fascism and authoritarian environmentalism as anomalies, this panel situates them within a longer history of crisis politics: how the language of emergency, necessity, and survival transforms ecological anxiety into a rationale for hierarchy and control. It interrogates how end-of-world narratives become fertile ground for exclusionary, nationalist, and anti-democratic projects. Far from being new, the entanglement of environmental concern with authoritarian ideologies has deep roots—from early twentieth-century “blood-and-soil” ecologies to fascist conceptions of natural order and purity. Today, as climate crises intensify, far-right and state actors alike increasingly mobilize apocalyptic tropes of crisis, survival, and rebirth to legitimize borders, discipline, and domination in the name of planetary preservation.

This panel asks: What kinds of futures are imagined when environmental collapse is framed as inevitable? How do narratives of ecological doom feed desires for order, purity, and security that underpin authoritarian politics? Bringing together historical, theoretical, and cultural analyses, participants examine how apocalyptic imaginaries circulate through far-right ecologies, state policy, and popular culture, reshaping environmental discourse itself.

By situating contemporary apocalyptic imaginaries within the politics of the climate crisis, this panel reveals how the rhetoric of collapse becomes a tool of domination as much as a warning. In line with the conference theme, it underscores the urgent need to recognize and resist the authoritarian futures imagined in the shadow of apocalypse—futures where ecological crisis becomes not a call for justice, but a justification for exclusion, violence, and control.

This panel will accept papers in English, Spanish and Catalan.

Session organizer

Zarina Kulaeva. PhD in Political Science, graduated Cum Laude with an International Mention and received the Extraordinary Award for Best Academic Record in the Doctorate in Law, Politics, and Economics (2024–2025). Her research explores how environmental transformations intersect with political and economic structures, emphasizing governance and public policy implementation. She previously studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and holds a Master’s in Forensic Anthropology (University of Barcelona), a Master’s in Human Rights (OUC), and a postgraduate diploma in Qualitative Research (UNED). Zarina is a founding member of the International Institute of Human Rights – Spain Chapter and an active member of TURBA Lab, a research group focused on urban transformation within global change dynamics.

(Un)Worlding: What futures do children and youth imagine?

In the fictional futurism of ‘The Camille stories: Children of Compost’, Donna Haraway (2016) shares speculative narratives that emerged in a collective writing workshop, which follows five generations of Camille. As a child of Anthropocene (Lack, 2022), this butterfly girl and symbiotic being struggles to preserve the endangered monarch butterfly. In syntony with Staying with the Trouble, we co-construct stories with children and youth through our research, as co-authors of meanings, questions, rebellions and futures. We experiment with new imaginaries, worlds and relationalities that overflow Human centrality to produce new ways of living, feeling and inhabiting. In this way, relational ontology leads us to understand the bonds, memories, desires and affects formed by childhood and youth when ‘making kin’, while confronting adult-centrism, racism and extractivism.  

Together with ecofeminist, Afrofuturist and decolonial perspectives, we will weave, in the company of childhood, constellations of meanings that open cracks in the world as given, thus enabling the creation of multiple and sensitive worlds. This panel discusses the relationships between childhood, youth and more-than-human, including Intra-actions with nature, animals, spirits, other materialities, and the monstrous. Our proposal revolves around these questions: What imaginaries about the apocalypse do other-childhoods create? How are they politically activated ‘in relation’ to transgress (un)known worlds?  What alternatives for survival emerge from the vision of children and young people in the Global South?  We present narratives about (un)worlding inspired by the Common World Research Collective, to explore children’s and youth resistances in the face of social, ecological, political and spiritual crises.

This panel will accept papers in English, Catalan or Spanish.

Session organizers

Joanna Empain & Montse Rifà Valls. Researchers at The Atlas: Critical Intersections in Education research group analyses inequalities and the experiences of subjects through education (children, young people, families, education professionals…) by focusing on their relationships and interdependencies. We are an interdisciplinary research group (2021 SGR 01014) with different methodological approaches: narrative inquiry, autobiography, ethnography, storytelling, arts and design-based research, and multimodal methods. We co-generate knowledge from postfeminist, non-adult-centric, decolonial and collaborative perspectives. From this critical approach we propose to transform education and society from the basis of equity, plurality and agencies to resist and contest the multiple forms of discrimination and exclusion collectively.

How can cities be just and regenerative?

Cities concentrate many of today’s overlapping sustainability challenges: climate extremes, housing precarity, economic instability, and health inequities converge to produce conditions often described in apocalyptic terms. These dynamics not only expose vulnerabilities but also test our collective capacity to imagine viable and just futures under conditions of uncertainty and complexity. Historical legacies of racialized and class-based urban planning continue to shape present vulnerabilities, while contemporary (state-led or private) sustainability agendas often reproduce and perpetuate these inequalities. And yet, urban transformations such as greening and resilience-building projects are necessary to bring important benefits like reducing climate risks and improving public and mental health, even when they can also trigger displacement or mask structural injustices.

This panel invites contributions that explore how urban environmental justice is being redefined in the context of systemic crisis and contested sustainability transitions. Areas of interests for paper submissions and presentations include:

• Sustainability agendas and governance, examining how policy frameworks, institutions, and multi-scalar governance processes can both reproduce inequalities and open pathways for more just and democratic urban transformations.
• Equity in health and wellbeing within marginalized urban populations, with attention to embodied experiences, unequal socio-natures, and policies for just access to environmental benefits.
• The role of grassroots activism in contesting inequities driven by neoliberal urbanism, extractivism, and infrastructure-led development, and in envisioning just urban alternatives.
• Gentrification and exclusion linked to climate-responsive and green infrastructure projects and other urban transformations, alongside civic and policy initiatives to create more inclusive green cities.
• Housing precarity and affordability in the context of climate adaptation and mitigation, including the effects of financialization, and explorations of socially just housing, retrofits, and energy transitions.
• Experimental methodologies—participatory action research, artistic interventions, and critical mapping—that surface hidden injustices and broaden imaginaries of regeneration.

By linking sustainability challenges with justice concerns, the panel seeks to open an experimental space for interdisciplinary dialogue. Contributions will help us reflect on how to confront the “unknowns” of urban futures: how to navigate crisis without reproducing exclusion, and how to cultivate forms of regeneration that are socially equitable, ecologically grounded, and politically transformative. We welcome different kinds of presentations—including work in progress, critical interventions, and multimedia materials—that expand the ways in which urban environmental justice can be studied, represented, and practiced. We encourage submissions from early career scholars, as well as from activists and practitioners engaged in policy, planning, and/or community work.

This panel will accept papers in English, Spanish or Catalan.

Session organizer

Amalia Calderón-Argelich. Postdoctoral researcher with the TURBA Lab at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and an affiliate of the Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ). Her work bridges research and activism, focusing on climate adaptation, housing precarity, and environmental justice. She collaborates closely with community groups, practitioners, and policymakers to address climate gentrification, improve green planning and to co-produce more just and regenerative urban futures. Her approach combines participatory and transdisciplinary methodologies to center the voices of marginalized communities in shaping sustainability transitions.

(How) can environmental education make space for uncertainty, community and radical care?

Across many contexts, learners and educators express a desire for deeper engagement with environmental issues alongside a growing sense of overwhelm. Recent studies show that young people see current environmental education as insufficient and thus the emotional and cognitive fatigue surrounding ecological crises continues to rise. This panel asks how environmental education can move beyond information delivery to enable understanding of scientific complexity (including uncertainty), foster community and support grounded forms of care – particularly in spaces shaped by epistemic tensions between the material, the political, the religious and the social.

We invite contributions that examine one or more of three interlinked dimensions. First, uncertainty as an ontological position: how can science education embrace the unknown as part of learning, rather than treating uncertainty as a deficit? Second, awareness-based community building: how can pedagogies create spaces where cultural, dialogic and power awareness is cultivated, allowing for diverse worldviews, identities and ways of knowing to engage meaningfully, foster agency and participate in collective action? Third, radical care as a frame of action: how can educational practices nurture creativity, resilience and connection in a way that counter paralysis and open possibilities for just more-than-human futures?

We welcome theoretical, empirical and practice-based papers exploring innovations at any educational stage (from early years to higher education). We are interested to hear practices and ideas that help environmental education hold uncertainty, strengthen inter-human and inter-species community-building and sustain radical care. Contributions that share specific pedagogic experiences of being able to navigate situations of conflicting interests, and that explore the tensions between current environmental education and the socio-economic and geopolitical context in which it is taught, are particularly welcome.

This panel will accept papers in English, Catalan or Spanish. This panel will likely take place outdoors. Please make sure you can deliver your research paper without visual aids.

Session organizers

Catherine Walker. Research Fellow in Human Geography at Newcastle University, exploring how children, youth and key adults in their lives are experiencing and responding to environmental challenges. Catherine’s current research focuses on meanings and practices of climate justice, with a particular focus on how both meanings and practices are negotiated intergenerationally in classrooms, and the role of both educators and students in these processes. Catherine is leading the British Academy-funded Classrooms for Climate Justice research collaboration. More info at https://www.ncl.ac.uk/gps/staff/profile/catherinewalker.html 

Tina Sikka. Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice in the School of Arts and Culture at Newcastle University, UK. Her current research includes the critical and intersectional study of science, applied to climate change, bodies, and health, as well as research on consent, sexuality, and restorative justice.Dr. Sikka also works in the areas of decolonisation, bordering practices, and DEI. https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/people/profile/tinasikka.html

Ana Fernández-Aballí Altamirano. Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization (CRCG) of the University of Groningen. BA in Economics. PhD in Communications. Currently explores how ontological and epistemological diversity inform environmental education and policymaking. Specializing in transdisciplinary research, she brings extensive experience working at the intersection of research, advocacy, and intercultural dialogue, engaging with grassroots movements, international NGOs, and intercultural networks in both academic and applied contexts. More info at https://sites.google.com/site/anafernandezaballi/home

What is left of the ruins of progress in (post)apocalyptic times?

The aim of this panel is to explore, like a laboratory in the ruins of progress, in what sense and to what extent what we might call apocalyptic imaginals can operate as philosophical devices that question three bastions of modernity:

1. The linear time of progress: the apocalypse fractures the temporal continuum and reveals tensions between past, present, and future, as well as the possibility of envisioning alternative temporal relations.
2. The universal subject of history: alternative histories of history bring to an end the history of the universal subject—male, white/European, and capital-owning—and fracture its continuum of meaning. In this context, the apocalypse performs an interruption of the hegemonic narrative and enables the plurality of histories that have until now been excluded.
3. The instrumental reason of technique: modern reason collapses in the apocalypse that unfolds in the Anthropocene, understood as the Capitalocene, and calls for considering planetary relational forms beyond speciesism that may reveal other complex ecological rationalities.

Drawing on these three axes of critical reflection, the proposal understands the apocalypse not only as an end—and even less as an inevitable horizon—but as a critical threshold from which to formulate questions about the validity of the conceptual assumptions that structure our symbolic and material context, thereby activating its imaginative potential.

This panel will accept papers in Catalan, Spanish, and English.

Session organizer

Blanca Pérez Díaz. Predoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose thesis focuses on a hermeneutic, genealogical, and ecofeminist analysis of the work of María Zambrano, with the aim of seeking new forms of action in response to the contemporary triple crisis—political, ecological, and spiritual. In this sense, the research works around the proliferation of end-of-the-world narratives and examines to what extent these are symptoms of our present in crisis. What cultural function do these apocalyptic imaginals serve? Do they only have the power to paralyze the imagination, or can they also open alternative horizons?