Does the Future Speak a Foreign Language?

The course focuses on transformations of our linguistic praxis and knowledge production in the context of globalization and rapid technological advance in major fields of economic production, scientific research and communication. It will ask how global capitalism rearticulates linguistic hierarchies and hegemonies? In this context we will detect and discuss the processes of re-vernacularization of national languages and various practices of linguistic and cultural translation. Having in mind that the historical ground of the old baroque infrastructure of academic knowledge is crumbling, the course will also ask what it means to learn today when the vast spaces of knowledge production have been exposed to the processes of commercialization, privatisation and commodification.

The examination will have the form of a curatorial project. The class will organize a conference (possibly public) on the topic of the course, staging lectures, lecture performances, artist presentations and panel discussions for which the students will themselves write and prepare lectures, statements and presentation and organize moderations on different themes of the course. The general idea is that the students themselves create—curate!—a performative presentation of their own textual, visual and discursive contributions. The goal is to support the idea of learning as a performative act that intentionally aims at the addressees beyond the strictly academic framework.

Students from other faculties or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities