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Abundant Imaginaries: Virtual Student Symposium on Indigenous Futures
Call for Proposals Now Open!
When? May 2026
Where? Zoom (click here for link)
Who? Students at all levels of study (Diploma, Undergrad, MA, PhD)
Call for Proposals: The future of artificial intelligence is far from set in stone, despite what tech CEOs and billionaires might claim. The corporate push towards building a superhuman ‘artificial general intelligence’ and the integration of commercial AI systems into every aspect of our lives is driven by a narrow set of imaginaries and interests. How can we disrupt and problematize those imaginaries, and work towards shaping our own AI futures?
“One way to move forward without being paralyzed by this ostensibly omnipotent amalgam of systems that revolve around AI,” note Jason E. Lewis and colleagues (2025),
is to resist AI as a monolith. AI, as conceived in the Western research and technology matrices, is often thought of as a singular project. Abundant Intelligences points toward the multiplicity of AI. This is not an effort to “catch up” with the state of the art. Rather, we start from the discontents and carve out a different path for developing technology altogether.
Shaping our own AI futures will require, in other words, an abundance of imaginaries for what those futures may hold and what role technologies might play within them.
The Abundant Imaginaries Virtual Student Symposium aims to create a space for sharing and generating unique, culturally-grounded, and subversive AI imaginaries: a platform for discussion, resistance, hope, and collective future-building. The Symposium will feature research and creative works from Abundant Intelligences’ students around the world, along with a keynote discussion on AI Futures facilitated by researchers from the network.
Interested in Participating?
We’re calling on students and learners to share research, stories, imaginaries, and other creative outputs that engage with future imaginaries of AI through Indigenous Knowledges, epistemologies, arts, and cultural contexts.
We welcome proposals for research presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and creative outputs that fit broadly within the theme of Indigenous AI futures. Submissions from students at any stage of study are welcome. All presentations will take place virtually.
Click here to access the application form.
If you’d like to submit a short proposal (200-400 words), please fill out this form by Friday January 16, 2026. (More details on abstracts and presentation types is available on the form).
We will aim to notify successful applicants no later than two weeks after this deadline.
If you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us via robert.marinov@mail.concordia.ca.
Opportunities
Event
Impact
Call for Applications
Student Feature
Speakers:
Robert Marinov
Ceyda Yolgörmez
Location:
Canada
Featured People
Robert Marinov
Robert Marinov is a current PhD candidate whose doctoral research focuses on the growth of Digital Twins as sustainability solutions, exploring the environmental and normative impacts of their embedding within Canadian discourse, policy, and practice. His work has been published in journals including the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Communication Review, Politics & Policy, and Critical Studies in Media Communication, and has been presented at international conferences in Bologna, Italy, and Berlin, Germany. He has also made media appearances and publications for The Conversation Canada and Radio-Canada’s Bonjour La Côte.
Ceyda Yolgörmez
Ceyda Yolgormez is a Postdoc at the Indigenous Futures Research Cluster, working in the Abundant Intelligences Research Program. Her PhD work brought together social theory and interactive technologies, such as large machine learning models or social robots, to consider how our conceptions of the social are changing. Her PhD dissertation proposes a framework for a sociology of machines that reimagines human-machine relations. Her research looks at playful and creative engagements with machines as a site to explore and experiment with human machine socialities, and is interested in methodologies that reveal and trouble the common-sensical way in which we understand such relations.