Futures4Europe Conference 2026
The Futures4Europe Conference, to be held in Rome, returns for its second edition in Rome from 30th september to the 1st of october 2026, building on the inaugural event held in Vienna in May 2025. The conference series takes its name from futures4europe.eu, the online hub for foresight in Europe. Both the conference and the platform were developed within the EU-funded project Eye of Europe.
Call for contributions
Proposals should be submitted before 1st May 2026 at 18:00 CET through the form available at this link. Approximately 50 contributions will be selected by an evaluation committee and will be invited to join the conference in presence.
Europe and the world are living through times of profound change, marked by discontinuities, systemic crises, and far-reaching transitions. These challenges can also be understood as products of inherited and increasingly inadequate imaginaries. Such conditions urgently demand to re-open the future through renewed ways of probing the possible.
Foresight creates spaces where future imaginaries are produced, negotiated and contested and new relations between knowledge, values, and action can emerge. At the same time, foresight cultivates awareness of imaginative processes and supports their reflexive examination.
The Futures4Europe conference invites foresight practitioners, Research & Innovation experts, and future-sensitive artists and creators to reflect on and expand imagination as a collective epistemic force—one that shapes how societies sense, interpret, and act toward the future.
Themes for the 2026 edition
The conference welcomes contributions on different interconnected aspects of imagination:
- The role of imagination in anticipatory processes. This theme examines how imagination shapes the way futures are perceived, explored, and enacted. It focuses on the cognitive and affective mechanisms that enable futures imagination, as well as the methods and practices that cultivate, guide, or constrain imaginative capacity within foresight processes.
- Collective Imaginaries and the Myths of the Future. Futures are shaped by shared narratives, metaphors, and myths. This theme examines how collective imaginaries organise social expectations, how cultural production acts as a laboratory for the future, and how foresight can disrupt and renew dominant imaginaries of progress, crisis, or salvation.
- Plural Futures and Inclusive Foresight. This theme invites perspectives from diverse epistemologies and ontologies (e.g. Indigenous, postcolonial, feminist, ecological, AI-mediated), and explores how futures literacy, technologies, and inclusive foresight practices enable the imagination of multiple worlds.
- Foresight, Imagination, and Policy Action. Imagination shapes how futures enter policy and decision-making. This theme focuses on imaginative approaches to anticipatory governance, the translation of scenarios and visions into institutions, and the tensions between creativity, evidence, accountability, and political realities.
- Experiential, Embodied, and Affective Foresight. Beyond analysis and cognition, foresight often engages emotions, bodies, and lived experience. This theme highlights embodied, immersive, and artistic approaches, such as role-play, performance, installations, and XR, that deepen engagement with futures while raising ethical, relational, and inclusion-related questions.
Formats and Contributions
The conference welcomes a wide range of contribution formats, including:
- Academic presentations or articles
- Videos and visual narratives
- Installations and artistic or performative interventions
- Posters and interactive formats
- Foresight laboratories, tools, rituals for anticipation, and facilitation approaches fostering “out-of-the-box” futures thinking.
Contributions submitted by young foresight experts and future-sensitive artists are highly encouraged.
Attendance
Participation is free of charge for all contributors with accepted proposals (papers, films, installations, etc.).
Travel and accommodation costs are not covered by the conference organisers.
The programme of the conference and the registrations for participation will be accessible later in 2026.
For further info you can write to eoe_romeconference@cnr.it.
