The first NNCT conference takes its cue from a well-known quote by Antonio Gramsci:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. In this interregnum, monsters appear.

Several authors (Fraser 2019, Stahl 2019, Streeck 2024, Ó Rálaigh 2025) have applied Gramsci’s diagnosis to our own time. Old structures and practices get merged with technological revolution and neoliberal globalization into a “polycrisis” (Tooze 2022). Today’s global capitalism takes its intrinsic dynamics of acceleration, alienation and impoverishment to levels that threaten both the human and the non-human foundations for life. Digital technologies and social media have become tools for authoritarian and fascist movements; brutal wars drive technological development; and the unreflected use of AI puts labour and the production of knowledge at risk.

The conference will examine which analytic and normative tools critical theory can offer in order to develop a critical and emancipatory understanding of this situation and the social forces that operate in it. We invite contributions from philosophy, sociology, economics and related discplines. Relevant thematic areas include:

• the political epistemology of social media and large language models
• the political economy of militarization
• persisting mechanisms of exclusion in plural societies
• critical diagnoses of neoconservativism, -fascism and -imperialism
• global redistribution and existential anxiety in the age of climate catastrophe
• the nature of labour and the situation of employees in the age of artificial intelligence
• perspectives for a future after the interregnum.

Keynotes:
Nikita Dhawan
Rahel Jaeggi (to be confirmed)

The call for abstracts is available here (deadline April 30th).