ifk SUMMER ACADEMY 2026

25. August – 02. September 2026, Traunkirchen, Austria

longtermism 

The ifk Summer Academy 2026 will open up time and space for both academic and artistic research. It will approach the topic of longtermism from historical, theoretical and political perspectives by sounding out the different aspects of longtermistic thinking. Also, we will be reflecting on longtermism as artistic and epistemic strategy.

In Western industrialized nations, the average life expectancy is around eighty years. It seems difficult for many of us to think beyond this time span, and there are only few projects and institutions that take a more durational approach: few companies live for more than fourty years, and large corporations have an even shorter lifespan. This is more difficult to measure in the case of states, but most of the world's states are only a few decades old. Some Universities are institutions with hundreds of years of age, and religions can measure thousands of years, yet having undergone major changes. The oldest institutions in Europe are therefore the Catholic Church and, remarkably, a few very old breweries. In Japan, there are inns and guest houses that are more than a thousand years old. In comparison, parliamentary democracies are hardly able to plan beyond the next legislative period; the next election campaign is sure to come. Websites on the internet rarely last longer than two to three years. But perhaps it is possible to learn to think in very long time frames. And considering that we want humanity to survive for as long as possible, maybe we should. What makes people and institutions able to plan very far ahead? The question becomes even more urgent as we realize that “webs of life” that have been built over centuries and millenia are becoming fragile, affecting lifecycles of organisms and seasonal rhythms. And what about climate change with its effects on human, non-human and even geological modes of existence? ifk’s next Summer Academy will explore this longtermism, a way of thinking that goes beyond our lifetime and also beyond the lifetime of the many large and small institutions around us.

Participants will work in smaller groups with one faculty member and we will convene regularly in plenary sessions. The PhD-projects of the participants are expected to be presented for discussion, although not necessarily as a lecture, but in a different format that will be communicated beforehand. The ifk-Academy aims to facilitate the exchange of research methods and ideas between the humanities (Kulturwissenschaften) and artistic research.

 

ifk FACULTY

Anna Echterhölter (Vienna: history of science)

Julia Grillmayr (Linz: cultural studies/cultural theory)

Liv Nilsson Stutz (Kalmar/Växjö: archaeology)

Michael Wagreich (Vienna: geology, stratigraphy)

 

RESEARCH GROUPS

Research Group 01: On Grits and Values. Revisiting the Chronological Infrastructure of Time 
(Anna Echterhölter, Vienna)

Before globalised capitalism and unified legal systems were introduced there was a sheer abundance of ways to keep time. Does the fact that we now measure time with precision against atoms or the meridian of Greenwich tamper with the many rhythms of an ecology?

Research Group 02: Deep Pasts and Far Futures in Speculative Fiction
(Julia Grillmayr, Linz)

Science Fiction, Weird Fiction and Eco-Horror often speculate about (almost) unimaginable time loops far ahead and far back. We will follow some fictional and actual bogs, caves, water bodies and nuclear waste repositories to think about notions like »deep time«, »the planetary« or »the more-than-human«.

 

 

Research Group 03: Humanity—The Creative and Destructive Species. Learning from a deep past perspective on the Anthropocene
(Liv Nilsson Stutz, Kalmar/Växjö)

Taking a deep and interdisciplinary perspective on humanity, as a bio-cultural species, engaging with and affecting her environment in creative and destructive ways, we will explore how we can understand the effects of our species in a long-term perspective.

 

Research Group 04: Deep(est) Time in Geology and Anthropocene Debates
(Michael Wagreich, Vienna)