Radiant Futures: Spiral celebrateed its 30th Birthday
The Spiral Research Center at the University of Liège celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025. Founded in 1995, Spiral has become a dynamic community of STS researchers practicing basic and applied research, methodological innovation and interdisciplinary conversation across the social sciences and humanities. This anniversary was an opportunity to pause and reflect on the past, present and future; a moment of recollection and anticipation. To mark the occasion, Spiral organized a conference on "Radiant Futures", held at Val-Benoit in Liège on October 9 and 10, 2025.
The Radiant Futures theme was an invitation to reflect on the futures that STS researchers encounter, question, and conceptualize in their own communities, countries and societies. The theme of radiant futures was deliberately ambivalent: radiance can be empowering and destructive; it can connote the transmission of energy and flux, but also pervasive contamination. A smile can be radiant, like a nuclear isotope. Enthusiasm radiates outwards and is contagious, like pathogens. How do we find the right nuance to describe the deep-seated ambivalences that characterize our complex present and will shape our future? Radiant Futures marks our refusal to reduce contemporary and future challenges to a poor alternative between optimism and pessimism, and invites us to reflect on troubled technological, ecological and political futures.
During the conference, we gathered friends and colleagues from the academic community around parallel sessions, and three keynotes each accompanied by its own artistic reverberation! Hannah Landecker's (University of California - Los Angeles) presentation was set in motion by dancer Samuel Delvaux, Brice Laurent's (CSI-Mines Paris-Tech) by mixologist Robin Kayiranga and Kristin Asdal's (University of Oslo) by musicians Fanny Fauconnier and Alison Belflamme.
For Spiral, it was also an opportunity to explore aspects of research that go beyond the academic article or book: action research projects, workshops, activist interventions, games, video art and other experiments. We therefore encourage contributions that adopt speculative, participatory and/or reflexive approaches to the study of Radiant Futures, and that experiment with modes of knowledge production, communication and circulation, are particularly welcome through a "Making & Doing" session and activities set up by the center. In particular, we set up an STS map of Liège and a Toxic Cruise, which conference participants - and other interested audiences - were able to try out.
