11 | LUHMANN CONFERENCE 2026

Call for papers

Book of Abstracts

Conference Theme

Building on ongoing debates within social systems theory and beyond, the conference particularly welcomes contributions engaging with one or more of the following orientations:

• Meaning and observation: second-order observation, reflexivity, and the observation of observation in social and psychic systems.
• Psychic systems, consciousness, personality, and personhood: renewed engagement with consciousness, sense-making, psychology, psychotherapy, and their relation to identity formation across psychic and social systems.
• Artificial and technological mediation of meaning: AI, artificial communication, algorithmic decision premises, and their implications for meaning-processing systems and structures of expectation.
• Possibility, contingency, and alterity: forms of meaning that resist closure, reduction, or authoritarian simplification; imagination, counterfactuals, and non-necessary social orders.
• Meaning and society: values, polarisation, populism, inter-systemic relations, pathologies of meaninglessness, and strategies of complexity reduction.
• Expanding architectures of meaning: theoretical work that revisits or extends established three-dimensional models of meaning, including novel distinctions, questions, or sub-programmes within systems theory.

These themes are not exhaustive. Contributions from sociology, organisation studies, political theory, economics, education, cultural studies, literary studies, communication and media studies, cybernetics, philosophy, and related fields are explicitly encouraged, provided they engage meaning as a central analytical concern.

The conference aims to create a shared space for observing how meaning is currently being observed—and for experimenting with alternative ways of doing so. In this sense, the Luhmann Conference 2026 is conceived as both a continuation of, and an intervention in, contemporary systems-theoretical discourse.

By foregrounding meaning as a medium rather than a settled concept, the conference seeks to stimulate theoretical innovation, empirical exploration, and productive friction across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. It also marks a step toward a broader reflection on the future directions of Luhmannian scholarship in an era shaped by technological co-evolution and intensified societal complexity.

Offical web page.