International Conference
“Word in Education”
12th Edition
Hope and Sense in the Age of Technology
will be held at
CEU Universitat Abat Oliba
Assembly Hall
C/ Bellesguard, 30
Barcelona
15 – 17 October 2026
In 2012, the research group “Family, Education and Inclusive School” (TRIVIUM), led by Dr. Marcin Kazmierczak at Universitat Abat Oliba CEU, launched a series of transdisciplinary international conferences inspired by the same spirit as the group. After eleven successful editions, the International Conference “Word in Education”, organized in collaboration with Ignatianum University in Krakow, represented by the Dean of the Faculty of Education, Dr. Krzysztof Biel, and the University of Antwerp, represented by Dr. Walter van Herck, returns for its twelfth edition to Universitat Abat Oliba CEU, under the direction of Dr. Miguel Ángel Barbero-Barrios.
The present edition of the conference “Word in Education” proposes hope as both an object of study and a guiding principle for research and socio-technical design in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, marked by the rise of AI use, process automation, and bio-digital advances. From a humanistic perspective, we understand hope as a practical virtue that orients collective ends, pathways, and agency—that is, as a competence for projecting verifiable futures and coordinating action under conditions of uncertainty (Kant; Snyder), rather than as a diffuse phenomenon.
In dialogue with Christian philosophy, hope acquires normative depth: from Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas, it is conceived as a drive toward an arduous good that avoids both technocentric presumption and despair; in Benedict XVI (Spe Salvi), it requires memory, truth, and community. This framework allows us to distinguish concrete utopias (Bloch) from empty futurisms and to critically assess technological promises in light of risks such as data capture, bias, and heteronomy (Arendt; Zuboff).
From the perspective of literature, we propose reading hope as a driving force of narrative imagination, functioning as a laboratory of possibility—from utopia and dystopia to testimony that sustains agency in contexts of harm—thus refining criteria to distinguish genuine promise from empty rhetoric.
Educational sciences advocate for a critical hope that is institutionalized not merely in declarations but in practices of dialogue, co-design, digital literacy, and the evaluation of one’s own formation. Likewise, psychology—through Hope Theory—offers tools to measure and cultivate hope in teams and communities affected by algorithmic systems, linking it to well-being, self-efficacy, and resilience in contexts of automation.
In sum, we invite academic communities from different fields to show how hope illuminates concepts, informs methods, and guides practices so as to transform techno-industrial potential into shared freedom and the common good.