«Technology and Language» is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal. The manifold relations of technology and language are subject from the point of view of history, linguistics, cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, literary and media studies.

Founder and publisher: Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. Periodicity of publication: 4 times a year.

In the field of philosophy and cultural studies of technology and engineering, the journal promotes research and reflection on the manifold relations of Technology and Language. These include the grammar of things, design principles, and the rules of composition for the creation of technological systems or devices. Like literature and art, technology and engineering express ideas of human nature and the good life. Language and technology intersect when cooking and building, writing and playing follow instructions or execute programs, also when games, narratives, or amusement parks are propelled by dramaturgical machinery. Technologies simultaneously make up and help navigate today‘s multilingual world by way of techniques and technologies that support language acquisition. The production of written text as well the subjects of science fiction bring new and old technologies into play. — On this wide range of issues, epistemological and ethical analysis complements empirical investigations from history and contemporary culture, from educational and engineering practice. The journal serves as a platform for an interdisciplinary community of researchers and their philosophical, cultural, historical explorations.

The journal  “Technology and Language” is indexed by Scopus .

In “Technology and Language” we care about digital preservation policy. We understand the urgency of archiving and preservation of our journal content. We ensure the accessibility of our content by transferring full-texts and metadata to Russian Scientific Electronic Library  (elibrary.ru), CyberLeninka, Russian State Library, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt  and Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University Electronic Library. In the latter, data safety is ensured by data back-up according to their own internal policy.

The journal is registered by the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Communications, Information Technologies and Mass Communications (ROSKOMNADZOR), the number of certificate EL No. FS 77 - 77604 dated 31.12.2019

Publication in the journal is open and free for all authors regardless of the affiliations. For readers, all content is freely available without charge. They can view, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose.

All publishing expenses are covered by the Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. There is no embargo period.

All articles are subject to compulsory single-blind review. Articles are reviewed by independent reviewers who are experts on the subject of the reviewed materials.

Articles are licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. In addition, authors will sign a license agreement with the Publisher, granting the rights to original publication in Technology and Language.

Main thematic areas covered in the journal:

• history and philosophy of technology
• art, literature, digital culture studies
• social relations in the technosphere
• semiotics, technology, and the order of things
• education and communication, professional culture
• anthropology and technology, human-machine interactions
• principles of construction and design

Supervising editor: Natalia Chicherina

Editor Alfred Nordmanne-mail: nordmann@phil.tu-darmstadt.de

Editor Daria Bylieva e-mail Bylieva_ds@spbstu.ru

Book Review Editor: Andrea Gentili (University of Padua)

Assistant editors: Deng Pan,  Yu Xue, Jessica Lombard

Scientific reviewer: Olga Shipunova

Technical reviewer Irine Berezovskaya

Literary editor (English language): Anna Rubtsova

Literary editor (Russian language): Victoria Lobatyuk

An integrated document of all policies and general information on this site for authors, reviewers, and readers can be downloaded here. It covers the Aims and Scope of the journal, the Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement, a summary of the Peer Review Process and its guiding Principles as well as information about Manuscript Preparation and Submission.

For a quick overview of all published and forthcoming issues and a gallery of covers (designed for each issue by Maureen Belaski) see www.philosophie.tu-darmstadt.de/T_and_L

CfP Theatrum Machinarium - guest editors Yerevand Margaryan and Lucien von Schomberg. Deadline: October 5 for issue 7:4 of Technology and Language (December 2026)

The technologies of the theatre begin with the buildings themselves and how they organize the spectators' orientation towards a performance. They go on with curtains and fly-systems, lighting and sound, with make-up and video projection, with fabrics and props. All of these disclose a space for action of a certain type, they organize perception and the creation of meaning. Theatre, in this sense, does not just operate with technologies but functions as a technology of its own. And so, role-playing is a theatrical technique as are reenactments — and then there is dramaturgy itself and the mechanisms it proposes for the proper incitement of passion. It offers prototypes of relentless machinery that takes the audience to heights and depths of feeling, yet it also proposes counter-strategies to subvert stereotyped plot-lines and cliched emotions.

All of this provides the background to fundamental questions about theatrical technologies. For a long time, the theatre was contrasted to the cinema and the staged drama to a movie. Nowadays, we need to also consider performance art as well as the many types of generative storytelling. We are therefore looking to discuss

theatrical structures for controlling attention and emotion

the stage as a site for excess and failure, of technology breaking down

«deus ex machina» and theatrical devices for revealing truth

technical affordances of subjectivity and agency

the varieties of spectatorship between absorption and theatricality

theatrum machinarium — temporal and spatial organization of experience

dramaturgy and norms for the composition of theatrical elements

text and props as generative material

This range of topics highlights the theatre as a laboratory in which narrative devices are developed, critiqued, and refined. Experimentally it produces social constellations that refract the social world in highly idiosyncratic ways. Its controlled experiments are observed for their uncertain outcomes, allowing the audience to witness a spontaneous recreation night after night.

We are inviting papers from dramaturgy and cultural studies, philosophy and history of technology, literary theory and media studies, STS and design theory. Transdisciplinary reflections are welcome, as is the appreciation of literary devices, or empirical participant-observation of theatrical experiments.
 

CfP Natality — Technologies and Languages of Birth and Becoming (guest editors — Alexander Markov and Christina Schües). Deadline: deadline April 5, 2027 for issue 8:2 (June 2027)

For the one who was «untimely ripped» by Caesarian section, Shakespeare asked whether he is «from a woman born» — a technical intervention transforming human-world relations, reshaping interhuman interaction, and rewriting the grammar of political legitimacy. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the debilitated men dream of «test-tube babies» that bypass the female body altogether. If the 'new comers' are genetically tested and even altered, how is their beginning relation with the (m)other and within society? More recently, popular imagination has been gripped by genetically screened «designer babies.» The idea of «natural birth» has become an elusive dream in light of the countless technologies — from prayer and ritual to ultrasound, surrogacy, and neonatal intensive care — that circumscribe the beginning of life.

And yet, «being born» distinguishes living processes from all that is technologically constructed. Persons are not artefacts. How does it affect the relation between human being and world if life begins in a laboratory, or if the first breath is drawn inside an incubator? Do technologies of natality alter society's conditions and relations? This special issue of Technology and Language shifts the lens of biopolitics from the governance of adult populations to what we call the «zero degree of corporeality» — the stage where the natural remains indistinguishable from the technical, and biology is inextricably intertwined with politics, law, and pedagogy.

From Embryo to Citizen

Contemporary biopolitics scholarship, following Michel Foucault, has focused on the management of populations and the disciplining of adult bodies. We propose a radical ontological shift: from phylogenesis (the metaphor of the social contract) to ontogenesis — the individual’s physiological and pedagogical history. How does a living being's transition from a «state of nature» to a «civil state,» from medicalized state to a political subject state not as a philosophical fiction, but as a concrete, mediated, and contested process?

We invite interdisciplinary contributions that explore natality as a critical nexus where technologies, medicine, law, and pedagogy converge to produce the modern citizen — or, as early modern philosophers put it, the ens politicum (political animal). We are particularly interested in the long eighteenth century (ca. 1650−1800), when the foundations of modern biopolitics were laid, but we strongly encourage papers that extend this inquiry into the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries — including contemporary cases of bioengineering, reproductive technologies, neuroscience, and post-Soviet or non-Western sociotechnical experiments.

Potential Topics (illustrative, not exhaustive)

1. Perinatal Biopolitics of the Early Modern Period
Philosophy of medicine, political embryology, and early childhood pedagogy in the European city of the Enlightenment. How did physicians, midwives, and magistrates negotiate the status of the unborn? Did the experiences of the women — the only witness in the beginning of pregnancy — count?

2. «Expert» Conflicts over the Body
Corporative struggles (physicians vs. surgeons vs. midwives vs. women/families) for control over the fetal and neonatal body. The emergence of narrative medicine, forensic expertise, and fetal surgery.

3. Languages of Life: Statistics, Cameralism, and Natural Law
Politico-arithmetical sciences, theories of the state of nature (Hobbes, Cumberland, Pufendorf), and their surprising links to embryological and physiological models.

4. Maternity, Affect, and Imagination
Cultural histories of pregnancy and childbirth. Debates on maternal imagination (the «maternal impression») and its influence on the fetus. Representations of the female body (vs. male body) in medical and didactic texts.

5. Pedagogy and the Politics of Early Childhood
From Comenius’s utopias to the education of «unnatural» children (deaf-mute pedagogy, teratology, the handling of «monsters»). The continuum of prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care as a site of governance.

6. Socio-Technical Experiments in Ideocratic Regimes
Late Soviet and post-Soviet cases of subject construction: pedagogical experiments, club movements, «soul repair» techniques, organizational mimicry. How did Marxist vitalism shape technologies of the self and society?

7. Technologies of Novelty and the Anthropology of the Future
Philosophical and anthropological concepts of novelty, time, and becoming — from Middle Eastern and non-Western contexts to transhumanist imaginaries of self-reproducing machines.

8. Critical Reassessments of Biopolitics
Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, Esposito — revisited in light of reproductive technologies, gender studies, posthumanism, and disability studies.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS “Beyond the Limits of Language?” (deadline July 5, 2027):

The title of the journal /Technology and Language/ is innocuous enough as long as it refers to the many ways of "talking about technology." It becomes deeply provocative, however, when it suggests the possibility of /Technology as Language/: do the flashes, beeps, and algorithmic outputs of a machine really constitute a language? – In an era of conceptual hyperbole, where we readily attribute "intelligence" to machines, trees, and octopi, we must rigorously ask if we are similarly diluting the concept of "language." While many semiotic systems exist, not all signs are linguistic. A full-fledged language requires syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and crucially, the capacity for displacement: while animals signal to each other, only human language can refer to absent things that happened in the past or only hypothetically. But what, then, about the grammar for composing the elements that will form a machine? And does a given state of a machine also refer to hypothetical states in the future or the past? When Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that "in a sentence, a world is put together experimentally," did he propose an isomorphism between linguistic and technical composition? – We are hoping for a vigorous debate on these questions, including detailed case studies. We are also hoping to hear what pre-modern, modern, and post-modern thinkers from different cultures and traditions have said about this – mystics, analytic philosophers, and linguists alike.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS that appeals to History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, to STS and cultural studies, media and computer science, as well as the natural, social, or engineering sciences: Can AI Revolutionize Science? (deadline: October 5, 2027 – guest editor: Karim Gherab, Madrid)

Scientific revolutions come in two kinds. Some arise from radically new ideas, theories, concepts, some from new methods, tools, instruments. Generative AI appears to be of the latter kind, but might it also create a new paradigm and produce a whole new perspective on the world? We want to consider this question in a wider context. The invention of the printing press and the emergence of scholarly societies and journals fostered the flourishing of the Republic of Letters in the 17th century. Precision instruments advanced quantitative science. More recently, we have witnessed a growth in the scale, funding, and dissemination of “big science” and now “open science.”

Irrespective of whether AI can bring about a whole new way of representing and predicting phenomena, does AI in and of itself revolutionize the ways science and technoscience is done? Perhaps AI transforms all of science into data science. Or perhaps it is only the next step in an ongoing development that began with the computer and with simulation modelling. All this, in turn, may force us to consider separately how theorists and how experimentalists can benefit from their interactions with digital technologies: Is there an instrumental revolution only on the side of prediction from available data, without disclosing new features of reality or making empirical discoveries?

In the past, it was said that the human mind always encounters and recognizes only itself in all its endeavors. Now, a datafied world is represented in a digital “mirror of nature”: the machine encounters only itself in the study of nature. Is the human mind, is intellectual understanding, still the measure of all things —and: has it ever been? Can an artificial neural network develop a revolutionary artificial science that is translatable into human scientific language?