This volume began long before the first call for papers was circulated.
It began with a question: where should conversations about artificial intelligence take place when they concern not only those who design technologies, study them, or work with them professionally, but all of us whose ways of learning, teaching, reading, writing, creating, working, and communicating are already being changed by them?
For us, as scholars and editors working across different academic disciplines, institutions, and international research communities, this question was both intellectual and practical. We recognised that artificial intelligence could no longer be adequately approached as a subject belonging exclusively to computer science or technological innovation. Its implications extended into nearly every domain of human knowledge and experience, raising questions that demanded sustained dialogue across disciplines, professions, cultures, and national boundaries. What was needed, we believed, was not simply another discussion of emerging technologies, but a carefully developed academic initiative capable of connecting diverse intellectual traditions and bringing their insights into meaningful conversation.
In early 2026, this conviction found expression in Limits and Possibilities: Artificial Intelligence in Education, Culture, and Society, a scientific-professional programme developed through our shared academic vision and collaborative efforts, with the Belgrade Youth Center providing a welcoming setting for its public activities. From the outset, our ambition extended beyond a conventional sequence of lectures or discussions. We sought to establish an intellectually coherent and evolving programme in which artificial intelligence could be examined not merely as a technological development, but as a phenomenon transforming education, language, culture, ethics, research, professional practice, and society itself.
The choice to engage a public cultural institution reflected our belief that important academic conversations should not remain confined to universities or specialist research communities. Cultural and educational venues can facilitate encounters among individuals whose perspectives might otherwise remain separated by professional, disciplinary, or institutional boundaries. The Belgrade Youth Center offered a setting in which these discussions could reach a wider audience. Yet the programme’s intellectual direction, thematic development, scholarly engagement, and subsequent international expansion were shaped by the sustained academic and organisational work undertaken to translate this initial vision into a coherent and ambitious scientific initiative.
From February to October 2026, the programme developed through interconnected themes, lectures, panel discussions, and public conversations. Beginning with education and the changing role of teachers, it expanded to consider language, literature, translation, scientific and technological applications, digital safety, critical thinking, the well-being of younger users, cultural memory, ethics, law, employment, and the professions of the future. The thematic progression was deliberate. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as a collection of unrelated technical questions, we sought to illuminate the relationships among its educational, cultural, scientific, and social consequences.
As these conversations developed, it became increasingly apparent that no single discipline possessed a sufficiently comprehensive framework for understanding the transformations taking place. Questions concerning education inevitably led to discussions of language, authorship, assessment, and responsibility. Technological possibilities raised concerns about privacy, trust, inequality, and regulation. Literature and culture brought the discussion back to longstanding questions of creativity, interpretation, memory, and the value attached to human acts of meaning-making. Each theme revealed connections that extended beyond its original disciplinary boundaries.
It was from this recognition, and through our continuing discussions about how to extend the programme’s scholarly reach, that the idea of an international scientific conference emerged.
We envisioned a conference that would move beyond the geographical and institutional boundaries of the original programme, bringing together researchers, educators, scientists, practitioners, and intellectuals from different parts of the world. Our intention was not merely to increase the number of participants or contributions, but to establish a genuinely international and interdisciplinary forum in which different research traditions, methodologies, and perspectives could encounter one another.
Transforming this vision into an international academic undertaking required considerably more than identifying a theme and issuing a call for papers. It involved developing the conference’s conceptual framework, defining its scientific scope, establishing thematic areas, engaging scholars and academic institutions across countries, coordinating contributions, and creating an organisational and editorial structure capable of accommodating a remarkably diverse body of research. As editors and academic coordinators, we approached these responsibilities as interconnected parts of a single scholarly endeavour. Our objective was to build a conference whose intellectual coherence would be reflected not only in its programme but also in the quality, diversity, and international character of its contributions.
This shared editorial and academic leadership has been central to the conference’s development. Through continuous collaboration, scholarly correspondence, coordination, evaluation, and editorial work, we sought to create the conditions in which contributions from different fields and research environments could form part of a wider intellectual exchange. The process demanded careful attention to both the individual character of each contribution and the collective identity of the conference. It also required balancing disciplinary diversity with thematic coherence, international inclusiveness with academic standards, and ambitious scientific objectives with the practical demands of organising a large international scholarly event.
That intention shaped the conference from the outset. Its scope crosses disciplinary boundaries by design, encompassing language and artificial intelligence; education, pedagogy, assessment, and institutional change; literature and culture; translation; the technical and natural sciences; governance, regulation, rights, and work; questions of human meaning, values, philosophy, and spirituality; and international and comparative perspectives. This breadth is fundamental to the conference. Artificial intelligence cannot adequately be understood from within a single field because the changes it brings do not observe the boundaries by which academic knowledge has traditionally been organised.
A linguist may wonder what happens to meaning when language is generated algorithmically. A teacher may ask what becomes of learning when part of the intellectual work can be delegated to a machine. A literary scholar returns almost inevitably to questions of authorship and creativity; a translator, to the delicate relationship between linguistic accuracy and cultural meaning. Legal scholars confront questions of responsibility, regulation, privacy, and rights; psychologists and educators, those of development, well-being, and human agency. In medicine, engineering, environmental science, and other scientific and technical fields, new possibilities emerge alongside new risks and responsibilities. Philosophers, ethicists, theologians, and scholars of culture, in turn, find themselves returning to questions far older than the technology before us: how we understand judgment and responsibility, what we mean by freedom and creativity, and where, amid these changes, we choose to draw the contours of the human.
To bring these voices into the same conversation is not to erase their differences. The differences are precisely the point.
What we could not have fully anticipated was the scale and geographical breadth of the response. The present volume brings together 451 abstracts by 658 authors from 56 countries and territories, affiliated with 228 universities and university-level institutions. These figures reflect not only the international visibility achieved by the conference, but also the extensive scholarly engagement and sustained organisational and editorial efforts required to bring such a diverse academic community together.
Behind these numbers lies a considerable undertaking. Developing international academic connections, facilitating communication among contributors, coordinating submissions, addressing disciplinary and linguistic differences, organising scholarly materials, and preparing a unified volume required continuous attention and close collaboration. For us, the editorial process was never simply an administrative exercise in assembling individual abstracts. It was an opportunity to build connections among researchers working in different academic traditions and to give their contributions a shared intellectual context without diminishing the originality of their individual perspectives.
The significance of the conference’s international participation lies, therefore, less in the numerical scale alone than in what that participation represents: a remarkable range of scholarly traditions, research environments, educational systems, languages, methodologies, and local experiences brought into contact with one another. The development of this international scholarly network has been among the most meaningful outcomes of our collaborative work. It demonstrates what sustained academic initiative, purposeful international engagement, and shared editorial commitment can achieve when directed towards a common intellectual objective.
The contributions themselves testify to that variety. Some are grounded in empirical research; others take theoretical, critical, comparative, or practice-based approaches. Some regard the possibilities opened by artificial intelligence with considerable optimism; others approach them cautiously or sceptically. Many resist either position, asking instead when the use of artificial intelligence is justified, whom it serves, what it changes, and what we may be willing, or unwilling, to give up for what it promises.
Public discussion of artificial intelligence is easily drawn towards extremes: enthusiasm on one side and alarm on the other, promises of transformation set against predictions of loss. Academic inquiry has another task. It must make room for evidence and argument, but also for genuine disagreement. A conference devoted to artificial intelligence should not decide in advance what its participants ought to conclude. It should provide a space in which assumptions can be questioned, claims tested, familiar disciplinary habits unsettled, and seemingly straightforward answers complicated by perspectives arriving from elsewhere.
This principle also informed our editorial approach. We did not seek to impose a uniform intellectual position upon the contributions or to privilege a particular disciplinary interpretation of artificial intelligence. Instead, our task was to bring diverse forms of scholarship into a coherent academic framework while preserving the differences that make interdisciplinary inquiry productive. Preparing this volume meant engaging with a broad spectrum of research questions, academic conventions, linguistic backgrounds, and methodological approaches. It required both scholarly judgment and editorial sensitivity, particularly when bringing together contributions developed within substantially different intellectual and institutional environments.
The international character of this volume adds another dimension to that conversation. Artificial intelligence may have a global technological reach, but no technology enters a cultural, educational, economic, or linguistic vacuum. It enters particular classrooms and institutions, particular legal systems, languages, economies, and cultural traditions. What appears urgent in one context may look very different in another. Bringing those contexts together allows us to recognise common concerns without mistaking technological reach for uniform human experience.
For this reason, internationalisation was never simply an additional feature of the conference. It was integral to our academic vision. We believed that a meaningful discussion of artificial intelligence required perspectives extending beyond individual countries, established academic networks, and dominant technological environments. By encouraging participation from researchers and institutions across different regions, we sought to make the conference an occasion for scholarly exchange that was both geographically expansive and intellectually inclusive.
The Book of Abstracts, then, is more than a record of what will be presented during two days in Belgrade. It is the tangible outcome of a sustained process of academic planning, international scholarly cooperation, scientific coordination, and editorial development. Its preparation reflects our shared commitment to creating an international platform through which researchers from diverse backgrounds can contribute to a common conversation about one of the most consequential developments of our time.
Read together, these contributions capture an unusually unsettled intellectual moment, one in which established disciplines are being asked new questions, while apparently new questions often lead us back to some of the oldest ones. They show what researchers and practitioners in different parts of the world consider urgent now, where they recognise possibility, and where they draw or question the limits. The volume offers no single account of artificial intelligence, nor should it. Part of its value lies precisely in the presence of perspectives that do not always agree.
As editors, we regard this publication as both an academic achievement and a responsibility. The preparation of an international scholarly volume involves more than collecting and organising texts. It requires creating the conditions in which individual contributions become part of a larger academic undertaking. It means recognising the intellectual work of contributors, ensuring that their perspectives are represented with care, and presenting their research within a structure that makes the diversity of the conference accessible to its readers. In this sense, the editorial work behind the present volume forms an essential part of the conference’s scholarly contribution.
We are deeply grateful to the researchers, academics, and practitioners who responded to our invitation and entrusted us with their work. Their willingness to contribute to this initiative, often across considerable geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary distances, has made possible a genuinely international exchange of ideas. We also extend our appreciation to the members of the scientific and organising committees, whose contributions and professional support have complemented the academic and editorial efforts behind the conference, and to the partner institutions that have supported its development.
We thank the Belgrade Youth Center for hosting the programme and conference and for providing the physical and cultural setting for their activities. Its hospitality has enabled the scholarly initiative to take place in an accessible public environment, connecting the international academic community with the cultural life of Belgrade.
Above all, we wish to acknowledge the collective scholarly contribution represented by the authors of this volume. While the conceptual development, international coordination, and editorial preparation of the conference required sustained effort and close cooperation on our part, the intellectual substance of the undertaking ultimately resides in the research, questions, arguments, and perspectives contributed by its participants. It is their work that gives this volume its depth, diversity, and enduring academic significance.
Looking back on the development of this initiative, from its earliest conceptual discussions to the preparation of an international conference and a substantial scholarly publication, we are reminded that meaningful academic projects are built through a combination of intellectual vision, sustained commitment, international cooperation, and careful scholarly work. Their significance cannot be measured solely by the scale of participation or the number of contributions, important as these may be. It must also be understood in terms of the relationships they establish, the conversations they initiate, and the opportunities they create for future research and collaboration.
When this initiative began, our purpose was not to provide definitive answers about artificial intelligence. It was to create a space in which better questions could be asked, different forms of knowledge could encounter one another, and academic discussion could extend beyond familiar disciplinary and geographical boundaries. The conference and this volume carry that purpose forward on a substantially broader international scale.
If these pages suggest anything when read together, it may be that the questions that matter most about artificial intelligence will not be answered by technology alone. Their answers will take shape in classrooms and laboratories, in books and laws, in cultural institutions and workplaces, in research and public debate, and perhaps most importantly, in encounters between people who do not necessarily see the same transformation in the same way.
What began as a shared academic vision has developed into an international scholarly conversation involving hundreds of researchers and institutions across the world. For us, the greatest value of this undertaking lies not only in having brought these voices together, but also in the possibility that their encounters will generate new questions, enduring partnerships, and future avenues of research.
We hope that this volume will be read not as the conclusion of a conference, but as the beginning of further intellectual exchange. The conversations gathered here extend well beyond Belgrade, beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines, and beyond the circumstances in which this initiative first took shape. Their future belongs to the international academic community whose contributions have given them life.
Milena Škobo and Mustafa Kayyali Editors Belgrade, November 2026