About the conference
Three days in The Hague on the languages in which knowledge is allowed to exist
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
The International Multilingual Conference on Language-Agnostic Knowledge takes place in The Hague from 16 to 18 June 2027. Its question is simple and its answer is hard: if we recognise knowledge only in the language it was written in, what becomes of what is known in other languages? Today a large share of scholarly indexes, research funding forms and the data used to train language models is in English. As a result, much of what the world's people know is either not seen at all or seen only once someone else has retold it in English.
The conference starts from this point and takes a position. We do not consider Europe's official multilingualism, with its twenty-four official languages, a sufficient answer, because millions of people who think and write in other languages remain outside it. Nor do we accept that artificial intelligence will democratise knowledge by itself; a model that has learned from the texts of one dominant language repeats the same inequality, only faster.
Three days, three questions
- Day one, language, knowledge, power: epistemic injustice in archives and libraries, Persian as a language of knowledge rather than of 'heritage', and the language policy of the European Union.
- Day two, machines, institutions, authority: language models and the hidden labour of the Global South, peer review in the age of machine text, the EU AI Act and the limits of regulation, and whether the university is still the home of knowledge.
- Day three, infrastructures of the commons: the political economy of open access, knowledge infrastructure against authoritarianism, and the Hague Statement.
Language-agnostic knowledge
The Language-Agnostic Knowledge framework (LAK) is a constructive answer to this situation. In it every piece of knowledge has a stable identity that depends on no single language. Its original body is versioned and stable, and around it grows a living layer of translations, references, reviews and notes. A translation is not a separate copy but a representation of the same knowledge object in another language. The conference asks what this idea means for libraries, universities, publishing and teaching, and where it fails.
The shape of the conference
The programme includes three keynotes, parallel sessions, two workshops, a roundtable, a debate, a poster session, an exhibition, a book launch and a live demonstration of Lera. The conference languages are Persian and English, and the programme gives the language of each session. All conference texts are published on this site in both languages.
The convener is Sajad Sepehri, architect of Lera and developer of the LAK framework. The Hague Statement is read on the final day, in the closing session.