Ash Sarkar: The Future of Relationships (Inaugural Southbank Centre Annual Lecture)
Political commentator Ash Sarkar delivers the inaugural Southbank Centre Annual Lecture on how digital technology is reshaping human intimacy, care, and solidarity.
Why we picked this
Sarkar's politics have always been about how people connect, organise, and care for one another — this lecture brings that framework to bear on the algorithmic mediation of intimacy itself.
Ash Sarkar — writer, broadcaster, and one of the most incisive political commentators of her generation — has been chosen to deliver the inaugural Southbank Centre Annual Lecture. Her subject is the future of relationships: how the complex web of interpersonal connections that define human life continues to shift under the pressure of digital technology, platform capitalism, and a culture increasingly mediated by screens.
The lecture is the centrepiece of the Southbank Centre’s Letters to the Future weekend (18–20 September), a new youth-powered programme that brings together emerging and established voices to think through what kind of world we’re building. Sarkar’s appointment to deliver the inaugural lecture signals the ambition of the series — this is not a nostalgia exercise, but a serious attempt to reckon with where we are and where we’re going.
What does love look like when it’s filtered through an algorithm? What happens to friendship when attention is commodified? Sarkar is known for making political arguments that feel personally urgent — this lecture promises to bring that same quality to territory that is often treated as merely private.