Past Events
2026
NarraScope is a conference that brings together the writers, developers, scholars, and players of interactive narrative.
This three-day international conference aims to explore the relationship between fiction and falsehood from a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective, including philosophy, literary history and theory, narratology, film and media studies, psychology, and cognitive science. Proposals may focus on fiction in general, or on a specific historical period or cultural tradition. We also encourage studies of fictional works from various media (including video games, comics, film, and television series).
The Computational Models of Narrative (CMN) workshop series is dedicated to advancing the computationally-grounded scientific study of narrative, a crucial aspect of human experience used for communication, persuasion, explanation, and entertainment. Narrative, or storytelling, is a symbolic activity that imitates human actions through emplotment, representing discordant events through concordance. From myths to histories, narratives are ubiquitous across time, making understanding narrative intelligence essential to comprehending human intelligence. Narrative studies, aka narratology, has its root in Aristotle's Poetics, thriving in the wake of the French New Rhetoric, where Todorov first coined "narratology" in 1969 to theorize narrative grammar based on structuralist linguistics. Despite criticism for its formalism and reduction, this characteristic enables the intersection of computer science and poetics, providing various structures for computational modeling.
More Details on the Universidad Complutense de Madrid website.
The 2026 Narrative Conference is hosted by Narrative Research Lab & Centre for Fictionality Studies, Aarhus University.
More information on the conference website.
The research group “Suffering and Meliorism in Literature and the Philosophy of Literature” within the Centre of Excellence on Meliorist Philosophy of Suffering (MePhiS)
At frank x Montgomery, we examine that history, its duality and connect to contemporary lessons for change leaders today. Join us for this immersion and come back recharged.
Märten Rattasepp – Narrative Design from Within and Without
Nanny Jolma & Anna Kuutsa: The afterlife of parliamentary storytelling in social media: The portability of narrative features in the Finnish border security debate.
The “Future Narratives Across Media” symposium seeks to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation on this future-oriented media-cultural climate.
Repairing… Restoring… Reconnecting… Through True Storytelling
We live in a world inundated with tweets, hot takes, and breaking news alerts that dominate our thoughts for a moment and our news cycles for a day or two. Such a scattershot media environment only increases the power of narrative. Narrative penetrates the heart of the subject and the hearts of the audience. Bits of news or information rarely change our perspective about the world or our place in it. Narrative nonfiction rarely fails to do so.
More details on the Boston University College of Communication website.
Narrative as Medicine: When Telling a Story Changes the Body
Project Narrative is hosting a hybrid event with Joshua M. Smyth, Professor, Department of Psychology andOhio Eminent Scholar in Health Psychology.
Narrative theory often views stories as interpretive structures that disclose latent meanings. Expressive writing research invites a complementary, more “biobehavioral” proposition: narrative can be instrumental. That is, a process of self-making that reorganizes emotion, attention, memory, and social connection in ways that measurably shape health. This talk explores the potential for a productive collision between narrative theory and mind–body science: the idea that narrative is not only a lens on experience but a lever that can transform it. Drawing on decades of clinic/laboratory-based expressive writing research and newer forms of guided online journaling, I will examine how narrative articulation (especially shifts in coherence, agency, and meaning) can meaningfully alter stress-related processes, well-being, and functioning. on to the two-way traffic between relevant theory and primary narratives. A full syllabus will be available shortly.
Join a dynamic mix of filmmakers, journalists, comedians, creative artists, scholars, and media leaders as we explore how civic storytelling and community power drives real-world impact. Hosted by the Center for Media & Social Impact. More.
From Speculation to Speculative Agency: The Intertwining of Speculative Worldbuilding and Interactive Game Mechanics in Digital Fantasy RPGs
Join Project Narrative, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Department of History for a hybrid event with Wil Haygood!
Award-winning historian and journalist Wil Haygood spent more than four years piecing together the story of what happened when America launched its war in Vietnam amidst historic racial clashes back in America. Black soldiers - fighting in their nation’s first fully racially integrated war - quickly came to realize they were fighting a war within a war - the battles in Vietnam and the sociopolitical war raging stateside. Through the prism of their lives - and others such as President Lyndon Johnson, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., singer Marvin Gaye, Agent Orange activist Maude deVictor - Haygood reveals the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and the cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.
Markus Laukkanen: News about future turmoil: how a hypothetical war is narrated on Finnish news-media websites
Theme: Narrative and the Arts.
The Netherlands Winter School on Narrative is a joint initiative to bring together the next generation of narrative scholars and practitioners in responsible interdisciplinary work on narrative.
2025
Synthetic Narratives convened leading artists, technologists, and philosophers to ask what storytelling looks like when the line between human and machine authorship begins to blur. More.
Theme: Hunting for Attention: Interactive Digital Storytelling in Fragmented Attention Landscapes. The Zip-Scene Conference takes XR/extended reality (VR/AR/MR) and Metaverse-related works seriously and treats them on equal footing to film and performing arts, and wishes to expand its scientific treatment and reflection. More.
Theme: Limits of Narrative. In view of the rampant use of the term ‘narrative’, which often enough lacks a precise meaning, it is time to take a critical look at its limits. Which phenomena cannot be appropriately labeled as 'narrative'? What are legitimate and illegitimate uses of narrative? More.
Theme: Borders / DIALECTICS / Civility. Amidst the clamor for walls and fences and the host of anti-gay and anti-trans legislation being passed throughout parts of the United States and Europe, with civic life becoming increasingly gentrified and the borders between the haves and the have-nots and between the Global North and the Global South wider than they have previously been, with the space between the literary and mere “content production” (or between authority and mere opinion) paradoxically ossifying in the process of dissolving, this call for papers asks after the ways philosophy and literature interlink in coming to terms with these problems. Conference website.
Theme: Creativity, Story Experience, and Reflection. Conference website and program.
Theme: Narrative Theory: Foundations and Innovations. Project Narrative Summer Institute is a one-week course centered around narrative theory, through Ohio State University. Learn more.
The 2025 Computational Models of Narrative workshop series was dedicated to advancing the computationally-grounded scientific study of narrative, a crucial aspect of human experience used for communication, persuasion, explanation, and entertainment. More.
Theme: Disparate Narrative Worlds: Crisis, Conflict & the Possibility of Hope. Conference website.
The Narrative Power Summit (NPS), co-hosted by RadComms and ReFrame, is a transformative convening for social justice communicators and movement workers. More.
Theme: Narrative and the Mind. The 2025 winter school was on the interplay between narrative and the mind, to examine how cognition is informed by narrativity, and how narratives are shaped by our cognitive engagement. More.
2024
Theme: Creating Change: Integrating Narrative Research and Storytelling Practice. This interdisciplinary winter school invites researchers and practitioners from the humanities, behavioral, social, and technological sciences to take stock and reflect on their work. More.
2023
Theme: Rhythm, Speed, Path: Spatiotemporal Experiences in Narrative, Poetry, and Drama
IGEL 2023 is co-located with the 7th conference of the European Narratology Network (ENN), and the final event of ELIT, the Empirical Study of Literature Training Network. Conference website and program.
Discussing various views on the role and presence of science and literature communication in a highly diversified world, including science diplomacy as it is connected with our questions for the past, the present and the future of the world in various ways. More.
Theme: Narrative, Linguistics, and Cognition: Interdisciplinary approaches to narrative and storyworld possible selves.
The “narrative turn” in the social sciences has highlighted the need for specific methods that allow the systematic study of narrative experiencing from interdisciplinary perspectives. More.
Theme: Instrumental Narratives: Narrative Studies & the Storytelling Boom.
Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? Conference website.
Theme: Narratives in the Public Sphere. More.
2022
This conference featured the diverse work of Rwandan practitioners with children and families and from narrative therapists and community workers from many different parts of the world. More.
Theme: Narrative and Personal & Social Transformation. Learn more.
Theme: In Real Life. At frank 2022 we explored the role of lived experience in driving lasting social change. More.
2021
2020
frank is back for its seventh year, and at this gathering we’re going to play with your emotions. Or at least how you can intentionally use emotion in your work. More.
2019
Theme: Truth, Fiction, Illusion: Worlds and Experience. Today’s authoritarian populism has returned us to questions of the fragility of truth. These questions have cast deep divisions in contemporary life. To what extent are such worlds themselves constituted through truths or fictions, through narratives? More.
Theme: Space. Explore space in all of its different meanings. More.
2018
Theme: ABCs of Narrative.
The current booming interest for narrative or “story-telling” across academic disciplines and professional fields comes with the need for a better understanding and an interdisciplinary dialogue between the arts and humanities; the natural and computer sciences; and the behavioral, social, and health sciences. Conference website.
2017
Theme: Narrative and Narratology: Metamorphosing the Structures
Learn more.
Theme: Look Both Ways: Narrative and Metaphor in Education.
The 2025 winter school was on the interplay between narrative and the mind, to examine how cognition is informed by narrativity, and how narratives are shaped by our cognitive engagement. Learn more.
2016
Theme: Narrative and Metaphor in the Law
Legal scholars and specialists from cognitive theory, journalism, rhetoric, social psychology, criminology, and legal activism explored how narrative and metaphor are both vital to the legal process. More.
2015
Theme: Modelling Narrative across Borders. Learn more.
2014
2013
Theme: Emerging Vectors of Narratology: Towards Consolidation or Diversification?
2012
Theme: Warring with Words: Narrative and Metaphor in Domestic and International Politics. More.
2011
Theme: Working with Stories: Narrative as a Meeting Place for Theory, Analysis and Practice.
2010
Theme: Binocular Vision: Narrative and Metaphor in Medicine
Topics included: narrative and metaphor in patients’ experience of illness, the narrative medicine programs which have been developed in medical schools and the value of adding a metaphor dimension to these. More.
Theme: Exploring the Narrative Landscape. Learn more.
2008
2006
Theme: The Storied Nature of Human Experience: Fact and Fiction. Learn more.
2004
Theme: The Power of Story in a Postmodern World.
Reflections and presentations from this conference were included in a special issue of the McGill Journal of Education and a two-part special issue of Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education (Part 1 and Part 2). Learn more.