Narrative Events
Upcoming Conferences + Seminars + Schools
Narrare’s Narrative Seminar Series: Nanny Jolma & Anna Kuutsa
From workshops to community gatherings, here's what we have coming up. Mark your calendar—we'd love to see you there.
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An interactive session for makers and thinkers to collaborate, connect, and spark new ideas.
Narrare’s Narrative Seminar Series: Sari Kivistö et al.
An interactive session for makers and thinkers to collaborate, connect, and spark new ideas.
41st Narrative Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative
An interactive session for makers and thinkers to collaborate, connect, and spark new ideas.
9th International Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative (CMN’26)
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.
Computer scientists have long tapped into the three-act structure, Freitag's pyramid, Propp's morphology, and Campbell's or Vogler's hero's journey. Large Language Models (LLMs) boast their breakthrough in generating narratives, betraying traces of the structures mentioned above. Systems for narrative analysis and production are increasingly embedded in devices and processes, influencing decision-making in venues as diverse as politics, economics, intelligence, and cultural production. In order to appreciate this influence, it is becoming increasingly clear that research must address the technical implementation of narrative systems, the theoretical bases of these frameworks, and our general understanding of narrative at multiple levels, from the philosophical and cognitive impact of narratives to our ability to model narrative responses computationally.
The Computational Models of Narrative 2026 workshop (CMN'26) will be held at the Computer Science School - Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) from June 8, 2026 to June 10, 2026, organized by the NIL research group.
More Details on the Universidad Complutense de Madrid website.
Fourth SIRFF/ASIFF International Congress
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).
NarraScope 2026
NarraScope is a conference that brings together the writers, developers, scholars, and players of interactive narrative.
NarraScope 2026 will be hosted at the University at Albany in Albany, NY. It will be a hybrid event with live and pre-recorded talks both presented at the conference site and streamed via Discord. Recordings of all talks will be made available on the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s YouTube channel after the conference.
Subjects vary from interactive fiction tools to writing best practices and everything in between. Previous talks had titles like “Choosing Your Happily Ever After”, “Shaping Your Story with Emotional Intelligence” and “Adapting Film’s Techniques for Nonlinear Stories”, to give you a bit of an idea.
Our conference aims to be a place for everyone interested in narrative games to hang out, exchange ideas and get inspired. We do this through a broad selection of talks, keynote speakers, discussions, and workshops.
Project Narrative Summer Institute
Contested Issues in Contemporary Narratology: Theory and Practice
The 2026 institute will focus on a set of issues debated by contemporary narratologists, all of which have important theoretical and practical consequences: authorial intention; social context and narrative form; unreliable narration, fictionality, AI narratives, climate change, and narrative medicine. We’ll look at how different theoretical conceptions of narrative---rhetorical, intersectional, cognitive, and others—address these issues and pay special attention to the two-way traffic between relevant theory and primary narratives. A full syllabus will be available shortly.
6th CoSciLit biennial conference
Since 2014, the Commission on Science and Literature (CoSciLit) has brought together scholars and scientists from around the world to advance the study of science and literature in dialogue with one another. Our next biennial conference will take place at Ghent University, Belgium, on 17-19 June 2026. Confirmed plenary speakers include Professor Sadiah Qureshi (University of Manchester), Professor Jean Walton (University of Rhode Island), and Dr. Paul Hamann-Rose (University of Passau). The conference will be semi-hybrid, with papers presented in person and online. All presentations will be in English.
National Storytelling Conference
Every year, the National Storytelling Network invites voices from across the globe to come together in celebration of story. In 2026, we’ll gather in the Texas Panhandle, where the sweeping prairies and the grand walls of Palo Duro Canyon set the stage for Prairie Voices – Honoring Heritage, Inspiring Tomorrow. Here, stories will echo across generations—heritage meeting innovation, the wisdom of the past sparking the voices of tomorrow. Whether you are a seasoned teller, a first-time attendee, a sponsor, or a performer, your voice matters in shaping this year’s gathering. We’re calling on YOU to be part of the journey. Share your stories, your expertise, your passion—and help us weave a conference tapestry that honors where we’ve been and inspires where we are going.
STORY
Theme: Shift Narratives & change the future
STORY is a global gathering of creators, leaders and change-makers working in a variety of industries to shift narratives and shape the future by telling stories that matter.
Participate in a two-day, conference-style experience to ignite both personal and professional transformation. It’s the result of a truly interactive and immersive experience like no other, consisting of innovative talks, unique performances, and educational workshops.
Whether you're innovating within an organization or on your own, come regroup, redefine your process for shaping the future, gain the tools to be an intentional storymaker, and learn to spark, lead, and navigate change.
ACLAR 2026
Children's Literature in a Time of Crisis
Theme: At a time when young people are being faced with rapid disruptive technological changes, intolerance and extremism, and environmental catastrophe, the ACLAR 2026 conference is interested in the ways in which crisis is manifested through and within children’s literature and culture.
The Power of Narrative
An interactive session for makers and thinkers to collaborate, connect, and spark new ideas.
Narrare’s Narrative Seminar Series: Annika Valtonen
Master Narratives and the ‘Ideal Immigrant Subject’: A Multimodal Narrative Positioning Approach (co-authored with Dorien Van De Mieroop & Melisa Stevanovic)
Project Narrative: Narrative as Medicine
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.
Narrare’s Narrative Seminar Series: Nanna Numento
From Speculation to Speculative Agency: The Intertwining of Speculative Worldbuilding and Interactive Game Mechanics in Digital Fantasy RPGs
Project Narrative: The Vietnam War’s Lost Story
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.
Narrare’s Narrative Seminar Series: Markus Laukkanen
News about future turmoil: how a hypothetical war is narrated on Finnish news-media websites
In this presentation, I take a look at narratives proliferating in Finnish news-media regarding the security future of Finland, Nato, and “the West” in an age of uncertainty and geopolitical turmoil. A corpus of more than 200 future-oriented texts published since Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates an emerging journalistic practice of crafting future narratives to disseminate understandable knowledge of the future. Most of the texts included in the corpus narrate some aspect(s) of an imagined future invasion of Finland by Russia.
Future narratives constitute a crucial instrument that affords communicating about the future in a comprehensible way. However, the narrative form also brings with it notable difficulties in this regard. The future is multivalent, changeable, and ultimately unknowable. Because the narrative form is oriented toward retrospective meaning-making, it easily obliterates such qualities in whatever it depicts. In journalistic contexts, this dynamic can present significant challenges when it comes to adhering to epistemic and ethical standards. In the presentation I show how these challenges are (or are not) navigated in contemporary engagement-driven online news-media.
This talk is part of Research Centre Narrere’s Narrative Studies Seminar. The aim of the seminar is to allow for a multi- and interdisciplinary discussion on data, methods, theories, and the state of narrative research. Sessions consist of introductory presentations by researchers from different career-stages and different fields studying narratives at Tampere University (up to 20 min), and general discussion.
Critical AI Theory Reading Group
Read the paper in advance, bring your own lunch and let’s talk theory.
Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2026. “Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the New Authoritarianism.” AI & SOCIETY, ahead of print, January 25.