Master Narratives and the ‘Ideal Immigrant Subject’: A Multimodal Narrative Positioning Approach (co-authored with Dorien Van De Mieroop & Melisa Stevanovic)

More details on the Narrare 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.

More details on the Project Narrative website.

From Speculation to Speculative Agency: The Intertwining of Speculative Worldbuilding and Interactive Game Mechanics in Digital Fantasy RPGs

More details on the Narrare website.

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.

More details on the Project Narrative website.

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.

More details on Narrare’s website.

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.