The “Future Narratives Across Media” symposium seeks to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation on this future-oriented media-cultural climate.
In contemporary public discourse, from news media to political speech and various cultural commentators, our present era is commonly characterized as a time of deep uncertainty, turbulence and transition. Recent descriptors and media buzzwords like ‘polycrisis’ and ‘permacrisis’ denote a complex tangle of interconnected and mutually amplifying crises, back-to-back and seemingly never-ending. In this cultural climate, future-oriented storytelling and scenario-making flourishes across media, from dystopian and utopian fiction to policy briefs, science communication, marketing, and journalism. Used as a means for anticipating and preparing for possible future upheaval brought about by geopolitical conflicts, new pandemics, ramifications of new technologies, climate change, or other societal, political and economic developments, these future narratives play a significant role in public imagination at the moment. They may facilitate action in the present by enabling us to imagine possible futures, but may also delineate what kinds of futures we are capable of imagining as possibilities, individually and collectively.