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.
Narrare’s Narrative Seminar Series: Sari Kivistö et al.
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)
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.