The event is organized on site at Tampere University, Finland, on 23–24 April 2026. You can also follow the symposium online via Zoom (click here).
Keynote speakers are Associate Professor Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar, University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and Associate Professor Marina Lambrou, Kingston University (UK).
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.
The “Future Narratives Across Media” -symposium seeks to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation on this future-oriented media-cultural climate.
Symposium programme:
Day 1
23.4.2026
Tampere University, Linna -building (Kalevantie 5), auditorium K103
10.15–11.45 Session 1
Elise Kraatila Stories about a future Russian invasion in Finnish news media
Samuli Björninen Fact-based fictionality in future-oriented narrative scenarios – and how to talk about it
Markus Laukkanen Distributed media narratives: how online news websites construct overarching future narratives
11.45–13.00 Lunch break
13.00–14.00 Keynote
Marina Lambrou “The future is already with us”: reframing climate change and environmental degradation in a speculative short story
14.05–15.35 Session 2
Maria Mäkelä Simultaneity, Processuality, and Gentrification in Climate Protest Storytelling
Jouni Teittinen The bottom of it: Fantasies of the archive in Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know
Silvia Anastasijevic Futuristic Identities: Speculative Imaginaries of Humanity, Community, and Technology in Binti and The Tiger Flu
15.35–16.00 Coffee break
16.00–17.30 Session 3
Kirsi Sandberg Pragma-semantics of future-oriented knowledge in parliamentary rhetoric
Nanny Jolma, Anna Kuutsa & Mari Hatavara Future narratives in political debate: mind attribution and narrative positioning
Hanna Rautajoki Changing scenarios in the Finnish Government Reports on the Future
Day 2
24.4.2026
Tampere University, Virta -building (Åkerlundinkatu 5), Auditorium Virta 109
10.15–11.45 Session 4
Special session on Eastern European utopias organized by Natalya Bekhta
Zsolt Czigányik Utopia and the nation
Jaak Tomberg The End of History at the Beginning of History
Natalya Bekhta Narrating utopia
Discussant: Henri Vogt
11.45–13.00 Lunch break
13.00–14.00 Keynote
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar Storyteasing: Conspiracy Theories and Narrative Literacy
14.05–15.35 Session 5
Cecilia Thirlway Formatted futures: the case of thought leadership storytelling
Christy Dena The Link Between Collective Action, Writing Discourses across Media, and Values
15.05–15.30 Coffee break
15.30–16.30 Session 6
Aino Kolehmainen The Past is Young and the Future’s Old: Dystopian Sounds and Scenarios in Ayreon’s Into the Electric Castle and Toehider’s Stereo Night Ash
Xaver Boxhammer Remediating Narratives of Lost Futures: Science Fiction Comics in Atomfall
Keynote abstracts:
Marina Lambrou: “The future is already with us”: reframing climate change and environmental degradation in a speculative short story
“The future is already with us, it’s just unevenly distributed” asserts William Gibson’, (1992) so how are we to imagine possible futures if it already overwhelms us in the present and will be assigned to the past tomorrow. In other words, we can argue that writing about the future is not journalism but science fiction or speculative fiction because the future is unpredictable. Nonetheless, we are already seeing the effects of speculative futures in today’s climate change, a process that was inevitable decades ago. To reflect on these points, this presentation will focus on Peter Carey’s (1980) short story “Do you love me?” analysed through the lens of climate change. Set in an unknown time and place, the story’s description of the disappearing coastline, mapped by the ‘elite- well paid, admired, envied, and having no small opinion of themselves’ (44) Cartographers, provides a metaphorical analogy of the decaying landscape and the devastating impact on people and places we can associate with climate change. Building on postcolonial theory, where in one of the two discursive worlds ‘thrives on spatial metaphors like mapping, location, cartography and landscape in fictional literatures’ (Soja, 2011:x), “Do you love me?” will be reframed as a story about climate change and what is lost, as well as what hope it may offer about our future.
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar: Storyteasing: Conspiracy Theories and Narrative Literacy
Contemporary societal challenges such as climate change, energy transition, global inequality, and information polarization, are characterized by how complex, multifaceted, and resistant to simple solutions they are. Such complexity can be experienced as threatening, confusing, or frustrating, and that can make it tempting to opt for shortcuts in problem-solving and problematic linear thinking, of which conspiracy theories are an extreme example. In this talk, I will introduce narrative literacy – a critical, reflexive capacity to assess how stories shape our responses to complex societal issues – as a means to respond more fruitfully to such complexity. I will present mock disruptive narration – jocosely inventing narratives through which ‘everything suddenly makes sense’ – as an attractive tool to train such narrative literacy, as it offers a “cognitive playground” to playfully engage with complexity. Finally, I will propose that such narrative literacy is a propaedeutics to futures literacy.
The symposium is organized by the research project “Journalistic Future Narratives in and about NATO-era Finland” together with Narrare Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University.