5th HELAAS Young Scholar Symposium: The Age of Narratives: Expanding, Re-inventing, Re-imagining

March 7, 2026 | Athens, Greece

Call for Papers:

In times marked by political polarization, climate crisis, and digital transformation,
narratives are not just aesthetic forms but powerful tools of persuasion,
resistance, and collective imagination that dynamically transform our social
realities. Once restricted mainly to the study of literature and narratology, the
term “narrative” has reached a wider audience in the early twenty-first century
and is now standardized in contexts of media and communication, history and art,
and culture and technology. Though narratives exist in a wide spectrum of ordinary
activities and understandings of the world (Abbott), the term still holds ties to
literary criticism, giving rise to fresh understandings of storytelling across media
forms. The interdisciplinary expansion of narrative studies not only reflects
theoretical breakthroughs but also grapples with contested truths and responds to
rapid technological advancement. As hybrid genres and media raise questions of
authorship, authenticity, identity, and sustainability, traditional literary categories
of narratives are subverted. At stake, then, is not just the scholarly study of
narrative, but the recognition of its urgent sociopolitical and cultural implications
today.

Our present moment can largely be characterized as the age of narratives, with
the proliferation of technological stimuli shaping broader narratives in local and
global contexts. The acceleration of information flow via algorithmic structures and
social media shapes public discourse in unprecedented ways, making our
engagement with emergent narratives timely and pertinent. The rise of
competing, and often conflicting narratives – from political propaganda and
misinformation, to climate change denial and AI-generated texts – results in
various perceptions of reality, affecting the way we receive and process
information. Narratives today determine how communities imagine and negotiate
their futures, functioning as crucial instruments of both cultural survival and
contestation. Meanwhile, the rise of AI storytelling urges us to reconsider the
boundaries between human creativity and technological mediation.

Contemporary research embraces an expanded, transgressive and multivalent
view of narratives, increasingly observing that a narrative can be, indeed, any
form of expression that tells a story; a movie, a theatre show, a photograph, a
song, a folktale, a dance performance – anything that can be taken in and
interpreted by an audience, stimulating senses and emotions, bearing ethicopolitical implications
(Muñoz; Montez and Sanchez Saltveit; D’Lugo et al.) and sharpening critical perspectives.
Additionally, previously marginalized narrative angles – belonging to artists and writers of colour, women,
or members of the LGBTQ+ community – are revisiting existing narratives and proposing new ways
of interpreting the world. Expanding traditions centered on Anglophone narrative
forms and using modes prevalent in their cultural heritage, creative artists from
Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Global South produce innovative storytelling
products, ranging from orality-infused texts (Danticat), films (Iñárritu), music
performance (Jara), and theatre (Svich) and making narratives more inclusive.
The growth of narratives across media has led to significant scholarly work on
authorship (Gibbons and King), mediation (Gloviczki), slow narratives
(Caracciolo), multimodal narratives (Ghosal and Gibbons), intermedial narratives
(Rippl), and transmedia storytelling (Sutherland and Barker; Thon), among
others. Digital and algorithmic narratives (Hayles; Emerson), interactive and
game narratives (Murray), embodied narratives (Hogan), ecocritical narratives
(Morton), and posthuman or nonhuman storytelling (Haraway) have recently also
gained scholarly attention. Meanwhile, the term has in some ways organized our
understanding of the world, with narratives of hope and despair, unity and
division, shaping our response to past, present, and future realities. Ultimately,
narratives are not just tools of meaning-making; they are points of intersection
for human subjectivities, nonhuman entities, time, politics, and experience alike.

In this context, the organizers invite proposals for 20-minute presentations by
early-career researchers that focus on the symposium’s theme including, but not
limited to:
● Narrative as identity and experience (individual/collective)
● Narrative re-imagining histor-ies; countering grand narratives and
uncovering stories untold
● Narrative mediation, affect, authenticity, and the reliability of memory
● Narratives of crisis: climate change fiction, pandemic storytelling, trauma
narratives, war narratives
● Narrative as an active agent (the social repercussions of narratives and their
agency)
● Creative narratives across media (literature, film, television, video games)
and platforms (VR/AR, artistic installations)
● The politics and ethics of narrative
● Narratives shaped by artificial intelligence and machine learning
● Communicating text through narratives of emptiness and erasure
● Narratives as power
● Narratives of control: censorship, authorship, authority
● Narrative perspectives from Latin America, the Caribbean and the Global
South;
● Narratives of migration and diaspora
● Performance as a narrative act (explorations of music, dance, theatre,
carnival studies)
● Environmental narratives: speaking for/speaking with nature (the
nonhuman world)

Submission guidelines:
Abstracts of 200-300 words should be accompanied by a brief bio (100-150
words), 4-5 keywords, and a tentative title, and sent to
helaasyoungscholars@gmail.com.

Deadline for abstract submission: 20 November 2025
Notifications: 10 December 2025
This is an on-site event.
Venue: Library of the School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University
of Athens

For further information, please contact helaasyoungscholars@gmail.com.
Symposium webpage:https://helaas.enl.auth.gr/yss5/

Organizing Committee:
Maria Giannouli (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Lina Katsorchi (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
Thomas Mantzaris (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Foteini Toliou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Works Cited:
Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 3rd ed. Cambridge, 2020.
Amores Perros. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, performances by Emilio
Echeverría, Gael García Bernal, and Goya Toledo, written by Guillermo Arriaga
Jordán, Zeta Film, 2000.
Caracciolo, Marco. Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities. U of Nebraska P, 2022.
Danticat, Edwidge. Krik? Krak!. Soho Press, 1995.
D’Lugo, Marvin, Ana M. López, and Laura Podalsky, editors. The Routledge Companion to
Latin American Cinema. Routledge, 2018.
Emerson, Lori. Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound. U of
Minnesota P, 2014.
Ghosal, Torsa, and Alison Gibbons, editors. Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives. U of
Nebraska P, 2023.
Gibbons, Alison, and Elizabeth King. Reading the Contemporary Author: Narrative,
Authority, Fictionality. U of Nebraska P, 2023.
Gloviczki, Peter Joseph. Mediated Narration in the Digital Age: Storying the Media World.
U of Nebraska P, 2021.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP,
2016.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. U of Chicago
P, 2017.
Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affect Studies and Literary Criticism. Cambridge UP, 2021.
Jara, Javier. Our Rhythm, Our Voices. Performance, Georgetown, Texas, 2021.
Montez, Noe, and Olga Sanchez Saltveit, editors. The Routledge Companion to Latine
Theatre and Performance. Routledge, 2024.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard
UP, 2007.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
U of Minnesota P, 1999.
Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT P,
1997.
Rippl, Gabriele, editor. Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound –
Music. De Gruyter, 2015.
Sutherland, Karen E., and Richie Barker. Transmedia Brand Storytelling: Immersive
Experiences from Theory to Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Svich, Caridad. Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart: A
Rave Fable. Alexander Street Press, 2004.
Thon, Jan-Noël. Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture. U of Nebraska
P, 2016.