CfP | “Narrating Eventness: Economy, Ecology, and the Critical Power of Imagining”

International conference at Humboldt University Berlin, May 11-13, 2027

Deadline: September 15, 2026

Crises and catastrophes, disruptions and disasters, tipping points and turns: this arrayof terms ignites the imagination of historians and literary theorists alike. Today, theseterms largely cluster around the intertwined spheres of economy and ecology, capitaland carbon, the “Capitalocene” and the “Anthropocene.” Using these terms to narrateour past and present, as well as imagine hypothetical futures, shapes collectiveexperiences and the social imagination while opening (or closing) political possibilities. To think through these terms is both a cultural and a historical endeavor: cultural in theattempt to scrutinize concrete practices of sensemaking and representation, andhistorical in its attention to the contingent, shifting dynamics of imaginaries andnarrative forms across time and space.

Deciphering the “eventness” of ecological and economic crises serves as a focus pointfor understanding both their cultural and historical impact. We build on Hayden White’sdistinction between “events” – occurrences that actually took place – and “facts” – thenarrativized versions of events, shaped by cultural authority, ideological context, andnarrative form. “Eventness,” here, could be the reflexive conditions that determine whatbecomes a “fact”. White’s analytic pathway is one of many. Historians like William H.Sewell and anthropologists have defined events not only through narration but throughsocial structuration: as happenings that create and change social structures. Here, the“eventness” of a critical moment emerges from diverse practices of symbolic and socialstructuring. “Eventness” is also a temporal concept. Both environmental and economiccatastrophes, for instance, often unfold gradually, as “slow violence”, across vasttemporal and spatial scales, resisting humanistic modes of narration that privilegedisruption and immediacy. To render them legible, we must consider more-than-humanactors as historical agents. Even for the humanist, the imaginative creation of“eventness” moves across temporalities, encompassing Fernand Braudel’s historicallayers: the history of events (l’histoire événementielle), the shifting development of theeconomy (l’histoire conjoncturelle) and the longue durée of ecological surroundings(géohistoire).

The conference “Narrating Eventness: Economy, Ecology, and the Critical Powerof Imagining” will investigate how critical events emerge, are imagined andrepresented in order to understand the nature, scope, and scale of environmental andeconomic changes. By bringing together the literarily- and historically-minded, thisconference aims to interrogate what links and what distinguishes narrations ofeconomic and ecological events in and between these two disciplines.

We invite papers pursuing the following questions: How is the “eventness” ofenvironmental or economic disruption constituted from historical and literaryperspectives? In which ways are the consequences of events imagined in moderntimes, and what is the relationship between the social practice of narration and itsmaterial, economic, and political context? How do different narrative concepts (e.g.,crisis, catastrophe, accident, incident) shape the possibilities we imagine? What roledo populism, fake news, deep fakes and artificial intelligence play in reverberations ofhistorical events? In the light of environmental catastrophes and economic disorder, dowe have to rethink human story-telling capacities and include more-than-humanactors? How do human and more-than-human narrations interact, contradict,combine? And might there be room for a definition of “disruptive eventness” as non-
change, as a form of perverse stability when the world seems to shout for radicalreform? What impact do Indigenous knowledges have as well as other concepts whichdecenter Western epistemological concepts of crisis?

Please send a proposed title, an abstract of 500 words, and a short CV to Nina Huwer (nina.huwer@uni-jena.de) by 15.9.2026.

The conference is organized through the Cluster of Excellence “Imaginamics.Practices and Dynamics of Social Imagining” at the Friedrich Schiller University Jenaand will be hosted at Humboldt University Berlin. We will be able to cover your traveland accommodation expenses. Please keep in mind that we are planning to publishselected and reworked papers in an edited volume afterwards.

Organizers: