May 11-13, 2027, Humboldt University, Berlin
Crises and catastrophes, disruptions and disasters, tipping points and turns: this array of terms ignites both the literary and the historical imagination. Today, these terms largely cluster around the intertwined spheres of economy and ecology, capital and carbon, the “Capitalocene” and the “Anthropocene.” Using these terms to narrate our past and present, as well as imagine hypothetical futures, shapes collective experiences 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 the attempt to scrutinize concrete practices of sensemaking and representation, and historical in its attention to the contingent, shifting dynamics of imaginaries and narrative forms across time and space.
The conference will investigate how critical events emerge, are imagined and represented in order to understand their nature, scope and scale. By bringing together the literary- and historically-minded, this conference aims to interrogate what links and what distinguishes narrations of economic and ecological events in and between these two disciplines. We invite papers pursuing the following questions: How is the “eventness” of environmental or economic disruption constituted from historical and literary perspectives? In which ways are the consequences of events imagined in modern times, and what is the relationship between the social practice of narration and its economic, ecological, and political context? How do different narrative concepts (e.g., crisis, catastrophe, accident, incident) shape the possibilities we imagine? In the light of environmental catastrophes and economic disorder, do we have to rethink human story-telling capacities and include more-than-human actors? 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 radical reform? What impact do Indigenous knowledges have as well as other concepts which decenter 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” based at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and will be hosted at Humboldt University Berlin. We will be able to cover your travel and accommodation expenses. Please keep in mind that we are planning to publish selected and reworked papers in an edited volume afterwards.