Imaginamics cluster Call for Papers for ‘Narrating Eventness’ conference Humboldt University Berlin; Travel and accommodation covered, edited volume planned.
CfP: “Narrating Eventness: Economy, Ecology, and the Critical Power of Imagining” | Uni Jena
CfP: “Narrating Eventness: Economy, Ecology, and the Critical Power of Imagining”
Call for Papers for the Conference “Narrating Eventness” from 11.-13. May 2027, Humboldt University, Berlin
Imaginamics - Praktiken und Dynamiken sozialen Imaginierens
Meldung vom: 5. August 2026, 14:15 Uhr
Call for Papers: “Narrating Eventness: Economy, Ecology, and the Critical Power of Imagining” 11.-13. May 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.
Deciphering the “eventness” of ecological and economic crises serves as a focus point for understanding their political, social and cultural impact. We build on Hayden Whites distinction between “events” – occurrences that actually took place – and “facts” – the narrativized versions of events, shaped by cultural authority, ideological context, and narrative form. “Eventness,” here, could be the reflexive conditions that determine what becomes 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 through social structuration: as happenings that create and change social structures. Here, the “eventness” of a critical moment emerges from diverse practices of symbolic and social structuring. “Eventness” is also a temporal concept. Both economic and environmental catastrophes can bring radical and revolutionary change in an instant, yet can also unfold gradually, as “slow violence” (Rob Nixon), across vast temporal and spatial scales, resisting humanistic modes of narration that privilege disruption and immediacy. To render them legible, we should also consider more-than-human actors as historical agents. Even for the humanist, the imaginative creation of “eventness” moves across temporalities, encompassing Fernand Braudel’s historical layers: the history of events (l’histoire événementielle), the shifting development of the economy (l’histoire conjoncturelle) and the longue durée of ecological surroundings (géohistoire).
The conference Narrating Eventness: Economy, Ecology, and the Critical Power of Imagining Externer Link 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.
Stefanie Middendorf, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History (Dictatorial Studies), Humboldt University, Berlin
Caroline Rosenthal, Professor of American Studies, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena
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