Narratives occupy a central place in contemporary cultural and political life. From climate discourse and digital platforms to artificial intelligence, political misinformation, migration, and identity politics, stories increasingly shape how societies understand crises, negotiate differences, and imagine collective futures. At a moment marked by the Anthropocene, the rise of algorithmic media, post-truth media cultures, experimental literary modes, and renewed debates about human and nonhuman agency, storytelling has emerged as a crucial site for examining the production and validation of meaning in a rapidly changing world.

This seminar invites participants to explore how 'narrative world-making' happens across literature, media, and cultures in contemporary times, and how storytelling practices respond to contemporary social, technological, ecological, and political transformations. The seminar intends to take up questions of narrative authority, politics of mediation, memory, affect, identity, and world-making in an era shaped by platform capitalism, artificial intelligence, ecological uncertainty, and competing truth claims. How do narratives mediate relationships among humans, and between human and nonhuman actors? How do stories participate in the construction of political realities, collective memories, and imagined futures? How might narratives help us understand contemporary experiences of crisis, displacement, precarity, and environmental change? How do narratives determine the way we experience and engage with the world? 

The seminar welcomes comparative and interdisciplinary approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, digital humanities, environmental humanities, posthumanist theory, political theory, and related fields to explore similar questions. By bringing diverse perspectives into conversation, the seminar aims to examine the changing role of storytelling in shaping cultural imaginaries, political subjectivities, and collective understandings of the contemporary world.