Project introduction in research centre Narrare's seminar:
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, the security situation in Finland and the atmosphere of the public discourse regarding it changed rapidly. This has given rise to a highly future-oriented media climate preoccupied with dangers and uncertainties, where journalistic texts anticipating possibly impending crises and disasters currently proliferate (see Kraatila 2025). These anticipations typically take a narrative form (Liveley 2022; Grishakova 2022), framing stories about possible futures as epistemic instruments for guiding preparatory action in the present. Finland’s decision to join NATO in Spring 2022, in particular, has been widely narrativized in Finnish media in terms of the nation’s future in a volatile world.
This journalistic preoccupation with the dangers and insecurities of the future constitutes an urgent call for a deeper understanding of 1) how contemporary journalism uses narratives as epistemic instruments for producing and communicating future-oriented knowledge, 2) what kind of impact such future-oriented storytelling has on public discourse, and 3) what epistemological and ethical challenges come with telling journalistic stories about the future. Our project is an answer to that call. We aim to partner with scholars and practitioners in the field to find and advance good practices for narrating futures in journalism in a manner that promotes well-informed public debate and democratic decision-making.
Bringing together perspectives from interdisciplinary narrative studies and futures studies, as well as journalism scholars and practitioners, our project aims both 1) to open a new academic field of inquiry regarding future-oriented knowledge as a journalistic challenge and 2) to provide practical, widely applicable guidelines for telling journalistic stories about futures in a responsible manner.
To that end, we will organize a two-day symposium in April-May 2026 at Tampere University that brings together scholars interested in future narratives and narrative journalism, as well as journalists and journalism students, to discuss the challenges and good practices of future-oriented journalism. Based on the symposium, we will put together a special issue on the topic (in English) as well as a guidebook for practitioners (in Finnish).
The project is situated at Narrare Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, and will run from September 2025 to August 2027, funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. We welcome anyone interested in collaboration to get in touch!
Contact:
PI Elise Kraatila, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher at Tampere University, Finland
elise.kraatila [at] tuni.fi
Background
There has been a wealth of research on narrative journalism in recent years, regarding the capacity of storytelling to attain, move, and persuade readers, and so confront the crisis of trust in traditional journalistic media in the so-called “post-truth” era (e. g. Vanoost 2021; van Krieken & Sanders 2021). On the other hand, the idea of journalism as storytelling has also been noted to carry connotations of epistemic recklessness among both journalists (Boesman & Costera Meijer 2018) and audiences (Calfano et al. 2022). Future narratives in journalism have received little scholarly attention so far, but they present a significant further challenge to traditional journalistic standards of fact-based knowledge and truthfulness (cf. Broersma 2010), necessitating an evaluation of what counts as legitimate knowledge regarding possible futures by these standards.
Futures, after all, only exist in the present as a matter or projections, hypotheses, scenarios, and models. Future-oriented knowledge is therefore fundamentally uncertain and speculative in nature (Beckert & Bronk 2018), and its ‘truth-value’ is a purely pragmatic matter of likelihood, plausibility, credibility, and usefulness (Durance & Godet 2010; Poli 2021). Moreover, the narrative form itself is a limited heuristic tool for anticipating futures: while it facilitates engagement with possible futures by consolidating them into legible patterns, it also tends to obscure the plurality and openness of those possibilities (Bode & Dietrich 2013; Liveley 2022). As a form geared to afford emotionally charged, experiential engagements, narratives also easily lend themselves to fearmongering.
Therefore, although we do consider storytelling an indispensable resource for facilitating informed decision-making and public discourse about the future, we also regard the awareness of the form’s epistemic limitations a crucial feature of the ‘narrative literacy’ (Moenandar et al. 2025) required to tell these stories well.
Bibliography
Beckert, Jens and Richard Bronk. 2018. “An Introduction to Uncertain Futures.” Uncertain Futures: Imaginaries, Narratives and Calculation in the Economy, edited by Jens Beckert and Richard Bronk, Oxford UP.
Bode, Christoph and Rainer Dietrich. 2013. Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment. De Gruyter.
Boesman, Jan and Irene Costera Meijer. 2018. “Nothing but the Facts? Exploring the Discursive Space for Storytelling and truth-seeking in Journalism. Journalism practice, vol. 12, no. 8, s. 997–1007.
Broersma, Marcel. 2010. The Unbearable Limitations of Journalism: on Press Critique and Journalism’s Claim to Truth. The International Communication Gazette, vol. 72, no. 1, s. 21–33.
Calfano, Brian, Jeffrey Layne Blevins, and Alexis Straka. 2022. “Bad Impressions: How Journalists as ‘Storytellers’ Diminish Public Confidence in Media.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 66, no. 1, pp. 176–199.
Durance, Philippe and Michel Godet. 2010. “Scenario Building: Uses and Abuses.” Technological Forecasting & Social Change vol. 77, s. 1488–1492.
Grishakova, Marina, Francesca Arnavas, Marzia Beltrami, Silvia Kurr, Siim Sorokin. 2022. “Chronotopic imaginaries: A narrative approach to the letters from the post-pandemic future.” Futures vol. 142.
Kraatila, Elise. 2025. “Narrative Literacy for the Age of Permacrisis: Speculative Journalism and Challenges of Narrativizing Uncertain Futures.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 55:1.
van Krieken, Kobie and José Sarders. 2021. “What Is Narrative Journalism? A Systematic Review and an Empirical Agenda.” Journalism 22: 6, s. 1393–1412.
Liveley, Genevieve. 2022. “Narrative: Telling Social Futures.” Routledge Handbook of Social Futures, edited by Carlos López Galviz and Emily Spiers, Routledge.
Mäkelä, Maria et al. (toim.). 2020. Kertomuksen vaarat — Kriittisiä ääniä tarinataloudessa.
Moenandar, Sjoerd-Jeroen, Jan Alber, and cecilia Thirlway. 2025. “Introduction: narrative Literacy.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 55:1.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan and Richard Walsh. 2015. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative vol. 23, no. 1, s. 61–73.
Poli, Roberto. 2021. “The Challenges of Futures Literacy.” Futures, vol. 132.
Vanoost, Marie. 2021. “Another Way to Tell the News, Another Way to Read the News: Immersion and Information in Narrative Journalism.” Poetics Today 42:3.