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Ours is an increasingly precarious planet, haunted (to borrow Anna Tsing’s phrasing) by uncertainty, instability, and dissolution. Even as global crises like climate change threaten to destabilize ontological futures, political upheaval in the U.S., among other places of unrest, undermines epistemological integrity. The age of post-truth – heralded by the weaponization of Donald Trump’s “alternative facts,” and hallucinatory and suddenly ubiquitous AI – coincides with planetary precarity, the sense of neoliberal capitalist-fueled social vulnerability and lack of certainty. “Truth matters,” assert New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl, historian Timothy Snyder, and critic Bruno Latour. But does it still? And if so, where does fiction, that slippery, speculative, subversive art, fit in? How is the sense of “radical disorientation, uncertainty and loss of meaning” that characterizes the precarious present moment on a planetary scale according to Bourdieu reflected and refracted in works of art, including literary texts, and other forms of cultural production? What insights into the complex workings of precarity in post-truth societies do cultural productions provide and what role do they occupy in contributing to and/or subverting post-truth sentiments? How can we think about and analyze fiction in a time where fictitious narratives seem to hold more power than science and truth?

The 2026 PGF Conference takes place from 12-14 November 2026 and is open to students of all levels (bachelor, master, doctoral), as well as post-docs without tenure.

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