Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.

What futures can we imagine for literature – and for the ways we do literature – when we start from the margins, the footnotes, the postscripts or even the digital comment threads? This panel brought together a constellation of researchers whose work opens up innovative perspectives on storytelling, temporality and literary practice.

The session adopted a dynamic format of short provocations, lightning talks and open-ended discussion. Participants responded to prompts that invited them to reflect on their projects – Why this now? What does this do? – and formulate their own questions, challenging the boundaries of what we value as literature and how it acts in the world. Together, we considered how literature negotiates visions of the future, unsettles inherited hierarchies and offers new ways of thinking through our entangled ecological and political worlds. The panel thus aimed to provide space for experimentation and critical curiosity – a space where the emerging voices of early career researchers can shed fresh light on the question of how literary research itself can become a practice of future-making.

Topics of inquiry included:

• New takes on who literature is for, and where it happens – from Reddit threads to religious bookshelves to digital archives of reception.
• Critical engagements with storytelling as a method for confronting ecological crisis, postcolonial inequality, and the shifting politics of identity, humour and form.
• Early sparks of research projects already asking: What futures are we writing towards, and what futures do we resist?

Initiated by Dîlan Canan Çakir (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities), Rebecca Hardie (Articulations) and Viktor J. Illmer (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities).