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Narratives of the crisis: myths and realities of contemporary society
International Conference, Thessaloniki, June 24 - 26, 2015

Narratives are present in all societies. They are present in myths, legends, news, rumors, in historical and artistic texts, in politics, in everyday conversation. Stories are able to construct reality. As Roland Barthes suggested (1966) the most important issue is to describe the code by which the narrator and the reader are signified in a narrative. In this sense, an author is not the one who invents a narrative but the one who possesses best the code used by the participants. The different social discourses are supposed to reveal what a society considers as “natural”, as requiring no further explanation (the so called “common sense” used by media discourses). This kind of narrative coincides with the social representations of the audience and even if this is not always the case, the social subjects normally try to reduce the distance between the information received and their attitudes: strategies are thus elaborated in order to maintain a dominant way of thinking.

Narrative analysis has become fundamental for the social sciences, and especially for sociology. Myth cannot always be clearly differentiated from “reality” in the social discourse (fiction seems essential to the “reproduction” of the facts): it is necessary to be understood in relation with the narrated reality.

The “Narratives of crisis: myths and realities” International Conference aims to record and analyze the myths which narrate the economic crisis in Europe and particularly in Greece, and investigate the ways media and the diverse political and social discourses represent the crisis. The Conference is organized by the AISLF– GT 21, the ISA-RC14, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Macedonia, the Ecclesiastic University of Thessaloniki, the Municipality of Thessaloniki and the French Institute of Thessaloniki.