Hannu Heikkinen

Over the past fifty years, the concept of narrative has been of increasing scholarly interest across the humanities and social sciences, including educational research. Scholars have described a narrative turn, a narrative boom, even a narrative explosion. Finnish narratologist Matti Hyvärinen has argued that we have had four distinct narrative turns: first in literary theory during the 1960s, then in historiography, later in the social sciences, and finally as a diffuse sociocultural turn. Narrativity has also gained a strong foothold in educational research; it has been applied in a wide range of research areas, from narrative learning to the development of teachers' professional identities.

In this keynote, I argue that we are witnessing another narrative turn. My claim is that we are living in the age of hypernarrativity; a social and cultural condition in which the concept of narrative has broken far beyond its conceptual boundaries and thus become increasingly ambiguous. As narrative has evolved into a fashionable catchword, its theoretical clarity and explanatory power has diminished. Narrative has become an empty signifier, used everywhere and meaning very little. This also has direct consequences for educational knowledge.

The hypernarrative condition is tightly intertwined with the dynamics of the post-truth era. Compelling narratives function less as ways of understanding the world and more as instruments for affirming identities and solidifying worldviews. Social-epistemic bubbles evolve into narrative echo chambers where people gather around a shared narrative, as if around a symbolic campfire. In most extreme cases, these narrative echo chambers develop into conspiratorial rabbit holes.

Yet, as Yuval Noah Harari reminds us, Homo sapiens has always been a post-truth species: large-scale human cooperation has historically relied on collectively upheld fiction like religions, national identities, and economic systems. What distinguishes the 21st-century post-truth condition, however, is the unprecedented technological environment in which narratives now operate. Digital media ecosystems—driven by algorithmic amplification, personalised feeds, and virality—reshape the cultural modes of storytelling. Children and young people are particularly vulnerable to the epistemic vulnerabilities of hypernarrativity.

For education and educational research, the rise of hypernarrativity presents a clear challenge. Understanding the conditions in which knowledge is produced and distributed is crucial. The purpose of this keynote is to map the social, cultural, and epistemic landscapes of hypernarrativity and to consider how to reclaim truthfulness by cultivating narrative literacy in education and educational research.