[Commlist] CFP "The End: Finality and Renewal in Culture", 10-12 June 2026, Tallinn, Estonia

*16th Annual Lotman Days Conference “The End: Finality and Renewal in 
Culture”*
10–12 June 2026
Tallinn University, Estonia

Conference website: https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026 
<https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026>

Extended deadline for abstracts: *28 February 2026*

“The end” is one of the most powerful and unsettling notions in culture. 
Endings, whether of life, texts, or civilisations, fascinate us because 
they imply both destruction and renewal. This tension between finitude 
and continuity is intrinsic to human culture and becomes especially 
visible in moments of crisis and transformation, when imaginings of the 
end intensify and shape collective meaning-making. The 16th Annual 
Lotman Days invites participants to reflect on endings as semiotic, 
cultural, and existential phenomena, not merely as closures but as 
thresholds of change. How do artistic movements, political systems, 
religions, scientific disciplines, media environments, or societies 
imagine their limits? How can “the end” function as a creative mechanism 
rather than simply a point of disappearance? What is the semiotic 
potential of end narratives in times when endings are experienced as 
ongoing?

The conference welcomes interdisciplinary approaches, and many of the 
proposed themes resonate strongly with current debates in Communication 
and Media Studies, including media representations of crisis, digital 
cultures, political discourse, environmental communication, and the role 
of emerging technologies in shaping collective imaginaries.


Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Endings in artistic, literary, and cinematic texts

- The semiotics of death, closure, and renewal

- Cultural mechanisms of transformation

- Endings as sites of translation, explosion, and unpredictability

- Entropy, limitation, and self-restraint as cultural principles

- The fascination with apocalypse and the aesthetics of collapse

- The last sentence, the last frame: the function of the ending in 
artistic text

- Endings, afterlives, and renewal in folklore, myths, and oral traditions

- Cyclical versus linear models of time and history

- Endings and beginnings in scientific and philosophical thought

- “The end of culture” and “the end of history” narratives

- Eschatology and the imagination of the end in religious thought

- Semiotics of extinction, loss, and regeneration in the Anthropocene

- Fear, hope, and eco-anxiety in the age of environmental collapse

- Imaginations of the end in conspiracy narratives and post-truth discourses

- The role of media in constructing and amplifying collective 
perceptions of endings

- The age of artificial intelligence as a new cultural threshold

- Memory, forgetting, and the afterlives of the past

- Temporalities of ending

- Digital afterlives and the persistence of meaning beyond material limits

- The end as an ethical and creative challenge

Confirmed plenary speakers are:
*Stef Craps *(Ghent University, Belgium)
*Dolly Jørgensen* (University of Stavanger, Norway)
*Eelco Runia* (Independent researcher, Netherlands)


More information can be found in the Call for Papers on the conference 
website: https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026 
<https://www.tlu.ee/en/lotman-days-conference2026>


The official languages of the congress are English and Russian.

*Registration*

*150 € early bird* (March 1 to April 15, 2026)

*200 € late bird *(April 16 to May 16, 2026)

Please note that no payment is required for abstract submission. 
Registration fees apply only to accepted participants.

Questions about the conference can be sent to (merit.maran /at/ tlu.ee) 
<mailto:(merit.maran /at/ tlu.ee)>

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