Credit: Aarti Kawlra, Dakar, Senegal (2025)
"Imagining as Research Strategy" Writing Workshop
Imagining as Research Strategy was a writing workshop held during the third Africa-Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge (AA3) ConFest, acting as a space for postgraduate students and early career scholars interested in exploring fabulation, i.e. storytelling with a free reign on the imagination. The aim was to speculate (and write) not just critically but to do so as a strategy of research, such as to “right” disciplinary omissions, or engage with archives “creatively”, following the work of literary theorist Saidiya Hartmann.
Abstract:
Taking the Africa-Asia axis of knowledge as the terrain to experiment with the method of critical fabulation, participants discussed and learned how to narrate along three shared paradigms:
- Africa-Asia as a chrono-tope where the physical region or geographical entity is narrated as a time-space configuration, example inter-regional encounters, circulation of ideas, people, objects, climate, disease etc.
- Narrating human and planetary past, present and future as memory, myth, science fiction, allegory, or fairy tale along the Africa-Asia axis of collective amnesia and/or retrospection.
- To view the Africa-Asia axis as a sensory one – filled with emotions, abilities, and motives, grounded in human-nature-technology triads, for example, bio-technical reactions and transformations, intentional acts of human and nonhuman intervention.
Workshop highlights:
- deploy our imagination to interplay with disciplinary concepts, discourses;
- guided writing (in English, French & Portuguese) through prompts in a collegial group setting;
- individualised feedback.
Convenors:
- Françoise Vergès, Sarah Parker Research Centre, UCL London, UK
- Aarti Kawlra, IIAS Leiden, The Netherlands & Pondicherry, India
- Laura R. Erber, IIAS Leiden, The Netherlands
Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAD)
LOS-104, Batiment Ousmane Sembene/Ousmane Sembene Building (LOS)
Dakar
Senegal
Email:
[email protected]