[Activity/Workshop] Imagining as Research Strategy

'Imagining as Research Strategy' is a workshop space for post graduate students and early career scholars interested in exploring fabulation, ie storytelling with a free reign on the imagination. The aim is 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.

Taking the Africa-Asia axis of knowledge as the terrain to experiment the method of critical fabulation, participants will discuss and learn how to narrate along three shared paradigms:
i) 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.
ii) 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.
iii) 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:
i) deploy our imagination to interplay with disciplinary concepts, discourses;
ii) guided writing (in English, French & Portuguese) through prompts in a collegial group setting;
iii) individualized feedback.