Academic Fictions

An often underestimated but critical element of academic endeavour is communication. As part of a course on “Cities, Conflict, and Development” that I teach at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva, Switzerland, I set my students an assignment that is aimed at pushing them to think about how to best communicate a message. Inspired in particular by the anthropologist Margery Wolf’s famous book, A Thrice-Told Tale, where she presents and analyses the differences between a short story, fieldnotes, and a social science article that she has written about the same events that took place during her research in Taiwan, I ask students to choose an article from the course syllabus, and to re-write it as a 1,500-word short story or poem, along with a 500 words appendix explaining how and why they went about writing their short story or poem. This thematic thread showcases a selection of their very original and evocative work. Curated by Dennis Rodgers.