Questions to be addressed include: What is the place of fiction in making sense of the social realities created by international development and aid? How has the daily contact with discourses of development shaped the mental and intellectual landscapes expressed in works of imagination from the Global South? How has fiction represented the (foreign) ‘expert’ – either in the shape of a person, an organization, or, metaphorically, in the form of ‘expert knowledge’? How have works of imagination received the development industry, its international and national actors, its material signs and promises? Who desires ‘development’ and for what reasons? What meanings do narratives give to epistemologies, subjectivities and practices encountered in the field of development cooperation and international aid? What are challenges posed by works of imagination to modes of knowledge production in social and political science and vice versa?

Interdisciplinary in scope, the workshop assembles contributions from African Studies, Political Science, English Studies, History and Development Studies on the grounds of a shared interest into crossing conventional boundaries between literary studies and social sciences. The workshop is open to the public.

Programme (pdf)

The workshop is jointly organised by the FWF-research project 'Concepts of Development in Postcolonial Kenyan Literature', Department of African Studies, and the Department of Development Studies.