Fabulating Otherwise

Abstract

I relating otherwise, articulating new forms of comprehension and connection. In thinking through absences, Mthoko, Adamu, and Lazem honor Hartman’s critical fabulation as a mode of historical reimagining—“(re)present[ing] the sequence of events through rewriting against our recollection of the records,” they explain. Here, fabulating holds lessons for the classroom within and beyond African institutions. It shows how expanding the pedagogical toolbox might require not only a range of new situated case studies but also new situated approaches to connecting, interpreting, retelling, and rewriting those stories. Fabulating design across a geographically diverse set of communities means learning how to reimagine this shared process with students. As design pedagogy, then, fabulation describes a movement that inquires in place, a practice focused less on resolutions, and more on the unknown and unknowable. In a recent XRDS article, HCI scholar Leslie Coney gestures at this critical repositioning: “[M]y new and diverse perspective...allows me to explore not only unanswered questions, but also unquestioned answers” [2]. By returning to the unquestioned answers, Mthoko and colleagues tell stories from another side.