Paper short abstract:

The communication offers a glance back at the author’s journey in the writing of a PhD thesis. It delves into very practical aspects of available textual solutions and their contested legitimacy for dissertations as basis for a personal career and for knowledge production in a disciplinary field.

Paper long abstract:

In this contribution, I offer a critical glance at my journey in the writing of my PhD dissertation about cultural translation and mediation in a globalized periphery, in southwestern Ethiopia.

My attempts to compose a pluralistic picture made of contrasted viewpoints -of lowland and highland Ethiopians and of foreigners, of men and women, of upper-class educated actors and less-privileged ones- may run against standardized manners of constructing and presenting a dissertation in social anthropology.

In dissertations, research students affirm their unique contribution to the discipline. While there is room for innovation, institutional validation sets clear boundaries, that are the scientific standards within which dialogue between peers can happen. Building on the idea of “communing imagination”, I use communality and imagination as two themes to assess possibilities and barriers on experiments in the writing.

Fieldwork-based anthropology PhD is usually presented and experienced as a solitary work. How one could make science out of what is common, or make it a common thing? Often, co-authorship initiatives happen only later in careers. Could alternative ways of presenting bibliographical resources with informants and other contributors’ name provide a middle way?

It is common in a PhD dissertation to account for the imagination and imagined desires and realities of the people studied, but much less to "seriously" account for the writer's imagination - even lesser to their imaginations combined. The use of fiction and oral genres such as jokes can provide an entrance door into their imaginations, but with which basis for peer-reviewing?