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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the use of speculative fiction in anthropology teaching as a response to polarisation. Treated as a parallel site of cultural knowledge, fiction enables students to practice ethnographic analysis, reflexivity, and interpretation in a safer, affectively engaging pedagogical space.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the use of fiction as a strategy for teaching anthropology in an increasingly polarised world. Drawing on three years of teaching experience in an undergraduate course, we explore how speculative fiction can be used to train ethnographic thinking while navigating ideological conflict and emotionally charged topics.

Rather than treating fiction as supplementary material, the course approaches it as a parallel site of cultural knowledge production, where meanings, power relations, and social imaginaries are constructed and contested. Unlike “finished” ethnographies, in which analytical moves are already explicit, fictional narratives require students to identify patterns, formulate interpretations, and argue from the material themselves. Fiction does not replace ethnography, but functions as a preparatory training ground for ethnographic reasoning before students encounter ethically and politically loaded issues in their own fieldwork.

Fictional narratives allow engagement with such issues in a pedagogically safer environment than confrontation with polarising ethnographic experiences. This relative distance can serve as a pedagogical buffer, enabling experimentation with interpretation, reflexivity, and critique while maintaining moral and political engagement. The approach also mobilises the affective dimensions of learning, often resulting in higher levels of student participation and interpretive investment.

The paper reflects on classroom dynamics and moments of friction, particularly around authorship, representation, and legitimacy, and addresses the limits of fiction-based pedagogy, including tensions between authorial intent and anthropological interpretation, and challenges in situating fictional texts within broader cultural and structural patterns. It argues for an experimental, reflexive, and student-agency-based approach to anthropology education in a divided world.