Date: 2026-03-09
This week we look at several ‘contemporary’ techniques of scholars and researchers, including critical fabulation and autethnography.
Critical fabulation presents a practice of imagining alternative narratives or speculative scenarios based on gaps in our existing research. This is a practice of creative-critical hybrid approaches.
In autoethnography, you turn the lens on yourself, examining your own media consumption, creative practice, or cultural participation. How does your experience illuminate broader patterns?
Saidiya Hartman is a literary scholar and cultural historian. She is tracing the afterlife of slavery in modern American life and rescuing from oblivion stories of sparsely documented lives that have been systematically excluded from historical archives.
Critical fabulation, a scholarly-sounding term coined by the brilliant American writer Saidiya Hartman, refers to a style of creative semi-nonfiction that attempts to bring the suppressed voices of the past to the surface by means of hard research and scattered facts. The notion of critical fabulation originally appeared in Hartman’s essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” a piece dedicated to exploring, deconstructing and illuminating the Venus trope of the enslaved African woman.
Hartman created the piece as a response to the lack of representation the Black woman had in historical texts, noticing that the history of the oppressed is rarely autobiographical and, more often than not, is written by the oppressor himself. Taking matters into her own hands, she decided to give a voice to the thousands of women who had been talked over for so long.
Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural (Arthur Bochner, Carolyn Ellis) Autoethnographers speak against, or provide alternatives to, dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts, stories, and stereotypes” and “offer accounts of personal experience to complement, or fill gaps in, existing research. (Adams, Ellis, Jones)
Write about a disappeared or barely-documented digital space, community, or moment. This could be:
Use the fragments you can find (screenshots, Wayback Machine captures, others’ memories) as evidence, but allow yourself to imagine and speculate. What might have happened in the gaps? Who might have been there whose stories weren’t recorded? Write in a way that acknowledges you’re imagining while staying grounded in what little evidence exists. Reflect on what this method allows you to say that straight archival work wouldn’t.
Write about your own relationship to a digital platform, practice, or community. Make your personal experience the subject of analysis. How does your specific experience illuminate broader patterns about digital culture, media consumption, identity, or community?
Use “I” freely, but also step back: What cultural forces shaped your experience? What assumptions did you bring? How has your relationship to this space/practice changed over time? Connect your story to broader questions about media, memory, identity, or community.
This isn’t memoir—it’s using your experience as data to understand something larger.