Ideas on Fire is thrilled to be hosting Speculative Storytelling for Scholars: A Hands-on Workshop on October 27, 2026.
This workshop is currently full but see below for how to learn about more of our upcoming events.
As Black feminists have long demonstrated, speculative fiction can be a powerful tool for scholarly inquiry, helping researchers imagine new possibilities, rethink assumptions, and sharpen their intellectual interventions.
In this Ideas on Fire workshop, Alyssa Napier, Acquisitions Editor at Columbia University Press, will guide participants in exploring how scholars can bring speculative writing into the scholarly book development process.
Through guided writing activities and discussion, the workshop invites interdisciplinary scholars to experiment with speculative fiction as a method—not simply a genre or object of study.
Participants use speculative approaches to think differently about their arguments, intellectual interventions, and the possibilities their scholarship might open up.
No creative writing experience is required or assumed.
Meet Alyssa Napier
Alyssa M. Napier is the sociology and Black studies editor at Columbia University Press, where she acquires books that engage the subject of inequality from a range of domains and methodologies.
She manages Columbia’s series Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past, Present, and Future, a partnership between Columbia and Howard University.
Prior to her work at Columbia University Press, she worked at MIT Press.
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