Fabulation: Responses and Propositions

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and the achievement of gender equality. Selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (2026, Duke University Press). In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship, Los Angeles.

Dr Nobunye Levin is a Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is a filmmaker and scholar. Her films and research are concerned with experiences from the Global South expressed through film aesthetics, the politics of aesthetics, radical cinemas, decolonial feminisms, anti-racism, and tactics of feminist filmmaking. She is the author of several essays on her film work. Her recent film work includes Dreaming is serious work (2025) and the video essay Reverie (2023), made in collaboration with Palesa Shongwe. Reverie received the runner-up award for videographic criticism at the 2025 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies awards. Nobunye completed a practice-based PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Wits). Prior to her appointment at King’s, she was a Lecturer in the Film and TV Department at Wits, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Decolonising Screen Worlds in the ERC-funded ‘African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies’ project, situated at SOAS, University of London.

Jyoti Mistry is Professor in FILM at Valand Academy and works in film both as a research form and as a mode of artistic practice. She has made critically acclaimed films in multiple genres and her installation work draws from cinematic traditions but is often re-contextualized for galleries and museums that are outside of the linear cinematic experience. Select film works include: When I grow up I want to be a black man (2017), Impunity (2014), 09: 21:25 (2011), Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit (2010) and I mike what I like (2006).

Select publications include: we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (2012) a collection of essays inspired by her film which explores the complexity of racial identity in South Africa. Gaze Regimes: Films and Feminisms in Africa (2015). Places to Play: practice, research, pedagogy (2017) explores the use of archive as an exemplar entry to rethink colonial images through “decolonised” film practices. She has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of African Cinema: “Film as Research Tool: Practice and Pedagogy” (2018).

She has taught at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), New York University; University of Vienna; Arcada University of Applied Science Polytechnic in Helsinki, Nafti in Accra and Alle Arts School at University of Addis Ababa. Mistry has been artist in residence in New York City, at California College of Arts (San Francisco), Sacatar (Brazil) and a DAAD Researcher at Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University (Berlin). In 2016-2017 she was Artist in Residence at Netherlands Film Academy. In 2016 she was recipient of the Cilect (Association of International film schools) Teaching Award in recognition for innovation in practices in film research and pedagogy.

Ram Krishna Ranjan is a lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersection of research, pedagogy and film practice. His educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies, Fine Art and Film. In his work, he critically explores decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and the intersectionality of caste, class and gender. He has made several films on these issues. His latest, Fourth World, delves into the various facets and stages of a creative-collaborative practice that attempted to foreground and engage with Dalit experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943.

Interested in trans-generational and intra-cultural haunting, Sacks’ artistic research frequently experiments with auto-ethnography and productive discomfort in multi-modal ways, attempting to discover sharper ways of giving attention, making safe space for generative failure. Via a series of inter-disciplinary corporeal and material experiments, the research at root asks questions around how to mobilize Sacks’ own positionality as a privileged body in the anti-colonial conversation. The ongoing research explores if and how clowning generates a kind of ethico-poesis, particularly examining how satire and parody might destabilize and rethink issues relating to power, race, privilege and identity. Or not. 

A professional actor/writer/director/researcher/clown, Sacks has taught and supervised at BA, MA and PhD levels in South Africa, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and the USA; was a Fulbright Scholar in Connecticut, USA (2021-2022); presented The Walls Have Tongues or… at the Research Pavilion (Venice Biennale, 2017); published their PhD ‘thesis’ SQUIRM (2020), and is co-author of The Clown Manifesto published by Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama  (2015).

Sacks currently occupies the position of Professor of Acting at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH).