The idea for Readings Beyond Academia was born out of my belief that books help us see things in other and more ways - and of my love of reading. It is an expansion of The Africa Bookshelf, where you find books, whose storyline is situated on the African continent. Books allow us to travel, to imagine a world in our heads, beyond our own immediate experiences. Through reading, we get to know a place or a situation, a people, a society differently, maybe better, maybe from a whole new angle and viewpoint.

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The place of fiction, of novels in the production of knowledge and for expanding your ideas on a particular historical moment, a specific place, or people, is not often on the agenda of academic researchers. Yet novels allow for a different, another access to reality, making certain and other things visible. Beyond scholarly visions, novels open up new ways of seeing.