My fellow Glaswegian policy troublemaker Nik Sunil Williams, who plies his trade for Index on Censorship, has started a wonderful hobby blog. His central conceit is simple: if films invent worlds, then what are the investigative journalists in those worlds writing?
Nik is using fan fiction as a starting point for – you guessed it – policy wonking! He is taking the battles he fights in his day job, such as freedom of expression, FOI requests, press regulation, censorship, and state stonewalling, and applying them creatively to scenarios from the movies. Jurassic Park from the perspective of the corporate cover-up of the deaths of the local workers? Yes please.
In fact, this has inspired me to set myself a summer challenge to bang out a 10k word piece of fiction, which I hope Nik will accept as a guest post, about a film whose relevance to my summer dissertation is almost painful. Yes, that film! The creative challenge will give me a place to house the outcomes that I will be setting the stage for, in my dissertation, which means that I will end up with one very tight dissertation and one very loose creative endeavour.
So that’s me, publicly committed to the challenge. I’m doin’ this. Strap in.