Refusing the single story
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie coined a phrase that echoes persistently across my own practice, in her 2009 talk ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. Her argument is simple to state and hard to live by: if you hear only one story about a person or a place, told repeatedly, that single story becomes the only story. It is rarely false outright. It is incomplete, and incompleteness dressed up as the whole truth is its own kind of lie.
I spend my working life teaching this, in miniature, on a page. A character in a novel is rarely just one thing. A poem’s speaker contradicts themselves, and that contradiction is usually the point, not a flaw to smooth over. Part of what I’m training a sixteen-year-old to do, when I ask them to track how a writer presents someone across a whole text, is to resist the first available reading and go searching for the second one, the one sitting underneath, the one that reaches for a more perceptive, unifying idea.
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It’s a strange thing, then, to watch the same discipline abandoned so completely the moment the person in question is real.
I’ve been thinking about this since the coverage of Jason Arday’s case, and since his death. I want to be careful here, so let me be precise about what I am and am not arguing. I don’t know what led to his death, and I’m not going to pretend to. That’s not a question I’m equipped to answer, and it isn’t really mine to answer. What I can look at, because it’s public and documented, is the story that got told about him while he was alive to read it.
Liverpool John Moores University’s own review found the plagiarism allegations against him amounted to an ‘honest and reasonable error’, not the deliberate deception that much of the initial coverage implied. That finding came after the story had already travelled. A study on tenure decisions in the US found Black and Hispanic academics are roughly 44 per cent less likely to receive a unanimous positive outcome at equivalent levels of productivity to their white peers, context that rarely made it into the pieces written about him. And by one count, 188 articles were published about his case in nine days, a volume of attention that dwarfs the coverage other academics have received over comparable allegations, some involving far more serious and substantiated findings.
None of that proves intent on any single journalist’s part. I’m not interested in assigning malice to a byline. What it shows, I think, is something more structural and more uncomfortable: that a single story, once it starts moving, doesn’t need anyone to will it forward. It just needs enough people to repeat it, and not enough people willing to ask what’s missing.
This is the same mechanism, scaled up and given teeth, that I ask my students to resist on the page. The instinct to fix a person, place or idea as one thing, competent or fraudulent, safe or dangerous, deserving or not, and then stop reaching. It’s a comforting instinct, because complexity is often slower and less satisfying than a verdict. But it’s exactly the instinct good reading, and I’d argue good thinking generally, has the potential to interrupt.
There’s a line I keep returning to that sits underneath everything I try to do at Attika: ‘for every child, especially those for whom school can feel an alien place’. I’ve started holding a second version of it alongside the first. ‘For every academic, especially those for whom the media can feel like an intimidating place’. Different setting, same obligation. The people most exposed to being flattened into a single story are rarely the people with the resources to defend, or protect, themselves against it once it’s told.
I don’t have a tidy resolution to offer here, and I’m suspicious of essays that manufacture one. What I have is a discipline I already believe in, taught differently depending on the room I’m in. On a page, it looks like asking a student to find the line that complicates their first reading. In life, it might look like something smaller and harder: noticing when a story has arrived at its verdict too quickly, and being willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing the rest. Until we do.
From the margins...
Sources
LJMU ‘honest and reasonable error’ finding: Liverpool John Moores University’s panel concluded (March 2026) that the citation issues in Arday’s PhD thesis were the result of ‘honest and reasonable error’, and that the text overlap was ‘well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time’. Reported by Retraction Watch.
Tenure-bias study: Black and Hispanic faculty were found 44 per cent less likely to receive unanimous approval in promotion and tenure votes, at equivalent productivity, in a University of Houston-led study of 1,571 faculty at five US universities (2015 to 2022), published in Nature Human Behaviour.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01977-7
Coverage volume: 188 articles about Jason Arday were published in UK media in the nine days following his resignation (249 across the full 22 days), per media analysis organisation NewsCord, reported in The Conversation, ‘Jason Arday and the new politics of plagiarism’.
https://theconversation.com/jason-arday-and-the-new-politics-of-plagiarism-290020
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