About this Event
Science Fiction as a Methodology for Theory Generation
Science fiction is one of the most popular fiction genres, long recognized for its capacity to critique social orders and to imagine them otherwise. Across the social sciences, however, it has mainly served as a resource—a source of data, an inspiration for critique, a methodological and pedagogical toolkit—rather than as a mode of inquiry: researchers write about science fiction far more than they write through it, and there is little methodological guidance for writing it as social research. Amid growing interest in creative methods and fiction as research, and calls to diversify academic writing, this article addresses this gap by developing science fiction writing as a qualitative methodology for theory generation through two complementary moves.
Conceptually, drawing on possible-worlds narratology, it introduces fictional actualization—the passage of a world from a virtual or possible state to inhabited textual reality—as the core mechanism through which composing science fiction does theoretical work. Practically, it operationalizes this account through a creative writing procedure built on four groundwork documents—world-building, characterization, plotting, and scene-making—drafted before the prose and recursively revised as theory and composition act back on each other.
I argue that science fiction not only can generate theory but, as a creative method, offers three affordances supporting a distinctive kind of theorizing: the genre’s conventions provide resources for theoretical variation that expand the social imagination; the craft demands of making a fictional world coherent and inhabitable act as a theoretical discipline, forcing abstract claims to be specified and embodied; and fictional actualization transforms the reader’s relation to theoretical knowledge, from comprehending propositions to inhabiting, feeling, and experiencing the social configurations they describe. The article thereby contributes to legitimizing fiction as research and making it more accessible by offering social scientists a formalized and teachable procedure for theorizing through fiction writing.
Event venue & nearby stays
CON 1.01, Department of Methodology, LSE, 65 Aldwych, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.