The Research Event by Mike Michael

Author:Mike Michael [Michael, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815354277
Google: tRh9zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2021-11-30T04:27:42+00:00

Circulating fabulation

Clearly, in the cases discussed earlier, a particular form of critical and creative scholarship has been mobilized to crystallize the speculative possibilities of particular cultural artefacts and practices. But social scientists also compose their own fabulations. In some ways, this can be tied to a tradition of narrativization in a discipline such as sociology. As Watson (2016, 2021) has summarized, the use of fiction has long been a means by which sociologists have attempted to disseminate sociological insights, to engage with publics in ways that better convey, and render more accessible, core sociological ideas. But additionally, dissemination can also attend to the prospective and the possible, involve speculations on the not-as-yet whether through poetry, instructional manuals, science fiction novels, speculative documentaries, digital games design and playing (see, for example, Jungnickel, 2020; Salazar et al., 2017). In all these cases, the broad aim is to enable access to other ways of grasping – understanding and imagining – states of affairs that are potentialities, which implicate alternative sociomaterial relations, that invite more inventive problems with their emergent pre-propositions.

As an example, we can turn to the work of Haraway (2016). In her Staying with the Trouble, we are presented with an argument for speculative fabulation – a complex and collective process of ‘participat(ing) in a kind of genre fiction committed to strengthening ways to propose near futures, possible futures, and implausible but real nows’ (p.136). Such social, semiotic and material practices are grounded in, and resourced by, a ‘rich terran muddle’ (p.53) characterized by tentacularity, laterality, heterogeneity, multispecies becoming and captured in the figure of ‘a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm’ – a compost pile in which humans are thoroughly immersed (p.55). What does speculative fabulation afford? It is a means – a lure – that enables the

proposing (of) the Chthulucene as a needed third story … (that) unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene … is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished …

p.55

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