Fictioning Social Theory: the use of fiction to enrich, inform and challenge the theoretical imaginationa: Introduction
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The introduction to the special issue taps into discussions about the inseparability of science and fiction. Commencing from the idea that scientific statements are distinguished from fiction only a posteriori, not a priori, the piece asks, how fiction could be used as a theoretical resource in social scientific thinking. Could it inform, enrich, extend, intensify, and challenge the sociological imagination? Besides rejecting any clear-cut separation of social science and fictional and artistic forms, the text seeks to unsettle our certainty as to what counts as “fact” and what as “fiction” in the first place. It also suggests that examining the relationship of sociology and fictional and artistic forms helps us unsettle the institutionalized disciplinary ways of ordering knowledge and thought and that there may be a poetics or fiction to be uncovered in sociological scholarship, as sociology is also a form of storytelling.
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Olli Pyyhtinen, Universidad de Tampere, FI
Olli Pyyhtinen is Associate Professor at the New Social Research programme at Tampere University, Finland. His research intersects social theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example The Simmelian Legacy (2018), More-than-Human Sociology (2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014), and Simmel and the Social (2010), and co-author of Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests (2014).
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