Science Fiction as Methodology: Extrapolation, Speculation, and Fabulation in Qualitative Inquiry

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: What is Possible: New Methodologies in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Science fiction functions not as a predictive genre but as a discursive methodology for shaping collective futures. Through the narrative modes of extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation, it becomes a site of knowledge-power-imagining—a space where imagination, epistemology, and power converge to construct alternative worldings. These modes can be adapted as methodological tools in qualitative research, inviting participants to imagine beyond the limits of empirical data and dominant narratives to engage with potentiality, futurity, and collective worlding. Science fiction as methodology invites scholars to treat fiction not as escape, but as ethico-onto-epistemology; not as prediction, but as intervention. In this sense, science fiction is not only about the future; it is a method for making it otherwise.

Author

• Matthew Weirick Johnson, University of South Florida