Findings From the Laboratory of Speculative Sociology

• In Event: 25.056 - Reconfiguring the Imagined and Real Futures of Educational Research: The Importance of Being Speculative

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper explains how the recent turn to speculative philosophy in the humanities offers an important way to rethink research methodology in the social sciences. Speculative philosophy invests in the material force of language to directly engage with the future by plugging into the potentiality of the actual present, and often turns to speculative fiction to achieve that direct access. This paper discusses the theory underpinning this kind of work, illustrating the radical power of the speculative in shaping the social sciences. We build on the speculative philosophy of Mark Hansen (2015) and Steven Shaviro (2015), to discuss a work of speculative fiction - Findings from the laboratory of speculative sociology (LSS) – for how it informed educational researchers’ experimental practice in a biosocial laboratory focused on learning and behavior.

Theoretical framework:
Speculative philosophy uses fiction to probe imaginatively into scenarios that often operate according to a different ontology, unsettling our common sense of shared reality (Bryant et al, 2011; Shaviro, 2015). Speculative fiction entails extrapolation and fabulation, often focusing on the limits of science and technology. The ‘speculative’ in speculative fiction digs into and mutates current techno-futurist desires, and builds an alternative new world, while exploring fundamental philosophical questions. This can involve continuously stretching and distorting a simple characteristic of the current environment, until it becomes almost unrecognizable, but is clearly an evolution or involution of the original (Gratton, 2014). It also entails speculation on what ‘sentience’ might be in these different ontologies, where standard categories – life, death, male, female, human, non-human – are broken and re-assembled in new ways (Hansen, 2014; Morton, 2016). Through this emphasis on different kinds of sentience, speculative philosophy lends itself to education research on the ‘social’.

Methods:
Researchers produced the LSS as part of an effort to build a research laboratory focused on the biosocial dimensions of learning and behavior. Like other speculative projects, LSS taps into the present historical moment, with its particular sociotechnical aspect, exploring how current technological tools are changing our relationship to data. The laboratory is alive with computational capacity, recursively elaborating whatever ‘data’ is generated. Researchers used the LSS to design new methods that might better study learning and behavior in complex computational environments. In the LSS, social science becomes a kind of non-human sociology infused with ecological insights and operating within the perspective of the anthropocene.

Significance
The LSS case study shows how speculative fiction was used by researchers to reconsider sociological methods in light of an expanded concept of sentience. The LSS triggered a set of experiments and a new vision of methodology similar in spirit to what David Roden (2014) calls dark phenomenology. Inspired by the LSS, researchers began to design projects that probed the dark recesses of sentience using new sociological methods.

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Manchester Metropolitan University