The researcher as unreliable narrator: writing sociological crime fiction as a research method

Abstract

Whilst works of art, including fiction, are well established as legitimate objects of sociological analysis, and the narratives crafted by the subjects of social research are widely understood to be meaningful, the use of creative writing as a methodology is still quite novel within law and the social sciences. In this article, I seek to demonstrate how the practice and process of creating fiction can extend the aesthetic, affective, and ontological possibilities of social research. Further, I argue that it offers a model for working ethically and creatively with others within a poststructuralist theoretical framework. I will do this by reflecting on the creation of a series of sociological crime fictions, written between 2015 and 2017. I discuss how this approach developed in response to concerns about working ethically with people who had experienced criminalization and stigma, drawing on Carolyn Steedman’s concept of ‘enforced narratives’. I then survey some contemporary trends in sociological fiction, and earlier feminist experimental approaches to writing research, which have inspired my approach. Using one of my own works of sociological crime fiction as an example, I demonstrate how these works are composed, drawing on a conceptualization of research as a process of ‘translation’ as developed within actor–network theory. I hope that the practice of working carefully with people with experience of the justice system to make experimental fiction, might help us reimagine and re-present complex processes of crime and punishment, in a form that can travel beyond social science audiences and enrich the practice of law.