Researching futures with speculative fiction

Futures have become a major locus of social research. Rich disciplinary debates abound on how to best study the roots and impacts of what people anticipate, believe and want to bring into being. This article explores speculative fiction methods and their potential to creatively expand traditional approaches to researching futures. It outlines several techniques for using speculative fiction to critically examine how people make sense and meaning of (and in) the social world. This includes methods of close reading, intertextual analysis, generating participant fictions and generating researcher fictions. Drawing from illustrative cases of these methods, the article considers their methodological and analytic value for generating multi-scale narratives. It reflects on how speculative fictions can converge and merge local and global trajectories into dynamic scalar horizons. By (re)imagining possible histories, presents and futures as well as multi-scale frames, speculative fiction methods offer creative approaches to explore people’s situated expectations and desires. Speculative fiction methods can engender nuanced insights on normative imaginaries and the conceptual complexities of current social issues, such as rapid technological change, where the spectre of the future is centred and felt in public discourse and everyday life.