Speculative Fabulation as Inquiry: Creative Approaches to Language Research

This article mobilizes speculative fabulation as a rigorous mode of inquiry for reimagining language research. Tracing how positivist commitments rooted in colonial and Cartesian logics continue to shape contemporary practices such as digitally scalable corpus models and survey-based research, the article critiques the human-centered and representational assumptions that position language as abstract data and the researcher as sovereign knower. Drawing on post-structural and posthumanist thought, it advances concepts such as assemblage, affect, and aparallel evolution to reconceptualize language as materially and relationally entangled. Through engagements with Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Ursula K. Le Guin, speculative fabulation is articulated not as fiction opposed to reality but as an ontological practice that reorients inquiry toward relational becoming, ethical attunement, and the transformation of researcher voice within inquiry.