Fictional Narratives, Storytelling and Imaginary Cases

Abstract

Storytelling has had some, but not extensive, methodological focus or attention (Frazer, 2017) (Stevens, 2017). With the ethnographic turn in political theory, or political theory in an ‘ethnographic key’ (Herzog & Zacka, 2017) (Longo & Zacka, 2019) (Perez, 2020), comes a challenge to methods that involve storytelling and fiction. Does ethnography make imaginary cases defunct, or is the project to combine ethnographic data with compelling, but generally fictional, narrative? Are we to limit fictional thought experiments to spaces where ethnographic data is not as easy to collect – non-human species, some indigenous tribes, etc? Or, similarly, as insightful counterfactuals? This panel examines what storytelling methods exactly are and what their methodological role is.

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