Fictional Writing in Doctoral Theses: The (re)Engagement of Play and Reflexivity

Abstract

In this chapter, I make the case for experimenting with fiction in doctoral writing in terms of both writing process and product. Experimentation with fiction involves playing with different ways of telling research stories, be they stories about the data itself or about the research process. Fiction offers doctoral students different ways to speak about affect, their relationships with participants, contradictions, messiness, uncertainties, and more. I draw attention to the potentials of using fiction as a process of sharing and (de)constructing knowledge in group settings and to its value as an alternate to conventionalized forms of academic language, particularly in terms of the representation of data. In short, fictional representation provides a way of playing with the doctoral performance and a further exploration of the ways language is used to make claims, position the author, and represent the social worlds being researched. Fiction and Social Research The use of fictionalized accounts is a well-established practice in social research and is just one of a number of writing forms that contribute to the creative turn in academic writing where aesthetics and voice are of key concern. Narrative research (Netolicky, 2015); arts-based research (Chilton & Leavy, 2014); and numerous iterations of ethnography such as creative analytic process ethnography (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005), performance ethnography (Alexander, 2005), new ethnography (Goodall, 2000), and autoethnography (Anderson, 2006) are all areas where this kind of creativity can be seen. Fictionalisation and concerns with the boundary between fiction/non-fiction can be found in a lot of these works, but as the list implies, ethnographers have had a particularly long-standing interest in it. The ethnographic novel is a genre that has its origins in the 19th century (Narayan, 1999), and it remains