By Laura Camfield
In an era of increasing complexity and uncertainty, conventional methodological approaches to pressing development concerns such as extreme income inequality often fall short. In a new reflection paper, Andy Sumner and I propose a new approach, social science fiction (SSF), not merely as an opportunity to cultivate empathy, but also as a robust methodological tool for development research.
SSF, as defined by Isaac Asimov in the 1950s, focuses on the human condition and the social organization of society, rather than just technology. This broad definition can encompass fantasy, magic realism, and even documentary fiction, as long as it shifts the reader’s or viewer’s perspective. Our paper explores how SSF can explicitly engage with social science puzzles, complementing empirical methods by generating hypotheses, exposing hidden norms, and imagining future impacts of continued inequality.
Why Does Development Studies Need Social Science Fiction?
Development Studies grapples with conceptual and methodological limitations. It often neglects both the past and the future, and its technocratic orientation inhibits exploration of alternatives to, e.g. the global capitalist world order. Its preference for retrospective and linear methods like interviews and surveys makes it harder to address complex and contingent futures.
This is where SSF offers a powerful corrective. It helps us imagine alternative social orders and institutional change, proving particularly useful for hypothesis generation. The existing engagement within Development Studies with arts and narrative-based methods and the call by David Lewis and others for a ‘development humanities’ creates space for SSF’s imaginative world-building capacity. It makes institutions and norms visible and testable, for instance, through counter-factual histories, and can be used to generate vignettes, scenarios, and new questions for empirical research. It’s even being used by the French army to imagine the threats that could endanger France and its interests
So where does it come from?
SSF has a rich literary lineage from Thomas More’s Utopia to contemporary authors such as Octavia E Butler or, most recently, Ian McEwan. Its key features are firstly, the Novum. This is anew element that makes us look at the world differently, such as a society run by talking horses or a reversal of the Atlantic slave trade’s historical dynamics where “whytes” are enslaved by “Blaks” (see also Blackman’s ‘Noughts and Crosses’).The second feature is cognitive estrangement where the aforementioned novum drives the process of “making the familiar strange,” allowing us to analyse social structures and norms from a critical distance. This distance enables us to think about a problem or dynamic in a new way. Key to this, however, is the third element – its plausibility or credibility – the narrative, despite its speculative elements, must feel believable within its own logic (I struggled with the premise of Koreda’s acclaimed film ‘Shoplifters’, given that Japan has the fourth largest number of surveillance cameras worldwide!) Finally, it must focus on the social institutions rather than the technologies, making it highly relevant to Development Studies, which is fundamentally concerned with the use of power. More’s Utopia, for example, critiqued 16th-century England by envisioning a society built on communal ownership and universal education.
What is SSF?
In the paper we propose that SSF can be organized into three clusters of methodological tools. The first cluster, narrative methods, includes techniques such as fictional vignettes which can be embedded in surveys or interviews to elicit reflection on sensitive topics, participatory scenario workshops co-created with stakeholders to draw out priorities and trade-offs, and collaborations with writers to generate speculative pieces used as prompts for discussion.
The second cluster, analytical techniques, supports theory building by using devices such as cognitive estrangement to reveal taken-for-granted norms. Metaphors from science fiction (e.g. ‘Big Brother’, the ‘happy pill’ Soma, ‘red pill’) act as analytical tools and in the last example, as shorthand for an alt-right worldview. Utopian/dystopian framings critique policies by pushing them to their logical conclusion (the ancient technique of reductio ad absurdum).
The third cluster, heuristic devices, tests causal logics and generates alternatives through thought experiments, extreme-case reasoning, scenario visualization and foresight techniques. Together, these clusters turn imaginative methods into tools for producing data, developing concepts, and generating testable hypotheses. While SSF draws on familiar elements, we believe it combines them in a novel and systematic way that enables more innovative approaches to inequality. To demonstrate its potential – and as an excuse to share some fiction I like – let’s consider three recent examples:
Naomi Alderman’s The Power: The novum of this novel is that women gain the ability to generate electrical energy, fundamentally shifting global gender hierarchies. The narrative, framed by a future historical exchange, explores profound institutional change, moral complexities, and unintended consequences. Its methodological value lies in the way it works as a controlled social experiment in narrative form, allowing us to systematically explore how physical dominance reshapes social and political structures.
David Simon’s The Wire: This multi-season ensemble drama, set in Baltimore, meticulously portrays the connections between institutions such as the police, drug dealers, schools, and politics. It functions as sociological storytelling, akin to an extended ethnography, revealing the structural drivers of urban inequality and governance failures resulting from capital disinvestment and state withdrawal. Its rich, credible storytelling makes it akin to a synthetic dataset – a new tool that was much discussed at the recent MethodsNET conference where this paper was presented – generating hypotheses about institutional interactions, incentives, and path dependence.
Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know: Described as a “post-apocalyptic campus novel” or “science fiction without the science,” this novel is set in a future UK drastically altered by what’s called “the Derangement” (in a nod towards Amit Ghosh’s eco-critique the Great Derangement) where a worryingly familiar combination of climate breakdown, conflict and AI have reconfigured the globe. The novel uses a future setting and thought experimentation to explore human motives, literary culture, and ethical ambiguity. It asks what can truly be known about the past from fragments, and plays with ideas of narrative, myth, and legend.
In the paper, we argue that SSF offers complementary, systematic tools for hypothesis generation and scenario testing in development studies. Our next steps include applying for a grant to work with writers and running small vignette experiments using the materials produced. We also plan to use SSF reflexively, establishing context-specific criteria for validation, including addressing ethical dimensions, building on guidelines for arts-based approaches. We plan to work with different communities and potentially also integrate SSF into teaching. As others have argued in relation to fiction more broadly, by embracing social science fiction, development researchers can broaden their methodological horizons, generate fresh insights, and more effectively grasp with the complex challenges of our time.
Laura Camfield is Head of the Department of International Development at King’s College, London, and co-convenor of the EADI Task Group on Methods Innovation