The case for faction as a potent method for integrating fact and fiction in research

Abstract

Many of us have been deeply affected by a piece of writing, an image or a performance that helped us reflect on our own or someone else's experience or encouraged us to look at the world in a different way. The chances are that this trigger was not a traditional factual piece of academic writing. Instead, as Norman Denzin and Laurel Richardson have argued, academic writing has often been characterised as boring and tedious. Since the 1990s, a growing number of researchers have been exploring alternative ways of presenting their findings that are methodologically rigorous, theoretically informed and interesting to engage with. Strongly influenced by postmodernism, there has been a growing efflorescence of what Norman Denzin calls radical experimentations that trample on the traditional boundaries of research representation and dissolve the usual distinctions between academic and creative writing. In this chapter, I explore one alternative form of research textuality, called faction, which attempts to make verifiable and justifiable claims to truth and simultaneously engage readers. Faction, and factionalisation as its method, combines elements of fact and fiction. As a form of academic writing, faction faces challenges because it straddles two forms of writing that are understood as significantly different from each other in their claims to truth and facticity. I address a range of ethical, methodological, disciplinary and creative challenges and pleasures in creating factional texts, as I argue for faction's value as a legitimate form of research representation.