Speculative Futures and “Found” Artifacts: Using Fiction for Defamiliarization and Analysis

Abstract

This project presents a cowritten fictional narrative that evokes questions about schooling. The story depicts future quasi-archeologists interpreting “found” educational artifacts—our data. The process of writing defamiliarized our perspectives on public school teaching and helped us explore the borders of what is valued in social science research. Early on, we established structures and criteria for sharing physical artifacts with one another. Then, we engaged in dialogue from the perspective of our characters using an adapted set of steps for document analysis to guide our interaction with the unfamiliar artifacts. Throughout, our discussions and narrative drafting helped us establish a more complete fictional future for our imagined researchers to inhabit. We identified three themes that we articulate through theory to build our critique of schooling. We have found that fiction writing not only helped us achieve defamiliarization, but our inquiry suggests that fiction writing operates effectively as a rigorous analytic lens.