Category: sociological fiction
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ISRF Fellowship 2021-2022: Prison Break
‘the creation of Utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology.’ H.G Wells in Utopia as Method (2013) Ruth Levitas. ‘[A]ll [activist] organizing is science fiction. When we talk about a world without prisons; a world without police violence; a world where everyone has food, clothing, shelter, quality…
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Just Humans podcast – Translation
I was honoured to be the guest on episode 2 of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research’s new podcast Just Humans. We talked about my sociological research using fiction and poetry and Stir my new poetry pamphlet for the Distant Voices project. When we think about translation we usually think of translating from…
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Stir, field works from the Distant Voices project
Stir (2020) is a collection of poems which were written while I was the research associate on the Distant Voices project (2017-2021).[1] I’m a visual sociologist (sociologist with an art practice as part of their approach) and these poems reflect on my experience of doing ethnographic research in carceral spaces, written from the perspective of an…
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‘We Who Are About To…’ Chapter 1 (sociological science fiction) for the Distant Voices project
‘Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present… [we] look at what we see around us and we say “how can the world be different?”’ – Samuel Delany (1984). The text in the link above is the first chapter of a speculative sci-fi novel… The following chapters have…
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In Her Direction (sociological fiction) in So Fi Zine (#1)
It was great sharing an office with Ashleigh Watson when she visitedGoldsmiths in 2017, and talking with her about making fiction and sociology. I contributed a short piece to the first issue of So Fi – her zine dedicated to sociological fiction. The piece I contributed: In Her Direction reflects on a moment during my doctoral…
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Grand Designs (sociological fiction)
Upon our time, a widower there was in rural France, who had strangers crossfingered to claim his home when he died. Neither had squeezed, softly skulled from his wife’s belly, their gym-bodies were hard from a different sort of labour. City of Londoners. Roast Beef. With manicures clamped around his writ, searching a flailing pulse,…
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Shrug (sociological fiction) @ CUCR blog, Goldsmiths
This might read like a painfully earnest fable about Brexit, so I want to point out that this story is based on an incident that happened on a friend’s allotment in the run up to the referendum. https://cucrblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/shrug-by-phil-thomas/ .
Phil Crockett Thomas 