Social Science Fiction and Development Studies: Expanding the Imaginative and Methodological Horizon

This survey paper examines the potential of social science fiction (SSF), an approach combining social science analysis with narrative and imaginative techniques of science fiction to explore the human consequences of global income inequalities. Although the social sciences’ influence on science fiction is well documented, the reverse, namely the methodological potential of science fiction in the social sciences, remains underexplored, partly due to a lack of systematisation. We pursue three objectives. First, to trace SSF’s intellectual genealogy and defining characteristics; second, to outline how SSF methodological tools could be applied in Development Studies; third, to illustrate SSF use across the social sciences. We argue that SSF could enable scholars to develop new conceptual and theoretical ideas about past, present, and possible future social orders. And when applied systematically, SSF offers rigorous tools for conceptual innovation in analysing emergent, complex, or under-theorised phenomena such as the dynamics of global inequalities in Development Studies.