Poetic Sociology

ABSTRACT Can sociologists feel? Sociological writing can be beautiful, making us think differently about people, processes, and structures. Yet traditional academic writing that does this is rare. For example, most articles adhere to a jargon‐filled format and structure that mimics a detached and disciplined writer. But what if sociology embraced the experimental in form and structure? The affective and emotional? In this article, I draw and build upon Black, transnational, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms as well as anticolonial scholars to argue for a “poetic sociology” that centers imagination, affect, and embodiment, bringing the emotional and interior to the forefront, and how these are socially, politically, and culturally co‐constituted. Embracing poetry as a means to theorize (not just describe) social life, as a sociological method, and as data opens up new possibilities of understanding social life because poetry offers new ways of thinking and being in the world, capturing settings, feelings, moments, and their residues in ways that run counter to the discipline of sociology. As such, taking poetry seriously has larger theoretical implications for how we know what we know and emphasizes what's not able to be captured by traditional academic writing.