Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ethnographic fiction as a creative scientific genre based in ethnographic knowledge. Most emphasis will be placed upon our own examples and will be drawn from our own experience of writing ethnographic fiction based on our work in migration studies and institutional ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the reciprocal relationship between ethnography and the arts. We will discuss ethnographic fiction as a creative scientific genre based in ethnographic knowledge. This genre can be a means to highlight social complexities that are excluded or simplified in more traditional scholarly texts.

Our discussion highlights some important theoretical contributions to this field such as Clifford Geertz 'thick descriptions' and 'faction', suggesting that ethnographic fiction is part of a longer tradition that problematize the division between facts and fiction, reason and affect, as well as objectivity and subjectivity. Qualitative research in general, and ethnographic research in particular, would be impossible without an active research subject that thinks, feels and engages with its field.

Most emphasis will be placed upon our own examples and will be drawn from our own experience of writing ethnographic fiction based on our work in migration studies and institutional ethnography. We intend to discuss the potentiality of this form of writing as well as how knowledge production can draw upon music and literature. We suggest that ethnographic fiction and a creative approach to writing and reading can serve as an alternative way to produce and communicate knowledge, as well as to reach new audiences and to help establish the importance of ethnographic work also outside of academia.