One of the quiet paradoxes of working in Sociology (with a capital S) is that attempts to make sense of society are often encased in the abstract grammar of academia. We write about communities while speaking in the singular voice of the academic, interview hundreds of people only to dissolve them into theory, and the lived experience that makes a project compelling in the first place becomes compressed into representative quotations, illustrative anecdotes and carefully anonymised extracts. The result is often entirely bloodless.
I did an event recently with my friend Cal Flyn in Inverness for the Highland Book Prize (her new book The Savage Landscape is out now) and she picked up on something we had been chatting about, the idea of ‘empirical fiction’ and how to condense the real to the point of legibility ethically. This isn’t anything new, and I am very much a latecomer to the party, but I find myself coming back to it again and again.
I am here on my office sofa at the university in Glasgow with a broken arm, typing one handed and staring at my bookshelf, looking at a big stack of books that could be loosely grouped as documentary non-fiction. John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Martha Gelhorn’s The Face of War, Ryszard Kapuściński and Hanna Krall, and three books by Svetlana Alexievich.
I was living in Stockholm when Alexievich won the Nobel prize in 2015, which gave her the attention she rightly deserved and meant a lot of her untranslated work appeared in English. She has been described as an oral historian, a journalist or a documentary novelist at different points and in different countries, none of these labels quite fit. Her books are perhaps better understood as democracies of voice. In Voices from Chernobyl, Second-hand Time and The Unwomanly Face of War, she constructs narratives from hundreds of interviews without allowing a single authoritative narrator to dominate. The authorial voice recedes and history emerges through accumulation, contradiction, repetition and emotion. She is an expert at subtle bricolage, and also clearly a collector.
The conventional interview is built around extraction. Researchers collect fragments of speech in order to answer questions they have already formulated. Alexievich and her fellow travellers work differently. Rather than reducing testimony to evidence, testimony becomes the architecture itself. The social world appears not as a coherent system explained from above but as a chorus of overlapping memories, disagreements and moments of humanistic intimacy.
The late sociologist Michael Burawoy argued that public sociology should create dialogue between sociology and wider publics rather than simply transmitting expert knowledge. Yet dialogue requires form as much as intention. Through legibility you connect, and through connection you explain, and through explanation you find purpose.
Critics of this kind of form worry that combining voices into c composite accounts or journalistic sensibility risks sacrificing authenticity for readability. The concern is understandable, but it assumes authenticity resides only in the individual testimony. Sociological fiction is not fictional in the sense that it isn’t real, but fictional in its impulse to tell a story beyond assembling a series of facts. It relies on a kind of informed subjectivity (What Candis Callison, a Canadian journalism theorist calls the ‘view from somewhere’). You can go to Wikipedia for the bare facts. Composite narratives acknowledge this overlap without pretending that one interview can carry the force of an entire social condition.
Composite narratives and narrative writing can also protect anonymity while preserving emotional truth. They allow researchers working with vulnerable participants to communicate structural realities without exposing individuals to unnecessary risk. More importantly, they permit the articulation of experiences that are collectively felt but individually fragmented. The composite voice is not a fictional invention so much as a representation of shared social experience.
The New Journalism movement in particular understood the power of polyphony. John Hersey’s Hiroshima remains one of the defining works of twentieth-century reportage precisely because it refused the singular heroic narrative that dominated much post-war reporting, nor did it try to see the atomic bombing of Japan as a geopolitical chess game. Instead, Hersey reconstructed the bombing through the lives of six ordinary survivors. Decades later he returned to those same individuals, recognising that catastrophe is never a single moment but an unfolding biography.
When I was in my early twenties and in Sweden I learned a lot from reading the novelist and essayist Sara Lidman, who demonstrated that documentary writing could carry both political urgency and profound respect for ordinary speech. Whether writing about the miners in the Swedish north or the Vietnam War, Lidman consistently resisted the temptation to reduce rural communities or political struggle into tropes. Dialect, rhythm and local knowledge remained central to her prose. Voice carries geography, class, memory and history.
If Sociology wishes to matter beyond the university, it must become more attentive to form. The challenge is not simply to make research accessible but to create ways of writing that embody democratic values. Composite narratives, carefully constructed and ethically transparent, can become acts of public scholarship in their own right. They acknowledge that truth rarely belongs to one speaker. It emerges through conversation, disagreement and memory.
Perhaps that is the deepest affinity. This kind of worldmaking begins from the conviction that knowledge is collective and storied. It’s a sensibility that does not assume that meaning resides exclusively with the powerful, but as the historian EP Thompson says, where the lives of normal people are present in their own making.
Dominic Hinde 