<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

HAL
open science

# Investigating Through Fiction

Laurent Matthey

► To cite this version:

Laurent Matthey. Investigating Through Fiction. GeoHumanities, 2025, pp.1-10.
10.1080/2373566X.2025.2482622. [hal-05073923](https://hal.science/hal-05073923v1)

HAL Id: hal-05073923

https://hal.science/hal-05073923v1

Submitted on 19 May 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Investigating Through Fiction

Laurent Matthey

**To cite this article:** Laurent Matthey (25 Apr 2025): Investigating Through Fiction, GeoHumanities, DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2025.2482622

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2025.2482622

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

© 2025 The Author(s). Published with
license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Published online: 25 Apr 2025.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Submit your article to this journal

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

Article views: 158

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

View related articles

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

View Crossmark data

CrossMark
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

# PRACTICES AND CURATIONS

## Investigating Through Fiction

Laurent Matthey<sup>a,b</sup>

<sup>a</sup>University of Geneva, Switzerland; <sup>b</sup>Architectures, Ambiances, Urbanités (AAU) Laboratory within the CRESSON Team, France

## FROM FICTION AS PRODUCT TO FICTION AS MEANS: A POST-POSTMODERN TURN?

The relationship between academic writing and literary writing has given rise to many studies, whether in the field of narratology (Barthes, as early as 1966), anthropology (e.g. the book published by Clifford and Marcus 1986), history (cf. the early studies by White 1973), or geography (Cresswell 2014). This relationship, which was initially considered from the viewpoint of the poetics specific to each of these genres, has for the past few years tended to be approached from the viewpoint of the role of fiction in the production of scientific facts. In what can be described as post-postmodern regime, the question is no longer to show that academic writing produces fiction, but to reflect on the way in which this fiction helps us approach reality, understand and explain it.

This reversal has affected different social science areas. In the field of literary studies, the research of Françoise Lavocat (2016) is, from this point of view, emblematic of a new way of looking at the relations between factual and fictional. While literary theory endeavoured to grasp the historicity of the notion of fiction, and considered its disappearance as the difference between real and fictional seemed to narrow, the main thing now seems to be to reassert the boundary between these two poles. Lavocat, for example, distinguishes between studies that subscribe to either “monism” or “differentialism” (2016, 38 of the electronic edition). The former tend to think that all is fiction and imagination, while the latter “see a difference between fact and fiction” (2016, p. 57 of the electronic edition). And, as the literary researcher herself explains, it is precisely because there is a boundary between these two registers that fiction allows us to explore reality.

In the fields of history and historical geography (see issue 36/2010 of the *Journal of Historical Geography*), the debate has been taking the same direction. Historical studies

## ARTICLE HISTORY

Initial submission, June 2024; revised submission, January 2025; final acceptance, March 2025.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR Laurent Matthey ✉ Laurent.Matthey@unige.ch

© 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
have been an important arena for developing the narrative turn in social sciences, particu-
larly in the wake of Hayden White and Paul Veyne's studies. While the former endeav-
oured to elucidate the tropes that constructed the articulation of historical facts, the latter
saw history as a kind of "realistic novel" dealing in facts. In this context, the question of
counterfactual narratives whereby a researcher imagines alternative historical develop-
ments gave rise to more or less heated controversies (Singaravélou and Deluermoz 2016),
with the counterfactual approach eventually becoming just another tool used by historical
studies. By exploring various futures engendered by changing certain variables, what-if
history helps us, through fiction, better understand the causes of past events, assess the role
of certain developments or the importance of decisions taken by those involved. Fiction
here plays the role of a hypothesis test as legitimate as any other: it is a means of testing
the truth of something.

In a similar vein, the French historian Ivan Jablonka (2014) speaks of “method fictions” in relation to the uses of fiction in writing history. The latter is not a product of fictional invention, albeit it uses fiction to explain reality. For Jablonka, the quest for the plausible requires the historian to take the paths of fiction, “allowing hypotheses to proliferate, before destroying them one by one” (Jablonka 2016). Narration, which breaks up continuous time into sequences, identifying a beginning and an end, also uses a fictional register which operates in similar ways to fictional writing. It also works on its presentation time, the rhythm of the story, “the variations in tempo, picking up speed or slowing down” (Jablonka 2016, m.p.). The concepts themselves, Jablonka explains, are method fictions in that they extrapolate reality (Jablonka 2016). However, what distinguishes historical writing from a novel is its being part of a research protocol and its inexorable aspiration to tell the truth based on data; in academic writing there is always an “implicit referentiality” (Jones quoted by Jablonka 2016, VII) and “veridiction operations” (Jablonka 2016, 161).

Whilst this debate is particularly lively in the field of history, it is not recent in social scien-
ces. As early as the late 1990s, Kirin Narayan (1999) pointed out fictional resources in ethno-
graphic writing, while at the same time showing that ethnography was certainly not fiction.
Indeed, its writing seeks to be transparent. It aspires to generalisation. Being aware of its respon-
sibility towards its research subjects, it has to accurately present their points of view. More
recently, Tamar Hager (2019) showed in her analysis of fiction produced outside the literary field
how this proved useful in overcoming the limitations of more traditional methods, while at the
same time making it possible to question the objective-subjective duality and popularise research
results. Hager demonstrated that this non-literary fiction was part and parcel of the research
work, helping to produce knowledge. From this point of view, her observations resonate with
Laurel Richardson's earlier work on fictionalisation techniques in qualitative research. Already
in the early 1990s, Richardson thought about how creating narratives or characters based on
empirical data could change how fieldwork was approached. Thus, techniques borrowed from lit-
erary writing could help better understand reality, while at the same time making it possible to
broaden research publics.

USING PSEUDO-FICTION TO REIMAGE REALITY

It thus seems accepted that fiction is a mode of existence (in the Latourian sense of “veridiction
test” – Latour 2012) of social science inquiry. It is no longer a case of using a narratological
device to show in what way academic writing constructs *the reality* it observes, but rather how
fiction allows us to approach *a reality* that can be observed. In other words, for some social sci-
entists, fiction helps provide a realistic description of the field under study. It is not the opposite
of reality, but the instrument of “an even greater realism,” to loosely borrow the famous words
of the French writer Michel Butor (1960). Some write up their investigations by following other
principles than those prescribed by the prevailing academic canons, not out of a narcissistic need
to be “a little different,” but because they try to tell the truth of their experiences. This attempt to
conduct an investigation in a different way should not be confused with an exercise in popularis-
ing outputs of research. The intention is not to communicate results differently (by using a film,
novel, graphic novel, theatre play, etc.); this is not about expressing the same thing in another
way in order to “democratise” access to results. Rather, the goal is to think about the same thing
in a different way. This is echoed by some of Tim Cresswell’s ideas (2013; 2022) which he
developed around the dialogue between poetic and scholarly writing. Writing requires a specific
type of attention and, as such, invites us to look at the world differently. As an activity (the
etymological sense of *poësis*) of a singular nature, it is a way of understanding places which
helps anticipate their potentiality (Cresswell 2022).

This use of fiction in a way falls under the differentialist schema identified by Françoise
Lavocat. Factual and fictional are not the same thing. Scholarly writing aspires to tell the truth,
or at least something close to it, to the extent that it refers to data and sources. It describes
observables. The author's intention is not to entertain and offer aesthetic experiences, but to ana-
lyse and understand by describing and interpreting the material available. Fictional writing can
certainly take on board facts, bring about encounters between diegetic and historical characters,
but its function is not to tell the truth, in the sense that its coherence principle is internal to its
own world. And it is this very boundary that makes fiction – in the sense of “fundamentally non-
referential cultural artefacts which, nevertheless, most of the time contain elements that refer to
the real world” (Lavocat and Wagner 2016, 2, §4) – appealing to academic writing. Fiction
allows us to describe reality in greater depth; it “reimages” it, stimulating a period of reflection
on our “perceptions and constructions of the world” (Lavocat 2016).

At least, that is what I am trying to argue here. Drawing on Hager and Richardson’s studies, I
would like to show how methods stemming from literary writing, when applied to the description
of investigation material, can produce a type of fiction that helps approach reality, rather than fic-
tionalise research or abolish the boundary between fictional and factual. More specifically, I
would like to take a reflective look at a literary experiment conducted as part of an urban-
planning study which a university was commissioned by a public body to carry out (Lehec et al.
2021). Different writing techniques were tested in order to grasp reality in greater depth. On the
one hand, they drew on an adaptation of Pasolini’s “contamination” principle (Ruy-Sanchez
1980) to our standardised forms of writing, in order to oralise academic discourse; and, on the
other hand, they revisited the principle of “redescription” of investigation material as previously
theorised by Rorty (1979). Indeed, I would like to show how, in social science texts, writing
which seeks to re-establish the different levels of language, the heterogeneity of ways of speak-
ing, of discursive styles, and the multiplicity of cultural references, leads, through successive
shifts, to the production of a type of uncertain fiction. At the same time, I would like to show
how this contributes to a paradoxical process¹ of redescription, opening up a new phase of com-
prehension and analysis. Indeed, fictionalising interview excerpts and observations makes it pos-
sible to think differently about the field and what is collected from it, encouraging a period of
decontextualisation/recontextualisation which, according to Rorty, lies at the origin of hermen-
eutic work.

The fictions I will talk about are, as explained, uncertain because they are ambiguous. They
struggle to fit neatly into a narratological definition of fiction. They are certainly artefacts, but they
are referential insofar as they mobilise investigation material that was patiently gathered using
methods I will soon describe. They were constructed using factual elements – and we will not find
one word that is not true. Nevertheless, they take the form of an invention in the sense that we will
hear voices that are not those of real, identifiable people. These fictions are another way of describ-
ing specific situations, translating archetypes, or embodying concepts. In this, they resemble the fic-
tional characters that are sometimes used to embody concepts and archetypes, or to illustrate
specific situations (Richardson 1990; Bornet and Brangier 2013; Kloepper 2025), except that they
aspire to a realistic ordinariness of which the *persona* created in these exercises are often devoid.
They are also akin to the “ideal types” of Weberian sociology, except that they are constructed
based on a practice other than typifying analysis. This practice uses writing or literary resources to
emphasise and systematise certain observable features of the fragments of reality collected during
an investigation. The best way to describe these fictions is probably as pseudo-fictions, literary
non-fictions (Boynton 2021), factions, or, more poetically, chimeras – those fabulous animals
made up of fragments of other animals or, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, “a creature with a
lion’s head, a goat’s body and a snake’s tail that can breathe out fire.”

THE TESTIMONY OF FORM: AN URBAN-PLANNING STUDY

The question of adapting form to function or content is a commonplace of aesthetic thought. Thus, when the university that employs me was commissioned by a Swiss town to conduct a socio-spatial analysis of a public square (Text box 1), the group² set up for that purpose did not claim to be innovative as it set out to develop a form of writing that could reflect both the singularity of an urban space (that is, the square) and the diversity of the uses it was put to (what people did in it). However, we wanted to engage in a more radical experiment by turning research writing into a main issue for our urban investigation. We quickly decided to write up the study in the form of short chapters, each one a miniature portrait of the square viewed from the angle of its boundaries, its social areas, its uses, and its meanings. The report could be read starting with the beginning, the end, or the middle; it could be fully or only partially read. It made no difference. Each chapter would focus on an aspect of the question of uses, but these different aspects would be mutually illuminating through the relationships established between them as part of a whole – like the square’s various ecosystems that underpinned its identity in the wider city, which made sense in relation to one another (Matthey 2022).

Text box 1: Documenting the daytime and night-time uses of a major public square

The investigation we had been commissioned to conduct concerned the daytime and night-time uses of a major square in a Swiss city. It further had to look into its geographical boundaries, which were not clear. Indeed, the square stretches on both sides of a major transport artery and comprises several levels, in keeping with an architecture typical of slab urbanism. The investigation drew mostly on qualitative resources: (1) systematic observations conducted over two seven-day periods, at different times of the day, in November 2020 and June 2021; (2) in-depth
individual and group interviews with local residents, users, shopkeepers, as well as representatives from various associations and services; (3) filmed guided tours with four main witnesses, who were invited to walk about the square while describing how they used it; (4) sketches and photographs produced by the research group to document the atmosphere and scenes observed; (5) informal meetings and conversations; and (6) a concluding workshop that brought together the various interlocutors encountered as well as new users, in order to compare and refine initial interpretations. At the end of the investigation, the report highlighted several development issues, including the need to preserve the character of “a village square within the city.” People liked the square for its hospitality and diversity, which gave it a village-like atmosphere. It seemed important to preserve these qualities while offering new activities and amenities so as to make it more attractive and dynamic.

Giving our material this textual form was an attempt, at another level of textuality, to employ a mode of writing that was built on comments gathered during interviews, focus groups, workshops, films, and other conversations in the field. Writing up a report is of course not the same as simply collating the things that have been heard – it involves producing an analytical synthesis of these things. Our aim was to weave together these comments by using a direct style (an interview excerpt), an indirect style (reporting what somebody said), and a free indirect style (using an interlocutor’s words without providing the context in which they were uttered) in order to produce a polyphonic narrative of the square (Example 1).

### Example 1: A polyphonic narrative of the square

Walking along the tree-lined avenue gives people the feeling of being in a square in the South. It begins with the impression of a space strongly appropriated by a diverse multiple public. “There are lots of people eating on benches thanks to the shed [Le Monopole], it’s quite lively…” (Man 3), “people hanging out” as well, “cool, simple people” (Man 8). And, suddenly, “you are in the South… It’s Lausanne’s South, but in a really… sociological sense” (Man 6). “It’s like a square in a Latin country… It’s used like back home… like a bistro… opposite the BCV [cantonal bank]” (Man 3).

This constant movement back and forth between the analytical and the oral was intended to draw on Pasolinian principles of “contamination.” This method, similar to writing techniques employed by Carlo Emilio Gada roughly at the same period, was Pasolini’s means to achieve a critical realism (Wehrli 2010). While Gada endeavoured to hybridise different expressive styles in order to invent his own language (Wehrli 2010), Pasolini saw this mode of writing as a way to capture the social, cultural, and linguistic diversity of a given world. Mixing the parlance of elites with the idioms of villages, classical with popular aesthetics, and externalist with internalist viewpoints, insinuated a poetic that was unique to the work of the Italian intellectual (Matthey 2022). Above all, though, it contributed to a criticism of reality, particularly the “cultural genocide” that was underway in Italy at the time, the elimination of the old rural world, “the patriarchal-peasant civility” (Prigent 2005, p. 38), and village life.

Struck by hubris, our ambition in writing our survey report was to use spoken language in order to revive the language of research. We constantly switched from description to subjective narration. However, our intention was not to merely engage in a stylistic exercise – we wished to simultaneously frame our analysis and the linguistic or sociological facts it related to. We also wished to capture the heterogeneity of reality.
This way of writing was thus gradually becoming a piece of research in itself, playing an
increasingly important part in the report we were preparing for the public authorities (Example
2). We were convinced that it would allow us to provide a more in-depth description of the
square in question, to tell the “truth” beginning with the multiplicity of its social “ecosystems,”
the diversity of its legitimate users, which could not be limited to the uniform public of couples
with children or single households with high incomes, who are sometimes the main beneficiaries
of urban regeneration projects (Froment-Meurice 2016; Fleury and Guérin-Pace 2022).
Producing a polyvocal, multifocal narrative allowed us to reveal the heterogeneity and complex-
ity of reality as already thematised by Jablonka (cf. supra).

**Example 2 – A sandwich, a coffee ...**

I come here for a coffee, a sandwich... I buy them from Le Monopole and go sit on a bench, if they're not all taken, or on the steps there, which lead to the BCV, or else I lean against the wall outside the BCV. I like this square because it makes me think of the South. There are people who meet here, chat around benches... You could be in Italy, Spain, the south of France, the Balkans... It's very male, I agree. But what I like is that it's often men in their forties and fifties who don't often occupy the public space during the day. You see them more here. Some probably even think it's virtually just them you see. It might be because of the services that line the square... its ecosystem... I don't know. If you do a count, there are many services connected to social assistance, unemployment, emergency housing, brief therapy. It's a bit as though this square were the city's waiting room... It may also be linked to the identity of the place. Chauderon has always been a working-class neighbourhood of Lausanne. And this is also reflected in the people who use the benches, there by the BCV. They're mainly working-class. People gather around a bench based on their community first, and they talk about everything and anything... Even about politics... But I digress. I was saying I like this square, its atmosphere, its spectacle, because it reminds me of far-off places. I come, take a seat, drink a coffee, eat a sandwich, and I travel... to other countries or my childhood.

By evading contexts of utterance (by connecting a series of interview excerpts, for instance), juxtaposing comments of different statuses (passers-by, users, inhabitants, designers, decision-makers), and engineering their sudden emergence on the square observed, this textualisation gave birth to artefacts. The latter were not quite ideal types and not entirely *persona*, but chimeras in the most literal sense of the word. They were the aggregate of several fragments of interviews, conversations, or observations whose origins (“Man 3,” “Man 6” and “Man 8” in Example 1 which referred to users met) had gradually been erased.

In the process, we felt that these artefactual, fictional characters could start some of the “reactivated listening” theorised by Augoyard (2001). In any event, our intuition was that they could support an exercise in recontextualisation. Their strangeness could probably encourage grasping an object or a phenomenon from a different angle (Rorty commented by Mondémé 2007). It was with this in mind that we decided to use them during participative workshops in order to once again give voice to the survey participants, square users, and local residents we had previously met. Through successive shifts, our desire to write our research in a form that bore witness to the multiplicity of uses and publics of a space led us to a situation where fictional writing became a means of the investigation and not just a way of writing it.

The workshop opened with the presentation of a first chimera (Example 3), which explained how our artefacts were produced. Participants were then able to see one possible textual form
their words could take, which we had already mentioned to them when we explained how we
would attribute the things that were said, seen, or heard during fieldwork. It is probably why
nobody was surprised by the writing method used.³

Example 3 – I don’t exist

I speak. I make myself heard. I could tell you a thousand stories about Chauderon Square. I know its users’ life secrets. I have spoken with them, observed them. Indeed, I’m one of them. I walk around this square every day. I am both everywhere and nowhere. You’ll have the feeling you’ve met me there. Listening to me, you’ll think I’m this or that person. And yet, you can’t have ever spoken to me, for the very simple reason that I don’t exist. I am a piece of fiction. A voice bringing together several other voices. That’s why I’m contradictory at times. Why I say one thing, and then another. I was once told that a chimera was “a fabulous monster with the head and chest of a lion, the belly of a goat, and the tail of a dragon.” At least, that’s the definition given in the Petit Robert dictionary. The same dictionary also gives an extended sense of the term: a chimera can be a fantasy. But the term here is too strong. I’ve been created for the purposes of an educational project. I talk about the square from the standpoint of people who use it regularly, making it possible to say the things that would usually be included in a technical or scientific report in a different way. I make suggestions by trying to flesh out a subject. Obviously, I do not replace more robust indicators, such as figures. But that’s not my reason of being. I am a sensitive diagnostic tool. No more than that.

It is probably also the admissibility of these artefacts that allowed the various witnesses in our
investigation to appropriate this method. Having been laid out on tables at the concluding work-
shop, they were seen as beings that populated the real world. Workshop participants tried to
guess who was speaking. They wondered whether they were extracts from their own interviews.
They interacted with them, the way a character in a novel can, for a while, become a companion
if not a confidant. They wrote comments, stuck Post-it notes. They took up their words. Hearing
themselves as others led to a new phase of (self-)analysis of their uses and representations of the
square, as seen in (Figure 1).

Our chimeras made it possible to establish links with other discourses, other descriptions,
other practices. They performed the function of reconnecting. It is in this sense that they were
close to Rorty’s reflections on the critical act as redescription, the capacity to establish connec-
tions and place objects in different contexts (Cometti 1992; Trevisan and Carneiro 2020). The
uncertain fictions that resulted from the montage of fragments of interviews made it possible to
grasp the different uses of the square in more depth. They reactivated the spoken word, contribu-
ting to a greater understanding of how this public space functioned from the point of view of its
uses.

FICTIONS THAT TELL THE TRUTH?

Attempting, by writing in a style close to orality, to recreate the polyphony typical of a field can,
when the artefacts produced return to reality, be a means to gain deeper knowledge of the practi-
ces and meanings of a given space.

It is first of all for this reason that fiction helps us tell the truth. What is probably interesting
is that the truth fiction allows us to get close to affects reality. The fictions produced as part of
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>FIGURE 1 Taking chimeras as real.</figcaption></figure>

our urban investigation were able to reveal this square's importance to a public that is often absent from the major public consultations launched for the purposes of urban development projects. To put it differently, the chimeras that resulted from a writing device that hybridised things
said, seen, and heard made it possible to amplify the words of those who generally struggle to make themselves heard in an urban project. This is because they are too fragile to form a stakeholder group; because their command of the language is not as good as that of the middle classes, who are quick to make themselves heard in this type of urban planning participation schemes; and because they simply do not consider themselves legitimate. Suddenly, a survey report put their experiences on a par with those of other square users. Suddenly, legitimising their words through writing gave them a legitimate presence in the urban space, which the people who had commissioned us seemed to have forgotten about. This square, which was barely readable, so problematic from the standpoint of its different types of traffic (whether mobility or drugs), so composite, with a heterogenous public, these days peopled by colourful characters, was the city's veritable village square. When the time for major redevelopment came, a "left-wing city" would probably deem worth preserving some of its aspects for its underprivileged publics.

Contamination and redescription converged in our desire to open up our understanding of reality to the plurality of its descriptions. They re-established the multiplicity of voices and uses of a public square, reinforcing planning that was sensitive to differences.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Monica Biberson for translating this text from French into English.

## NOTES

1. The paradox resides in the fact that, to a certain extent, Rorty postulates that language constructs rather than reveals or represents reality. Here, in a way the opposite argument is made. There are empirical elements that allow a given community to reach a consensus about the world.

2. The group was made up of two academic geographers, an architect, a sociologist, an urban planner, and a photographer.

3. It is probably important to recall that these chimeras generalised observations without breaking the confidentiality of those who spoke to us about their uses and experiences of a given place. Individual comments and detailed observations were aggregated to a point where they were disembodied, almost literally insofar as they were detached from particular bodies. At the same time, and paradoxically, this aggregation of heterogenous words and observations concretised our research, making it more sensitive.

## ORCID

Laurent Matthey http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9435-1666

## REFERENCES

Augoyard, J.-F. 2001. La conduite de récit. In *L'espace urbain en méthodes*, ed. M. Grosjean and J.-P. Thibaud, 173-96. Marseille: Parenthèses.

Bornet, C., and É. Brangier. 2013. La méthode des personas: principes, intérêts et limites. *Bulletin de psychologie* 524 (2):115-34. doi:10.3917/bupsy.524.0115.
Boynton, R. S. 2021. Le temps du reportage: Entretiens avec les maîtres du journalisme littéraire. Paris: Les Éditions du sous-sol.

Butor, M. 1960/2000. Le roman comme recherche. In *Essais sur le roman*, 7-14. Paris: Gallimard.

Clifford, J., and G. Marcus, eds. 1986. *Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography*. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cometti, J.-P. 1992. *Lire Rorty: Le pragmatisme et ses conséquences*. Paris: Éditions de l'Éclat.

Cresswell, T. 2014. Geographies of poetry/poetries of geography. *Cultural Geographies* 21 (1):141–6. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26168548.

Cresswell, T. 2022. Writing (new) worlds: Poetry and place in a time of emergency. *Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography* 104 (4):374–89. doi:10.1080/04353684.2022.2113551.

Fleury, A., and F. Guérin-Pace. 2022. *Les espaces publics urbains. Penser, enquêter, fabriquer*. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais.

Froment-Meurice, M. 2016. Produire et réguler les espaces publics contemporains: Les politiques de gestion de l'indésirabilité à Paris. Thèse de doctorat, Paris, Université Paris-Est.

Hager, T. 2019. If they cannot take it straight, they will get it in fiction: The power of literature. *Poetics Today* 40 (1):33–57. doi:10.1215/03335372-7273689.

Jablonka, I. 2014/2017. *L'histoire est une littérature contemporaine. Manifeste pour les sciences sociales*. Paris: Seuil.

Jablonka, I. 2016. Quand les fictions deviennent méthode – Rencontre avec Ivan Jablonka. *Histoire Globale*. https://blogs.histoireglobale.com/quand-les-fictions-deviennent-methode-rencontre-avec-ivan-jablonka_4102.

Kloepper, I. 2025. Il était une fois... Des personnages fictionnels pour comprendre l'attachement au quartier. In *Matières narratives: Concevoir la ville par le récit*, ed. L. Matthey, S. Gaberell, and E. Cogato Lanza, 43–54. Genève: MêtisPresses.

Latour, B. 2012. *Enquête sur les modes d'existence*. Paris: La Découverte.

Lavocat, F. 2016. *Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière*. Paris: Seuil.

Lavocat, F., and F. Wagner. 2016. Entretien avec Françoise Lavocat. À propos de Fait et fiction. Pour une frontière, Paris, Seuil, “Poétique,” 2016. *Cahiers de Narratologie* 31. Consulté le 23 mars 2025. doi:10.4000/narratologie.7619.

Lehec, C., L. Matthey, S. Collet, L. Piddiu, E. Flauraud, and P. Weissbrodt. 2021. *Chauderon, une place de village à l'échelle de la ville. Récits d'usages*. Genève: Institut de gouvernance de l'environnement et développement territorial.

Matthey, L. 2022. "Anyone who inspects the world around him is in some measure a geographer": Pasolinian contributions to an ecology of the edges. *GeoHumanities* 8 (1):177–96. doi:10.1080/2373566X.2021.1989321.

Mondémé, T. 2007. L'acte critique: autour de Rorty et de Barthes. *Tracés* 13 (13):91–114. doi:10.4000/traces.313.

Narayan, K. 1999. Ethnography and fiction: Where is the border? *Anthropology and Humanism* 24 (2):134–47. doi:10.1525/ahu.1999.24.2.134.

Prigent, C. 2005. La tristesse de Pasolini. *Lignes* n° 18 (3):29–45. doi:10.3917/lignes.018.0029.

Richardson, L. 1990. *Writing strategies: Reaching diverse audiences*. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Rorty, R. 1979. *Philosophy and the mirror of nature*. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ruy-Sanchez, A. 1980. La contamination poétique. *Esprit* 42 (6):179–82.

Singaravélou, Q., and P. Deluermoz. 2016. *Pour une histoire des possibles: Analyses contrefactuelles et futurs non advenus*. Paris: Seuil.

Trevisan, M. D., and M. C. Carneiro. 2020. Rorty's Redescription and the Pedagogical Context: Enunciation Possibilities. *Educação & Realidade* 45 (2):e95324. doi:10.1590/2175-623695324.

Wehrli, D. 2010. L'expérience hérétique de Pier Paolo Pasolini: Accattone comme clé de voûte d'une théorie esthétique. *Mémoire de licence*, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne.

White, H. 1973. *Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe*. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

LAURENT MATTHEY is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a researcher at the Architectures, Ambiances, Urbanités (UMR AAU) Laboratory within the CRESSON team, based in Grenoble, France. E-mail: Laurent.Matthey@unige.ch. His research and teaching, situated at the intersection of ethnography and literary studies, explore the political dimensions of urban narrative construction.