This article mobilizes speculative fabulation as a rigorous mode of inquiry for reimagining language research. Tracing how positivist commitments rooted in colonial and Cartesian logics continue to shape contemporary practices such as digitally scalable corpus models and survey-based research, the article critiques the human-centered and representational assumptions that position language as abstract data and the researcher as sovereign knower. Drawing on post-structural and posthumanist thought, it advances concepts such as assemblage, affect, and aparallel evolution to reconceptualize language as materially and relationally entangled. Through engagements with Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Ursula K. Le Guin, speculative fabulation is articulated not as fiction opposed to reality but as an ontological practice that reorients inquiry toward relational becoming, ethical attunement, and the transformation of researcher voice within inquiry.
BaileyM. (2013). Butch queens up in pumps: Gender, performance, and ballroom culture in Detroit. University of Michigan Press.
2.
BaradK. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
3.
BloomfieldL. (1933). Language. Henry Holt and Company.
4.
BuchananI. (2015). Assemblage theory and its discontents. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 382–392.
5.
DeleuzeG. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image (TomlinsonH.GaletaR., Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1985)
6.
DeleuzeG. (1994). He stuttered. In BoundasC. V.OlkowskiD. (Eds.), Gilles Deleuze and the theater of philosophy (pp. 23–29). Routledge. (Original work published 1993)
7.
DeleuzeG.GuattariF. (1987). Introduction: Rhizome. In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans., pp. 3–25). University of Minnesota Press (Original work published 1980)
8.
DerridaJ. (1978). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In J. Derrida, writing and difference (BassA., Trans., pp. 278–293). University of Chicago Press. (Lecture delivered 1966)
9.
de SaussureF. (1959). Course in general linguistics (BallyC.SechehayeA., Eds.; BaskinW., Trans.). Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1916)
10.
FoucaultM. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1966)
11.
FoucaultM. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (SmithA. M. S., Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1969)
12.
HarawayD. J. (2016). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In HarawayD. J. (Ed.), Manifestly Haraway (pp. 5–90). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1985)
13.
HarawayD. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
14.
KuhnT. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
15.
LawJ. (2004). After method: An introduction. In LawJ. (Ed.), After method: Mess in social science research (pp. 1–15). Routledge.
16.
Le GuinU. K. (1968). A wizard of Earthsea. Parnassus Press.
17.
LugonesM. (2011). Methodological notes toward a decolonial feminism. In Isasi-DíazA. M.MendietaE. (Eds.), Decolonizing epistemologies: Latina/o theology and philosophy (pp. 68–86). Fordham University Press.
18.
MacLureM. (2011). Qualitative inquiry: Where are the ruins?Qualitative Inquiry, 17(10), 997–1005.
19.
ManneK. (2018). Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford University Press.
RobinsonB.KutnerM. (2019). Spinoza and the affective turn: A return to the philosophical origins of affect. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(2), 111–117.
24.
SpringgayS.TrumanS. E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214.
25.
St PierreE. A. (2012). Another postmodern report on knowledge: Positivism and its others. International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, 15(4), 483–503.
26.
St PierreE. A. (2016). Curriculum for new material, new empirical inquiry. In SnazaN.SonuD.TrumanS. E.ZaliwskaZ. (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 1–12). Peter Lang.
27.
St PierreE. A. (2025). A primer for post qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 22(3), 571–595.
28.
TrumanS. E. (2019). SF! Haraway’s situated feminisms and speculative fabulations in English class. Studies in Philosophy & Education, 38(1), 31–42.
29.
TsingA. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
30.
TuckE.YangK. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20:, 811–818.
31.
VasconcelosJ. (2011). Mestizaje (PoltJ. H. R., Trans.). In StavansI. (Ed.), José Vasconcelos: The prophet of race (pp. 45–102). Rutgers University Press. (Original work published 1925)
