Narrating Serra, imagining cities: the use of fiction in socio-spatial research

Abstract

This work studies a series of interviews with elderly women who live at Aglomerado da Serra, in Belo Horizonte. Those interviews were carried out on June 2017, within the scope of an international network research whose methods turned out to be insufficient to deal with the complexity of narratives of the elderly women. Firstly, the nature of fiction present in the narratives of the elderly women is considered as a possibility of self-fabulation about their own experience in the city and as a tool to imagine the future. Then, I suggest that fiction is also part of those narratives which are socially legitimized as “truth”, as it is the case with official history and the discourses of sciences. In this sense, fiction emerges as an important tool for self-fabulation, and for questioning and deconstructing the status of “truth” inherent in official discourse.

Keywords:
Fiction; Space Production; Socio-Spatial Research; Gender; Elderly