The migration North of relatively privileged Global South citizens is part of a power-laden global dynamic that situates thriving in Global North countries as the end goal of a trajectory of progress. In this article, I draw from Anzaldúa and Rivera Cusicanqui to use what I call autohistoria-teoría in ch’ixi key to historicise my experience as a Chilean academic who migrated to the UK. When I came to the UK, I was keenly aware of Chile’s colonial past with Spain, but ignorantly – an ignorance carefully sustained by (neo)colonial cultural and educational systems – I thought our relationship to the UK was more neutral; after all, they were not our colonisers. In this paper, I ask: What histories have been obscured, ignored, or distorted to dazzle a Global South citizen like me into following neo-colonial lights? And, what might happen to my sense of self when these histories are made visible?
This article outlines the qualitative methodology adopted in a study of Black British-born males of African heritage navigating counselling and psychotherapy training within a white-dominated, neo-colonial university context. Grounded in an Africana Critical Race Framework and guided by a decolonial stance, the article critiques the epistemological limits of Eurocentric qualitative methods and challenges assumptions of methodological neutrality. Through critical engagement with Structural Existential Analysis, Heuristic Inquiry, and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), it demonstrates how phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions universalise the human and risk reproducing epistemic and ontological violence when applied to Black Africana lives. IPA was ultimately employed—but only through a deliberate refusal of its philosophical foundations and a selective repurposing of its procedural steps. The article argues that ethical qualitative research with Black Africana participants requires not fidelity to inherited European traditions but methodological rupture, cultural alignment, and epistemic accountability.
This article responds to the question of what writing means in the age of artificial intelligence. I argue that the possibility of replacing authors with artificial intelligence can serve as a test of the deadness of particular forms of academic production. The less writing and inquiry lose when a particular author is removed, the more reason there is to suspect that such production was already dead: detached from embodiment, existential meaning, and political and social engagement. I show that writing as inquiry, autoethnography, and dirty writing cannot be replaced without initiating a different process of writing and inquiry, and therefore without significant loss. This argument does not require rejecting artificial intelligence or treating it solely as a threat. Artificial intelligence can become one element within an assemblage, but this need not entail removing the author or losing the existential, embodied, and personal dimensions that ultimately give academic writing its meaning.
This article introduces the concept of white resilience as a theoretical framework for understanding the self-perpetuating capacity of whiteness as a structural, cultural, and communicative formation. Drawing on and synthesizing critical scholarship on white mediocrity, white fragility, and white rage, the article theorizes these three phenomena as an interlocking system of resilience through which whiteness absorbs, deflects, and neutralizes threats to its hegemonic position. Working with the Culture-Centered Approach (CCA) to communication, the article locates white resilience in the capacity of whiteness to regenerate itself through the very mechanisms that appear to be its vulnerabilities. Meritocratic mythologies sustain white mediocrity, affective performances of distress discipline racial discourse through white fragility, and institutional and extra-institutional violence reasserts racial hierarchy through white rage. Together, these constitute a resilient architecture that renders whiteness adaptive, self-correcting, and durable across shifting political and cultural landscapes. The article concludes by theorizing possibilities for disrupting white resilience through decolonial solidarity, subaltern voice, and communicative infrastructures that refuse incorporation into the logics of whiteness.
This lamentation skewers a primary post-truth neoliberal practice of the Anthropocene in America: scourging the scapegoat. Barding the alleged immigration issue with layers of attribution intended to imbrute vast segments of the population has both enflamed ethnocentric prejudice and helped mobilize a resisting local-level relativism. Tension in social relations has heightened. Other provocative practices such as political prevarication, gaslighting, rage-baiting, and the militarization of policing have further aggravated engagement between groups, endangering the common good. An angry persona grieves a brutalized populace, a traumatized citizenry, and the sacrifice of foundational ideals, fearing that psychic numbing may become normalized.
In what follows, the authors offer a performative instance of collaborative writing. They write between themselves, with the contributors to this issue, and with others. The authors (re)turn to the relational, to the somewhat messy practices that have shaped the field and in turn have shaped their thinking and practice. The articles in this collection speak of urgent, activist, disruptive, radical, human and more-than-human relationality. In light of this, this introduction suggests that paracollaborative writing may be one way of conceptualising the proposal for collaborative writing as inquiry made across the issue.
Power is always at play as wor(l)ds make themselves: Mutterings mattering in a political ontology. Here, desire pulls-pushes us as experimentation in pluriversal worlds: where wor(l)ds constitute each other, clash, combine, and morph. We, as people yet to come, find ourselves at the edge of possible wor(l)ds. We play with agency, (onto)politics, colonialisms - awfully serious stuff (sic)- but also humour. We do this in the context of social <-> environmental justice - understood and performed through off-beat collaborative writing - as a way to unsettle our own assumptions and reach those also wondering at the junctures of wor(l)ds.
This paper is the child of a community where brave hearts and souls chose to come together, and have conversations of a provocative nature. We are a community of students and staff who come together to think about how to be together in difference and in true, deep and right relationship with each other inside the troubling container of an old British university. Five of us, (now four) chose to explore the question of how we might think through the same question through writing together and exploring what it means to write collaboratively in 2025.
This article develops Affective Narrative Inquiry (ANI) as a diagrammatic practice for tracing affect as it circulates across media, audiences, and political imaginaries. Focussing on conservative coverage of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) from 1999 to 2024, it follows how admiration is progressively reorganised into irritation, hostility, and moral condemnation within contemporary culture wars. Drawing on Ahmed’s affective economies and Bakhtinian dramaturgy, the analysis approaches news articles and comment threads as co-performed narrative assemblages. Across four dramaturgical acts and interludes, ANI maps how pride, resentment, and outrage attach to figures, gestures, and symbols, becoming portable judgements that begin to precede events themselves. The USWNT emerges as an affective surface through which anxieties about gender, nationalism, feminism, and authority are worked. ANI is offered as a methodological contribution for studying affective circulation without treating affect as a stable meaning to decode.
In this paper, Helen and Mary share writings that emerged from a week in which the two found themselves, as Moten and Harney write, both in and of the university. Lured by the promise of a stolen space to explore what Manning refers to as the 'fugitive elsewhere' and 'the conditions for new ways of encountering study' with a scholar they had so longed to meet, somehow they are appointed the reluctant guardians of a hastily arranged doctoral conference, held in their visitor's honour. Sooner and later, the writing wakes. They write as Deleuze describes with Guattari, 'not ... together, [but] between the two ... never in the same rhythm, ... always out of step'. The writings divert on 'lines of flight' from the event/ful week and, excited by the layerings, a text begins to emerge & mldr;.
This article examines writing as a material-discursive practice that both produces and stills thought. Using a posthumanist phenomenological approach, temporally separated writing sessions, personal narrative, cultural texts, and a longitudinal collection of notes are placed in conversation with one another. The article enacts its central claim that writing lays a thought to rest even as it enables future meaning making to occur. This inquiry invites reflexivity and restraint in how writing is treated as the definitive site of knowledge production, situating writing as both a necessary technology for sharing inquiries and a practice that alters what it seeks to represent.
Building from scattered encounters and exchanged artefacts (emails, WhatsApp messages, poems, and photos) collected across 4 years of relating to and with one another, we purposefully, and playfully explore our relational transformation from strangers, to 'critical friends', to trusted companions. By exploring how we changed one another's worlds through a critical friendship that makes space for more-than-words, more-than-just-us-two, we invite others - particularly those involved in any constellation of mentoring or supervision - to take the risk towards vulnerability; towards being curious about what might be mutually found when we walk with and alongside one another in academic contexts, in camaraderie.
The Arctic Terns are six creative artists|writers|photographers|poets, who perform the paper you will encounter here. We Arctic Terns engage in collaborative writing and artmaking, connecting with each other, along with some of the other-than-human earth and animal others, through whom our own being-human is extended. We Terns become and write together as an archipelago of 'singularities'; we have been meeting on Zoom for years, listening to and inspired by each other. We perform, here, in this paper, our approach to collaborative writing that builds on|pings off and playfully diffracts from whatever there is around us that provokes and inspires us. We invite our readers to take up the practice of emergent listening, to become with us in our archipelago of separate and connected becomings.
Grounded in affective futurity, this article examines the often-invisible forms of rejection that shape the ordinary body. In this light, rejection becomes a form of academic slow death, prompting some to imagine no futures for their lives within the academy. Rather than swallow indignation, I embrace the margins as a site of meaning-making, navigating an institution with little room to falter. Through creative-relational methodologies, I invite Professor Nick Hopwood to reexamine his "Rejection Wall," as a provocation that exposes both the faint possibility of transformation and the inequities sustained by power and institutional norms-ordering who may belong and who must remain peripheral. The article urges readers to resist using institutional systems to justify further exclusion and instead to imagine futures otherwise: forms of affective futurity where agency, dignity, and difference are foundational. It responds to Zembylas's call for methodologies attuned to the affective futurities of higher education.
What would it mean to engage with more-than-human landscapes as collaborative writing partners? Through a collaborative process we explore this question, developing a practice of feral collaborations. Starting from Tsing et al.'s (2024) 'patchy Anthropocene', the inquiry leads us through four landscapes across Europe as we consider embodied, relational co-creation that unfolds between human and more-than-human agencies. Piling these patches in collaborative writing comprises another feral landscape, in which concepts, technologies, schedules, and commitments become feral actors themselves. Our ongoing collaboration illuminates themes across our patches that lead us to engage our own research in new ways. Heterogeneous temporalities, ruptures, fragility, and endurance emerge as characteristics of feral collaborations. A practice of care for the other and the common becomes important in each landscape and in our collaborative process.
Racialised violence against Asian communities, (re)illuminated and (re)amplified during events like COVID-19 and the 2021 Atlanta massacre, reflects global patterns of anti-Asian racism. In Australia, Asian communities face similar everyday racisms rooted in Orientalist fears of the invading Other. This critical co-constructed autoethnography by two Asian Australian educators examines the entanglement of anti-Asian racism and the metaphor of breath to interrogate the suffocating nature of Australia's race relations. Through collaborative embodied vignettes, we explore how racism restricts belonging and movement, acknowledge entanglements with ongoing colonial violence against First Nations peoples, and seek solidarities through a politics of hope.
Collage-Cyborg-CollectiveBiography is an affective, situated proposition for researching academic subjectivities within the neoliberal university. Drawing on feminist affect theory, the study understands research as a living political practice emerging from everyday embodied academic encounters. Rather than applying predefined methods, this proposition unfolds through an articulation of diverse collective, theoretical-methodological, and experimental practices that foreground vulnerability, fragmentation, and relationality as epistemic resources. By tracing how affects circulate between bodies, institutions, and embodied memories, we explore how inhabiting the affective fractures involving discomfort, death, and life beyond academia can open cracks for epistemic disobedience, resistance, and alternative ways of knowing.
This article takes up collaborative writing as both subject and object, assembling a vitally ambivalent archive through written and visual art journaling. Arguing for this mode of thinking to trouble ideas of authorship, the authors intra-rupt subjective entanglements vis-a-vis correspondence with myriad co-constituting elements assembling and disassembling thoughts and things. Engaging with material feminist and other critical cultural perspectives, the authors explore the humble journal's role in collaborative inquiry. Private habits of practice come into dialogue, producing a vital and vulnerable resistance to singularity and incitement for becoming-with conceptual-material experimentation and negotiation.
In this mixed-genre paper, I bridge the aesthetic sensibilities of rasquachismo, domesticana, and bricozaje and present them as visual manifestations of autohistoria-teor & iacute;a. Using an arts-based methodology of nepantlando, or theorizing through creative acts, I present a diario visual (visual diary) that explores the colors Maya Azul and Rosa Mexicano. The culmination is a conversation of image and text, or a visual pl & aacute;tica. In this visual/text remix, Fabuloso, a popular Mexican cleaner, and the act of household cleaning are elevated to a scared space through a devotional candle. Engaging in visual theorizing through lived experiences, the significance of this study lies in the process of theory-making and multi-faceted ways of knowing. In addition to academic text, I use visual imagery, art practice, and performative text, as a way to theorize.
Qualitative researchers explore silence using different approaches and theories to think, make visible, interrogate, or deconstruct it in their inquiry. This paper draws on Daoist philosophy to explore silence as an ontological and epistemological entry point in qualitative methodology. We engage with two verses from Dao De Jing to reapproach and reconceptualize silence and silent moments in qualitative inquiries in Daoist theoretical underpinnings, offering entry points beyond the European philosophical canon for qualitative researchers to move beyond and trouble the European canon of theory. Daoism views silence as a reflection of knowledge of the world and surroundings. Attuning to silence offers a way to express knowing and being in relation to others, beyond language, and with connections to more-than-human wisdom.
