Intermezzo-Image-Text-Riffs: Walking-encounter-ings for thinking-doing qualitative research otherwise

Focusing on walking-encounter-ings for thinking-doing qualitative research otherwise, and composed as a series of Image-Text-Riffs, this article enacts artful inquiry practices as a mode of radical empiricism. It considers (a) what walking-encounter-ings enable as sensorial-embodied-affective inquiry for thinking otherwise; (b) how walking-encounter-ings may be enacted as creative experimentation in artful inquiry; and (c) how walking-encounter-ings may release speculative possibilities to imagine alternative nows and better/different futures. Theoretically grounded in material moments as feminist praxis, material-discursive intra-actions, practices of concept-ing, post-critical methodology, and empirically inspired by Berlant and Stewart’s The Hundreds, we walk, talk, think, write, paint, draw, photograph, imagine, get lost, follow loose ends and go down rabbit holes. Our image-text walkings-encounter-ings are intermezzo encounters with the world which aim to disturb, intervene in, and unsettle boundaries between research and everyday life.
(Barad, 2007; Berlant & Stewart, 2019; Fairchild et al., 2022; Taylor et al. 2022, 2023)