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This article illustrates and invites into a shared (ad)venture and process of collaborative inquiry inspired by taking the concepts of “becoming” and “thisness” both seriously and joyfully. Collaborative and embodied research practices between four academics in the intersection of arts, education, and artistic/post qualitative research affect the multiple processes of knowing: What and how we come to know, what we ask, and how we approach our work and each other, and others in the academia. In this process/article, we wonder, how material and immaterial encounters entangle with/in writing, how subjectivities become smooth(er), and how knowing turns toward open-ended movements.

This special issue is based on an experimental weekend workshop: “Methodologies of Darkness” held around the darkest time of the year, the end of November, in 2015 in Nokia, Finland. For this event scholars from a variety of disciplines, however all connected to education, were gathered to engage with darkness in a forest without knowing what this might produce or create. We were gathered to re-educate ourselves and to disrupt methodological habits that we might perform, that perform us, and that perform educational research. Further, we deliberately wanted to unsettle notions of methodology as a process where the eyes have signified what Haraway writes of as a ‘perverse capacity’ that has distanced the knowing subject from everything around in an ‘interest of unfettered power’ (2002, p. 677). Finally, yet importantly, we were gathered to collaboratively experiment with ways of knowing and sensing in the dark.

This article illustrates the becoming of one conference paper. The thought of Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) on rhizomes enables us to think of a paper, an article, of thinking and writing as always becoming, in the middle, in between, as an assemblage and a multiplicity. This article (undone) consists of three texts, the first being the paper read at the 7th International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), the second, the paper written before traveling to the conference, and the last, a text written after the conference. The texts show a work in the making (Lather, 2007), while revealing some (n-1, writing on multiple dimensions, though never on all) lines of reading, thinking, and writing. Also the author’s nomadic, questioning, and hesitant mode of proceeding with her research, coming to (not-)knowing, is exemplified and performed. Simultaneously, this writing also deconstructs (and goes beyond) certain traditional scholarly reading, citing, writing, and arguing practices.