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This article identifies core dimensions in the notion of “sustainability” as it is conceptualized among Indigenous peoples. These are context-based relationality, community-based governance, education, language, quality of life and health, and communal recognition of certain nonhumans as life-givers. Taking into account different Indigenous cultural and socio-philosophical experiences and their process of sociality with different life forms, it has become clear that these are little spelt out in the previous sustainability definitions. Thus, understanding how local interconnections are sustained and reproduced, both for humans and nonhumans, should inform policy mechanisms as well as new forms of evidence. We want to point out that the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cannot and should not be taken as universal due to conceptual and moral differences among different communities and peoples.

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 article, this porous writing, illustrates (and not) some parts of the becoming of the PhD thesis of the author. The PhD and this writing discuss and challenge research writing and arguing, and fumble and experiment toward something slightly new, open-ended and nothing-easy-or-needed-to-explain-or-understand. This writing/entanglement includes/materializes within poems, or movements-toward-poems, and love letters, as well as digressions, and steps “back and forth.” This is done in playful (and serious) joy with poststructural, postqualitative, and (new) materialist theories. This is (and is not) also a response to Professor Graham Badley’s welcome response to the author’s earlier article. One, not-yet/ever-solved, and/but-always-new question remains: What to think about/with the subjectivity of the writer/researcher, thus who/what is writing?

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.

Here, in this, ‘I’-and-the-multiple-others fumble, move, think, ask, become and write smoothly towards a posthuman (re)search, (re)think, Life with constant searching, thinking, becoming, not-knowing. Towards a living Being, where humanist epistemologies and human are decentered … Towards becoming-imperceptible (no ‘as a’ researcher/expert/anything-else anymore) … Towards an affirmative present.