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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 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 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.