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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.

The seven of us have never met; at least, our material bodies have not shared the same geographical space. We are a becoming-assemblage, drawn to write together through encountering Deleuze and others in collaborative writing workshops in the UK and the United States in 2010 and 2011. This paper explores, expresses and creates, through the trajectories and surprises of zigzagging nomadic inquiry, our continuing engagement with Deleuze and his collaborators' conceptualisations. In the stutterings of our emerging minoritarian language(s) we create and write ourselves into our assemblage in all our particularities, our differing and contrasting affective and geographical landscapes alive as our writing moves and flows: between each other; between the ‘then’ of the workshops and the ‘now’ of our lives since; between daylight and darkness; between summer and winter; and as we seek to disrupt these and other such binaries. In this paper, through the always zigzagging movements of our writings we explore and inquire within our different accounts of the workshops we each experienced and offer something that writes to and with what has emerged, and is emerging, for us as a consequence of engaging in them. We write with the paradox of a seven never having been in the same material space simultaneously and with intensive materiality, material and affective flows, with each other, with Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze and Parnet, Deleuze and … and … —with Deleuze there is always ‘and’—we open up (a) space(s) where we write between-the-seven.

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.

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.

Hakkarainen, Hytönen, Makkonen & Lehtonen ehdottivat Aikuiskasvatuksessa 4/2013 ”luonnontieteellisen”, niin sanotun kollektiivisen mallin soveltamista kasvatustieteellisessä jatkokoulutuksessa. Kirjoittajakollektiivi jatkaa keskustelua akateemisen kapitalismin uhasta.