‘Stuffed if I [still don’t] know’: towards weak methodologies

ABSTRACT

J. K. Gibson-Graham’s paper ‘’Stuffed if I Know!’: Reflections on post-modern feminist social research’ foreshadowed her meanderings with weak theory, and of attending not to what things are, or mean, but to ‘wonder(ing) where they might go’ and what they might do, in all their emergence, contradiction and multiplicity. Weak theory attends to the performativity of different encounters, processes and knowledges, in all their incompletion and multiplicity, and in following what things do, this paper suggests that weak theory is also methodological. I consider weak methodologies as an approach to methods and practices that centre and integrate the unexpected, confusing, failed and strange within the co-production of research and ways of knowing. To do this, I reflect on two inadvertent wanderings into weak methodologies in my research, and engage Puig de la Bellacasa’s thinking with and dissenting within, to ponder some of the potentialities present in interruption, trouble and dis(re)orientation in research methods. Here, weak methodologies are not just about creating and participating in worlding as researchers, but also about forming an intentional posture of openness to being shaped, shifted, moved and led through research in often unanticipated ways.

Resumen

El artículo de J. K. Gibson-Graham de 1994 ’Stuffed if I Know!’: Reflections on post-modern feminist social research ’ ilustra la exploración que tiene la autora con la teoría débil y su enfoque a no lo que las cosas son o significan, sino a ’preguntarse’ adónde podrían ir’ y qué podrían hacer, en todo su surgimiento, contradicción y multiplicidad. La teoría débil atiende a la performatividad de diferentes encuentros, procesos y conocimientos, en toda su incompletitud y multiplicidad, y al seguir lo que hacen las cosas, este artículo sugiere que la teoría débil también es metodológica. Considero las metodologías débiles como un acercamiento a métodos y prácticas que centran e integran lo inesperado, confuso, fallido y extraño dentro de la coproducción de investigaciones y formas de conocimiento. Para hacer esto, reflexiono sobre dos exploraciones inadvertidas hacia metodologías débiles en mi investigación, e incorporo el pensamiento con y el disentimiento interno de Puig de la Bellacasa, para reflexionar sobre algunas de las potencialidades presentes en la interrupción, el problema y la des(re)orientación en métodos de investigación. Aquí, las metodologías débiles no se refieren sólo a crear y participar en el mundo como investigadores, sino también a formar una postura intencional de apertura para ser moldeado, cambiado, movido y guiado a través de la investigación de maneras a menudo imprevistas.

Résumé

L’article de J. K. Gibson-Graham « ‘Stuffed if I Know!’: Reflections on post-modern feminist social research’ » (en français « ‘Du diable si j’y comprends’ : réflexions sur la recherche sociale féministe post-moderne ») préfigurait ses errances autour des théories faibles, ainsi que sa préoccupation non pas pour ce que sont les choses, ou ce qu’elles signifient, mais pour « se demander où elles pourraient mener » (Stewart 2008, p. 73) et ce qu’elles pourraient faire, avec toutes leurs émergences, leurs contradictions et leurs multiplicités. La théorie faible s’occupe de la performativité d’une variété de rencontres, de processus, et de connaissances, dans toute leur incomplétude et leur multiplicité, et en suivant ce que font les choses, cet article émet l’hypothèse que la théorie faible est aussi méthodologique. J’examine les méthodologies faibles en tant qu’approche vers les méthodes et les pratiques qui focalisent et intègrent l’inattendu, le compliqué, le raté et l’étrange dans la co-production de la recherche et des mécanismes des connaissances. Pour ce faire, je me penche sur deux aventures accidentelles avec des méthodologies faibles au cœur de mes propres travaux et j’associe les concepts de thinking with (penser avec) et de dissenting within (diverger au sein) de Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), pour contempler les opportunités présentes dans les interruptions, les difficultés et les désorientations ou les réorientations dans les méthodes de recherche. Ici, les méthodologies faibles ne concernent pas seulement la création et la participation au monde de la recherche, mais aussi la composition d’une attitude délibérée d’ouverture à toute possibilité de modelage, de changement, de mouvement et de cheminement à travers la recherche par des manières souvent inattendues.

KEYWORDS:

• Weak theory
• methodology
• qualitative research
• thinking with
• dissenting within

Palabras clave:

• Teoría débil
• metodología
• investigación cualitativa
• pensar con
• disentimiento interno

Mots-clefs:

• Théorie faible
• méthodologie
• recherche quantitative
• penser avec
• diverger au sein

Introduction

‘Stuffed if I know!’ is the phrase that resounds in my head as I reflect on doing feminist research in the 1990’s. It was the frequent reply made by Leanne, a woman participating in the research project, to any questions asked directly about her life, community and political involvements in a mining town in central Queensland. Of course she did know, and she knew a lot, although what she knew was not what she initially thought I wanted to know.

… Why does this phrase continue to resonate? Partly because as it was said by Leanne, it problematised knowledge. It questioned what one woman knew and did not know; what I wanted to know and why it might be she who knew it; and what of her knowing would be considered knowledge for my project.

Partly, also, because as Leanne said it, it struck a chord within myself.

(Gibson-Graham, 1994, p. 205)

For many feminist geographers traversing the post-structuralist conversations of the 1990s, Gibson-Graham’s concession resonated well beyond her exchanges with her research co-participant, Leanne. Years later, there’s still something resonant about this offhand statement in its troubling of the temptation towards certitude when we do research; a deeper, unruly trouble that’s worth staying with (Haraway, 2016).

In grappling with the provocations of post-structuralism and the crisis of representation for both critical theory and research practice, several scholars began to articulate a move away from the stronghold of what they termed ‘strong theories’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006, 2008, 2014; Sedgwick, 1997) that define, capture, explain, and ‘organise events into understandable and seemingly predictable trajectories’ (Gibson-Graham, 2014, p. 148), but which also inadvertently erase and obscure the emergence, incongruence and multiplicity of multiple events, knowledges and potentialities. In moving towards an alternately articulated posture of ‘weak theory’, Stewart (2008, p. 73) reflected that ‘the point of theory now is not to judge the value of analytic objects or to somehow get their representation “right” but to wonder where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating and attending to things are already somehow present in them’. Rather than measuring, explaining, determining, and accounting, weak theory offers attention both to what things are doing, and to other already/always present forms of potentiality in incomplete events, relations and ways of knowing and being.

Whilst weak theory isn’t an especially recent shift in critical dialogue, what remains striking about it is its inherent motion, its doings. Tracing, following, attending, listening, wondering. As researchers continue to grapple with what the doing of research asks of us, I suggest that weak theory may offer more than theory. Indeed, it may have something to offer our methodologies, too.

In this paper, I suggest that weak methodologies can be described as an approach to research methods that make room for something else to happen despite, or through, our best-laid methodological plans. In referring to weak methodologies, I foreground consideration of moments when our carefully considered approaches ‘don’t work’ – or, do unexpected things – and centre this as part of method (indeed, as part of data), not necessarily as a failure of method. From the outset, I stress that this is not about abandoning methodological rigour. Care-full and ongoing attention to the ethics and crafting of research practice is inextricable from methodology, as ‘ethics frame the relationships that enable “us” to be geographers in an ontologically complex and diverse world’ and ‘those relationships precede [and exceed] “our” place in the academy’ (Howitt, 2022, p. 85). Rather, I suggest that carefully formed methodologies and praxis are also too important not to allow multiple, moving and emergent events, ruptures, and encounters to contribute to the ongoing practice, formation and co-creation of knowledges and ‘worlding well’ (Van Dooren, 2019, p. 14).

In essence, by following weak theory into methodology, I suggest that weak methodologies are not just about creating and participating in worldmaking as researchers (Gibson-Graham, 2008), but also form a posture of openness to being interrupted, shaped and moved in ways that are unanticipated, partial, emergent, and that often lead somewhere different to what perhaps was initially imagined or intended. As Katz reflects in her work on minor theory, her proposition is ‘not [for a] a distinct body of theory, but rather a way of doing theory differently’ (2017, p. 598). This, too, can be said of weak methodologies as I pose them here, in that this is less about introducing new or distinct methods, but rather gesturing towards different (and already present) ways of approaching methods (and the kinds of data, knowledges and relations they can co-produce).

Weak methodologies enfold what might be perceived as accidental, strange, disappointing, unclear – interruptions and mis/adventures in varied forms and shapes – as methodology, as data, as co-emergence. Rather than ‘what to do’, weak methods are ways to do and hold diverse methods differently, that are open to movement in response to troubled presents and uncertain terrains. In research that approaches the world as emergent, multiple and re-forming, perhaps research methods may need to be able to let go, as well as hold on.

Here, research may not be or look as perhaps first imagined, prepared or anticipated. It may involve honouring refusal, decline, incompletion and/or ambivalence. It may require following re-direction, to instead go here, in this way, in this place. Or to listen when told to not go here, to stop, to step back, to defer to others: other actors, participants and knowledges. It may involve all or none of these things at all, or maybe something else entirely.

In the unexpected, the failed, the awkward, the intriguing, even in the seemingly smooth and ‘successful’, Van Dooren (2019, p. 13) reminds researchers that ‘there will always be more to learn, more stories and perspectives that might complicate or even redo what we thought we knew’, and that ‘as such, the partiality of perspectives is also an invitation into an ethics grounded in uncertainty, in humility, in open-ended questioning’. This does not negate the work of ethics, or response-ability, but rather posits that ‘there will be no final or singular ethical outcome: the good must be carefully crafted, in the multiple, again and again’ (Van Dooren, 2019, p. 13 – emphasis own). An invitation to an ethic of uncertainty, humility, indeed, open questions, perhaps suggests that the ways in which we do this, as researchers, may need to take a similarly agile posture.

In this paper, I offer two reflections on my own forays into what I describe as weak methodologies, during research tracing women’s resistance to natural resource extraction. I offer this as messy, partial work that emerges distinctly from who I am and who/what I am response-able to/with, as an uninvited guest of settler/colonial descent working on and through unceded Awabakal, Wonnarua, Bundjalung, Kamilaroi, Wiradjuri, Biripi and Geawegal Country.¹

Of course, it is perhaps ironic that the moment I have defined what a weak methodology is and isn’t, how to do it (and not do it), and what sorts of knowledge it produces (and the value of those knowledges), it is likely no longer as weak a methodology as I’d first posited. In this, I find myself accompanying others in lamenting that ‘I have fallen into the very trap I vowed to avoid’ (Wright et al., 2014, p. 707). And yet, there is also something to the work of persisting with the messiness of this, with all its inherent fumbling, non-innocence, partiality and slipperiness. There are, indeed, ‘poisons in the grounds that we inhabit’ and ‘rather than expecting to find an outside alternative, untouched by trouble’ and remediated by a ‘definitive critique’, I’m trying to participate as part of ‘an ongoing effort within existing conditions without accepting them as given’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 11). It’s this uncertainty, non-innocence and complexity that also holds possibility. And it’s this possibility that I’m determined not to foreclose, right here amid sometimes troubled grounds.

In this paper, I first consider context for the emergence of weak theory, before attending both to weak theory itself, (as well as other shifts towards other-than-strong theory) and some of its implications for methodology. I then consider how a weak approach to methods might open different practices that centre the unexpected, confusing or distracting as central to knowledges, or data, in research, and gesture towards already present examples of this work. In thinking through what weak methods (and methodologies) might look like in my own work, I also engage Puig de la Bellacasa’s thinking with and dissenting within (2017) to consider some of the potentialities present in interruption, shifting, trouble and dis(re)orientation – not as accidents or obstacles, but as formative of the knowledges and worlds research co-produces. To do this, I attend two particular moments in my own research; firstly, during the work of gathering and following data, and secondly, during my work with gathered data towards interpretation.

As we move through this paper together, perhaps engaging in weak methodologies might also foreground an intention to be a little more unsure, a little less certain, even to concede, at times ‘stuffed if we (still don’t) know’, too. And in this, to be willing to move towards something else.

Strong theory

Strong

UK/strɒŋ/US/strɑːŋ/

‘powerful; having or using great force or control’²

We know that in geographical research, all is (and has been) far from well (Kinkaid et al., 2022). There is a dearth of work calling out the long history and persisting endurance of research that extracts, that silences, that colonizes and possesses. The origins of Western geographical research are particularly pernicious in this regard, devoted to mapping, claiming, seizing, categorizing, colonizing and inscribing colonial power across bodies and places the world over. Despite the hegemonic claims of the colonial project, this has also always been resisted, contested and subverted by other always-present ways of knowing/being with/as place.

Furthermore, whether it be over-researched communities and research fatigue, the longstanding and ongoing violence of research conducted ‘on’ or ‘about’ First Nations peoples and majority world(s) by minority world scholars and institutions, enduring silences on ‘how the Western world as a whole or in part has relied, in some form, both on extractions from black people themselves – in their labor, cultures, reproduction, sexuality and so on – and blackness as a figure, position, or non-place’ (Ramírez D’Oleo, 2023, p. 17), and the ongoing extraction of knowledges from bodies, from places, from communities, from non-humans – here, there is much to be answered for.

Such theoretical and discursive work has been (and continues to be) critically engaged across a range of terrain, including through the lens of identification as strong theory. Distinguished not by its efficacy but by the ‘size and topology of the domain it organises’ (Sedgwick, 1997, p. 13), strong theories have sought to explain, account, and make sense of all other phenomena and processes within their grasp in reference to themselves. Strong theory ‘affords the pleasures of recognition, of capture, of intellectually subduing that one last thing’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. 4). Indeed, the trouble with strong theory is the allure of its afforded pleasures, its magnetism in the midst of mess, uncertainty, and frustration.

Within the context of their work on community economies, J. K. Gibson-Graham identified ‘capitalocentrism’ within economic, social and political theory as one example of strong theory, one which risks positioning ‘all economic identities’ and potentialities ‘with reference to capitalism’ or as being subsumed by, in resistance to, or reflective of, distinctly capitalist economic relations (Gibson-Graham, 2014, p. 148). Importantly, Sedgwick (1997) also asserted that strong theories (such as capitalocentrism) are inherently tautological; that if everything can be understood in terms of X, we then see evidence of X everywhere. To return to Gibson-Graham’s work on capitalocentrism, she argues that a focus on capitalist processes, relations and structures can also obscure the ways in which many complex, non-innocent, and ordinary economic relations elude the explanatory framing of capitalism and neo-liberalism, and are instead doing something else entirely.

Strong theory is fundamentally self-affirming, offering its claims to omnipotence as evidence of its pervasiveness. Sedgwick also observed that ‘the powerfully ranging and reductive force of strong theory can make tautological thinking hard to identify, even as it makes it compelling and near-inevitable’ (1997, p. 15). Indeed, strong theory ‘can’t help or can’t stop or can’t do anything other than proving the very same assumptions with which it began’, and this ‘may be experienced by the practitioner as a triumphant advance towards truth and vindication’ (Sedgwick, 1997, p. 14).

Towards weak theory | following becoming world(s)

Strong theory has certainly been troubled, both by the crisis of representation that pervaded the 1980s-1990s, and by ongoing considerations of power, ethics, praxis and method in contemporary geography. Furthermore, the ongoing interventions of decolonial, First Nations, black, dis/ability, queer and feminist scholars, as well as burgeoning work in non-representational and multispecies/more-than-human research, also highlights how strong theoretical claims have always/already been accompanied by difference, multiplicity, resistance and becomings-otherwise.

Furthermore, whilst weak theory is the primary framing I engage in this paper, it is clearly far from the only way of thinking and doing that troubles a strong theoretical and onto-epistemological stance. Indeed, one of the striking things about the proliferation of other-than-strong theory is that their diversity embodies a shared instance that the binary cannot (and does not) hold, and instead, that innumerable alternatives always exist. These can be perhaps described as ‘critical practices, not as theoretical ideologies’ and ‘as changing and heterogeneous relational stances’ (Sedgwick, 1997, p. 8) that continue to move and emerge, and that are, importantly not necessarily distinct or separate from the onto-epistemic terrain they seek to trouble.

For instance, Cindy Katz’s engagement with minor theory (Katz, 1996, p., 2017) considers theoretical work that disrupts, transforms and shifts established ‘major theory’ – theory which becomes ‘dominant in a particular historical geography under a specific set of conditions’ and power relations (Katz, 1996, p. 490). Following Deleuze and Guattari’s own engagements with minor literature, ‘thinking in a minor key opens many spaces of betweenness from which to imagine, act, and live things differently’ from within and through major theory (Katz, 2017, p. 597). For Katz, ‘what I am calling minor theory tears at the confines of major theory; pushing its limits to provoke “a line of escape”, a rupture – a tension out of which something else might happen’ (Katz, 1996, p. 489). Rather than referring to ‘a stable form existing in opposition to something major’ minor theory is ‘relentlessly transformative and inextricably relational’ (Katz, 1996, p. 489), entangled and imbricated within and through the major. Rather than a way of locating a fixed body of work in relation to the ‘major’, minor theory refers to a theoretical praxis and a way of doing knowledge that subverts, re-forms, and in the process, becomes something else too.

Additionally, emerging work in negative geographies (Rose et al., 2021; Mutter, 2023) attends to the limits of knowing, and to ‘that which is unable (or unwilling) to be related or resolved’ (Mutter, 2023, p. 165). Foregrounding the negative pushes back on approaches to the unknown ‘as a horizon to be surpassed’, instead recognizing, accepting and working with limits on what can be known (Rose et al., 2021, p. 12). Far from marginal, these ‘unknowabilities’ ‘reveal themselves again and again at the heart of scholarly endeavours’ (Rose et al., 2021, p. 12), and trouble any inherent claims to certainty, or to the possibility of knowing fully, or even at all. Indeed, the work of thinking with the negative is also a distinctly political project and ethic:

There are urgent problems that demand our attention and do require new knowledge. But unless we admit the negative – unless we reckon with how we are positioned in non-exchangeable relation to that over which we have no power – we forget how these problems both arise from and implicate ineliminable conditions of our corporeal experience that cannot be willed away (Rose et al., 2021, p. 290).

Attending to limits, to barriers, to obstacles, forms an important part of engaging with profoundly limited and often unknowable world(s) – and taking seriously actually-existing and uneven conditions, embodiments and relations. However, I do query the insistence that any relation is ‘non-exchangeable’ because this suggest a degree of determination and fixity that is undermined by the unknowabilities that negativity foregrounds. Perhaps, an instinct for optimism continues to exert undue hold over my imaginative dispositions. And yet, perhaps there is room for both – that to engage the negative is also to make room for potentiality, to ‘realize that the future may be different from the present’ and to consequently ‘entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities’ (Sedgwick, 1997, pp. 24–25).

In considering the practice of weak theory, Wright (2015, p. 392) suggests that:

Weak theory promotes attention to affective assemblages, to the ways things, people, affects and places, with different trajectories, may come together, albeit in often tentative, inconclusive or evolving ways. This requires attention to the ordinary, to more-than-humans, to practice and to radical heterogeneity.

In following this, weak theory attends to a plurality of ways in which relations, knowledges and places are ‘continually (re)made and (re)constituted, and … performed in messy, negotiated and material ways’ (Wright, 2015, p. 400). It ‘underscore[s] the essential co-constitution of beings’ (Wright, 2015, p. 402), turning to the many ways in which ‘we are all participants in the “becoming world”, where … learning happens in a stumbling, trial and error sort of way’ (Gibson-Graham, 2011, p. 4). Rather than attending to representation (or the work of describing ‘what is’), weak theory attends to what something ‘does’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. 4), and considers where it might go next, in all its incompletion, partiality and multiplicity. It can be described as a theoretical posture that ‘refuses to know too much’ and ‘welcomes surprise, entertains hope, makes connection, tolerates coexistence and offers care for the new’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. 8), moving in and through an ‘unfinished world’ (Stewart, 2008) in its incoherence and inconsistency.

Troubled grounds – a/politics of relationality?

Much of the premise of weak theory attends to incompletion, emergence, and an inherent embrace of multiplicity. Here, there can often be an emphasis not just on what things/beings/ideas are doing, but what different relations between and through things are also doing, in turn. However, the notion of relationality is not without its troubles. Indeed, an unproblematised emphasis on relationality within a growing cross-section of Western scholarship has been increasingly challenged for its post-political posturing, and its consequent erasure of uneven, racialized, and colonial exclusions, events, processes and structures of power (Giraud, 2019; Karera, 2019; Povinelli, 2016; Ramírez D’Oleo, 2023). Karera notes that concepts such as ‘relationality’ are ‘unequipped to account for the ongoing and brutal victimization of black people’ which underpins the colonial/capitalist foundations of the global ecological crisis (Karera, 2019, p. 47). Furthermore, Ramírez D’Oleo (2023, p. 13) highlights that ‘all “humans” have not existed, lived or died on a flat horizontal plane’ and that ‘relationists obscure that what looks like relation from one perspective is parasitism from another’; that what relationists might describe ‘as curiosity, a curiosity that births relational “becoming-with”, I would call, in this case, disrespect’ (Ramírez D’Oleo, 2023, p. 30).

Relationality is never neutral, nor is it new. Whilst engagements with relationality are ‘often drawing on seemingly Western concepts such as Actor-Network Theory, Non-Representational Theory and (new) Materialism’, Kanngieser and members of the Not Lone Wolf (NLW) Network (2024, p. 2) remind the academy that many ‘Indigenous epistemologies-ontologies-axiologies … have centred relationality for all time’, and in ways that are far from post-political. Many other First Nations scholars have also problematized and centred consideration of research itself as relation (Tuck & M, 2015), as response-ability (Bawaka Country Including Suchet-Pearson et al., 2019), as co-becoming and kin (Tynan, 2020), and as a site of First Nations sovereignty (Arnold et al., 2023): all imbued with obligations, with choice-making and with profoundly political implications.

Furthermore, Kanngieser and members of the NLW network reflect that ‘the paradox of relationality is found in precisely this struggle to accommodate things that are resistant to being in relation, including forms of politics that actively oppose particular relations’ (2024, p. 6). There are things that cannot, that will not, be reconciled. There are things that come together and things that fall apart, sometimes at the same time. There are some relations that damage, that injure, that tear, that hurt. There are others that ask, demand and take, and others still that call for consequences and obligations. In engaging with a feminist ethic of response-ability, which attends ‘to affect, entanglement, and rupture’ and an ability to respond (Hustak & Myers, 2012, p. 106), the Bawaka Collective have pushed this further, arguing that ‘“responsibility to/for” Others is an insufficient response to the ethical dilemmas of research in that it invokes and embeds colonial logics that position researchers as capable of agency and systematically excludes Others’ (Bawaka Country Including Suchet-Pearson et al., 2019, p. 685). Instead, they approach response-ability as two-fold (Bawaka Country Including Suchet-Pearson et al., 2019), describing it as both:

An ability to pay close and careful attention, as part of more-than-human worlds” and “An imperative to respond as, rather than to be responsible to or responsible for, what is seen/learnt/understood/communicated in more-than-human, situated, ethical ways.

In turn, this also ‘requires interrogating a constellation of colonial logics … anxiously maintained through ongoing violence and denials that delineate past, present and future, divide humans and non-humans, and define the subjects and objects of political agency’ (Bawaka Country Including Suchet-Pearson et al., 2019, p. 685). Approaching and engaging with relations (and relationality) is inherently political, ethical, implicated work, that calls for response-able ways of practicing research (and determining ‘what counts’ in knowledge making), and that is responsive to partial, mobile, co-determined and troublesome particulars. Work that also can be, and chooses to be, weak in its hold on knowledge claims, processes and phenomena. Work that is, indeed, care-full.

If relationality is marked by troublesome engagements, then care, too, is similarly fraught. Puig de la Bellacasa has described care as ‘a critically disruptive doing that can open to “as well as possible” reconfigurations engaged with troubled presents’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 12). Furthermore, she insists that ‘speaking of “good care” – or of as-well-as-possible care – is never neutral’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 6), that extraordinary harm can be exercised carefully, and that how care is determined, and by who, for who, is thick with(in) often irresolvable tensions and troubles. Yet it’s this very grapple that Puig de la Bellacasa suggests researchers take up, to keep working with care and carefull practices ‘grounded in practical engagements with situated material conditions that often expose tensions’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 11). Reflecting on this further, she suggests:

an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral obligations but rather about thick, impure involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed. That is, it makes of ethics a hands-on, ongoing process of re-creation of ‘as well as possible’ relations … unthinkable as something abstracted from its situatedness. (2017, p. 6)

This is a process, a doing, an embodied commitment to the incomplete, perpetual work of worlding ‘as well as possible’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 12) within and through particular emplacements to which we are response-able. This is methodological too, in in recognizing that if ‘we all dwell in these connections and cannot be extricated from them’ (Bawaka Country Including Suchet-Pearson et al., 2019, p. 685), then attention to these incomplete, moving, shifting relations in right-here tensions and messiness, is needed in methodological practice.

And in a refusal to pursue extrication (however inadvertent), I suggest weak methodologies may have something to offer.

Towards weak methodologies

Weak methodologies, in essence, are not just about worlding in/through/as research. Rather, I suggest that weak methodologies can also describe an approach to research that is willing to carefully prepare, and then hold loosely, intended methods and research practice. To be willing to be made/unmade/remade by and with worlds that writhe, burst, cry out for our attention; to respect-fully accept refusal, decline, interruption; to give attention to the unexpected, the strange, and the utterly weird – perhaps all at once. To participate in the particular, emplaced, actually existing relations, encounters and becomings that form research, whether I’d initially determined them important, expected, ‘groundbreaking’, or not. To let a more-than-human world shape me and what I know, and then to re-make it again. And again. And again (Van Dooren, 2019). It’s a partial, fraught, impure attempt to try and take the agency of others seriously – whether they be humans, non-humans, places, or beyond the reasoning of my onto-epistemic positioning.

Weak methodologies, as I articulate them here, are also less about defining or proposing new methods, and more about bringing both already existing and emerging practices together in conversation with one another – an ‘ecumenical’ gathering of multiplicity (Gibson-Graham, 2014), a rowdier cacophony of other things, other ways, other practices – put simply, others.

There are far more existing examples of what I’m describing here than could possibly be considered within the parameters of this paper, and the examples I offer below are far from definitive. Rather, they’re reflective of the knowledges and encounters I have engaged with, and my location in relation to others (for further consideration of relational and specifically de-colonizing engagement with literature, see Tynan and Bishop 2023). Your examples will likely take a different shape in turn.

For instance, Marr et al. (2022, p. 556) reflect together on their experiences of some of the ‘troubling and promising ways in which human and non-human bodies become unsettled and rearranged through (field) encounters’, and their engagements with these shifting encounters and knowledges. In their discussion, Marr and colleagues foreground ways that ‘nonhumans share in our research processes and practices, co-composing and rearranging our fields’ as they’re negotiated, adjusted and changed in their research, and consider how researchers might ‘engage modes of enquiry that are cognizant of and responsive to other epistemic worlds’ (2022, p. 556 – emphasis own).

Furthermore, members of Yandaarra, a Gumbaynggirr and non-Gumbaynggirr research collective, are working together to ‘better understand, support and share what Gumbaynggirr-led Caring for Country might look like’, on/with/as Gumbaynggirr Country, and as living protocol (Aunty Shaa Smith et al., 2020, p. 944). Yandaarra insist that engaging in the processes of nurturing and growing ‘relationships with Country and living protocols are not done quickly, nor is this a process that is ever finished’ (Smith et al., 2020, p. 954) and that for this collective, ‘we see Yandaarra, our research, as a re-creation story. It’s about remember-ing what was (what is) as part of re-creating, rebinding, remaking protocols as we honour Elders and custodians, human and non-human, past, present and future’ (Aunty Shaa Smith et al., 2020, p. 942). Indeed, Yandarra work to walk and move together with ‘uncertain beginnings, [the] mendings and re-bindings’ they see this posture to the doing of their collaboration as:

creating the conditions for radical change, because, as Neeyan has insisted, ‘what we need is people who will come together not knowing, otherwise they’re gonna learn nothing’! This process, we are trying to live, is like walking into something backwards. You can’t see the path until it’s in front of you – as the change is already being made. And you make yourself vulnerable in this because your back is something vulnerable, so you feel vulnerable (2020, p. 958).

Tsing reflects that ‘precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others’ and that ‘unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves’ (2015, p. 20). In moving towards a practice of method that is indeed more precarious to me as a researcher, more vulnerable, more of ‘walking into something backwards’ (Aunty Shaa Smith et al., 2020, p. 948), I’m also gesturing towards a methodological practice that engages response-ably and care-fully with the worlds that we co-emerge and participate in as they are, and as we are - not as we might wish they/we were, or hope they/we will yet be.

In reflecting on my movements towards weak methodologies, my encounters emerged out of moments of allowing my plans and preconceptions to fall apart, and to instead fall open into something else. It’s a messy, partial, non-innocent process that continues as I think and write through and with these moments, and as I continue beyond the writing of this paper.

Turning to two moments in research attending to women’s resistance to natural resource extraction (Ey, 2021), I offer these as one of the many entry points for considering what doing research/knowing might look like in moving towards a weak methodological practice. In tracing these moments, I engage Puig de la Bellacasa’s work on ‘thinking with’ and ‘dissenting within’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to follow two openings that weak methodologies might invite. In offering these reflections, my intention is not to provide templates for replicable patters of practice across scale, nor to make ‘grand interventions’ in critical theory, but instead to ‘offer a set of particular stories for particular places’ (Van Dooren, 2019, p. 6), as this is all that I can offer. My intent is to imperfectly and partially engage a critical reading of my experience that ‘would analyse the story as it is – not as one would wish it to be’ (Ramírez D’Oleo, 2023, p. 35), even when there are moments where I’d hoped or wished the research process would do or be something else. To practice fidelity to the right here particularities of the struggles, learnings, relations and movements of the actually existing, right here or over there co-emergence of knowledge formation and worlding.

Gathering and following | thinking with

Sitting in a mining activist’s home on a warm morning, we talked a lot about place. At the time, I thought I was deeply engaging with the role of place in activism, and prepared a lot of questions about what home and place meant to her, and why this compelled her to participate in resisting proposed mining projects in her local area. Yet as I continued to enthusiastically lobby my carefully prepared questions, something else kept happening, kept interrupting. Rather than sitting down and politely answering my questions (retrospectively occasioning tedium), she kept wanting to move, to point, to show, to talk in reference to particular features of the place she was defending from extraction.

As the morning progressed, her movements gathered momentum and we were soon moving throughout her home, led by a tissue she used to wipe oily dust from a nearby open cut coal project which had settled on her furniture, on her picture frames, on her cupboards and windowsills. This wasn’t an interview anymore, well, not in the two person-sitting-down way I’d planned. There were also certainly more than two of us there, indeed the entire house seemed to be weighing in on our conversations, provoking and pointing to other things, other experiences, other troubles, other things entirely.

In my field diary, I noted after this exchange that I felt an experience of the place itself leading the conversation, remarking this with some degree of surprise. While I was confident that I had prepared questions that invited women to reflect on their relationships with place, and that I had sought to conduct many of these interviews within these places, I had still primarily turned to human actors to describe their experiences of place, rather than explicitly attending to place itself within the methods I used. It was a moment to let a living, moving, more-than-human world say something, to not assume that it was I who could understand what it was saying in a definitive way, and to loosen my grip on the conversation.

The Bawaka Collective has invited researchers to push back against ‘the notion of independent human action’ which is ‘sustained by using differences and distances to numb, diminish and disrupt affective connections and relationships among humans and non-humans’ (Bawaka Country Including Suchet-Pearson et al., 2019, p. 685). This has much to offer the way methods are engaged, which can also be a practice of attending and attuning to different senses, different events, different actors, and to ‘accept[ing] or be open to being changed, moved or shifted through paying close attention and becoming immersed in more-than-human engagements’ (Bell et al., 2018, p. 137).

Whilst now I am a little taken aback at my surprise that place could indeed ‘lead’, somehow I knew that place was asking more of me, even if I couldn’t quite articulate it at that moment. Indeed, place is still asking, right here and now as I grapple with what to say and how to say it. Reflecting on ecologist Frank Egler’s observation that ecosystems are ‘more complex than we can think’, Rose reiterates that we co-emerge with a world that is ‘complex in ways beyond our thought’ and our capability for thought (2022, p. 10). Here, the notion of thinking and knowing independent of a more-than-human world emerges as precarious, indeed, impossible. How can we do the work of knowing and learning without those with whom we are imbricated with, and without whom we simply cannot think, and cannot know? How could I have imagined what our conversation that day could have held, and what else did I close down by holding too tightly to my interview schedule when ruptures emerged? And in a climate changing world, as we all live in the wake of the consequences of the sorts of knowing, being and doing that such separation cultivates, a different way is not only possible, it’s urgent.

Puig de la Bellacasa offers the practice of thinking with as one way of engaging and participating with the emerging world and its (un)knowabilities. Described as a ‘relational way of thinking’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 72), thinking with attends to ‘patterns’, practices and ‘politics of solidarities across divergences and the enlargement of the sense of kinship and alliance beyond humanity’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 74). In referencing Deleuze and Guattari, Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us that ‘it’s not enough to shout, “Vive the multiple! … the multiple has to be done’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 72), and that thinking with is a way of participating and engaging with ‘a collective of knowledge makers, however loose its boundaries and complex its shapes’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 75) – an inherently weak methodological posture.

Rather than uncovering new pre-existing knowledge by expanding the reach of investigation, thinking with also ‘creates new patterns out of previous multiplicities, intervening by adding layers of meaning rather than merely deconstructing or conforming to ready-made categories’ (2017, p. 74). Rather than determining what is, it participates in crafting and shaping other relations, knowings and possibilities alongside, with and as a more-than-human process. Thinking with – always a practice, always doing – invites ‘enlarge[ing] our ontological and political sense of kinship and alliance, to dare in exercises of category transgression, of boundary redefinition that put to test the scope of humanist visions of care’ and disrupt ‘existing articulations of concerns’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 73). This changes both individuals and emerging worlds in turn, where ‘kinship and alliances become transformative connections – merging inherited and constructed relations’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 73).

Crucially, a practice of thinking with is not just a method that traces different knowings, doings and relations, it’s also a way of being with and in the world. Rather than ‘reinforcing the self of a lone thinker’s figure’ the work of thinking with ‘makes the work of thought stronger … it builds relation and community, that is: possibility’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, pp. 76–77). It also foregrounds and insists on reciprocity and responsibility, as ‘to be alive is to be enmeshed in the lives of others, and that to be enmeshed is to bear responsibility’ (Rose, 2022, p. 5). Indeed, ‘the conditions that make life possible precede us; before we take our first breath we are already indebted’ (Rose, 2022, p. 5). Thinking with, then, is not just a recognition of human interdependence and co-emergence with other humans and non-humans, but also, of ethical and relational obligations as we think, be and live with a more-than-human world across all practices, including research.

Deborah Bird Rose also reflects that ‘if we are to respond to the calls of others we must be able to actually experience those calls’ (2022, p. 6). Indeed, I couldn’t experience the calls of the coal dust, the terrain, the embodiment and inseparability of people/place, and identified emerging traces of this as ‘interruptions’ during the encounter described above. I was looking to take ‘insights’ and ‘answers’ from the woman I had planned to ‘interview’, and in doing so, participated in a ‘puzzle making approach to critical knowledge’, where researchers ‘seek in a text new “data” to complete the (objective) representation of an issue, or conclude on ideas’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 77). What would it have looked like to attend to the unexpected, the unclear, the multiple of that moment – not as a peripheral or even novel research encounter, but as the very stuff of doing the work of knowing with a more-than-human place? To have entered the home that so generously welcomed me and patiently extended elements of its shared knowings, and to have taken seriously the responsibility and reciprocity that such engagements imbricate me within (irrespective of whether I experience or recognize this)? To move away from knowing about, and instead, to move towards the humility that the invitation to know and think with a more-than-human community? And to following where this community gestured, indeed insisted, that I go next?

I can’t answer these questions in a way that feels satisfactory to me, or to what I’m trying to call for here in this paper, if I’m honest. In this, ‘some threads remain loose and out of place. Some remain broken and others tie in at the end’ (Kanngiesera et al., 2024, p. 6). This doesn’t negate my response-abilities here, and perhaps what can be done, is to take hold of the invitation to move and think carefully with others, to think with. Not in such a way that can be mastered, but that continues to do what it can to make room in the right here mess, non-innocence and imbrication of my own emplacement.

Working from troubled data | dissenting within

Importantly, thinking with also requires ‘acknowledging our own involvements in perpetuating dominant values rather than retreating to the sheltered position of an enlightened outsider who knows better’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 10). Indeed, Puig de la Bellacasa queries if thinking with can even be done ‘if it pretends to be outside of worlds we want to see transformed, even those we would rather not endorse’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 10). It is this query that leads us to another accidental encounter with weak methodologies, and towards the practice of dissenting within.

During my research, the conversations and encounters I shared with women resisting extractive projects were rich and wide, and traversed an array of relations, moments, questions, emotions and affects. I approached my questions (and my interpretive task of coding and theming) armed with many ‘why’ questions: why resist, why resist in this way, why women, why here, why now? I approached my questions and analysis in this way because this was, as I understood it then, what research does – it finds out things. I’d positioned myself for the interpretive work of discerning and defining ‘themes’ as I understood them, to decode the underlying threads of meaning. Except, these threads of meaning began to furl outward, becoming a little too numerous for comfort.

At every moment that I thought I had narrowed down some recurring themes, I struggled to shake the disease I felt, that attending to a handful of ‘key’ themes betrayed the extraordinary diversity and multiplicity of experiences, relationships, moments and practices that I had encountered, or that had encountered me, or that had emerged with and through some of me, and might still be emerging even now. How was it possible for what I prepared following these encounters to begin to even remotely capture all of the things that actually happened – the hours of talking, eating, watching, feeling, unlearning and re-thinking? A highlight reel of 4–5 findings felt oversimplified, especially for those who had given so generously of their own particular, located experiences and stories.

Indeed, I’d begun doing the very thing I thought I wanted to avoid – I’d focused on what I was looking for, and what I thought ‘counted’ as important, even as I sought to argue that experiences and challenges often erased and disregarded by the academy warranted our attention. I’d been asking questions about issues I perceived as important, which were rarely what women wanted to talk about (and fortunately often persisted with this, in spite of my prepared line of inquiry). I’d been deciding what mattered and what didn’t, and I’d been looking to bend what I found to conform to clear categories and issues – even though I didn’t think that’s what I was setting out to do.

What constitutes some of the most oppressive and violent forces and structures in our world (including colonization, racism, sexism, ableism) is that variations to a particular norm, body and idea are marginalized, erased, extracted or obscured. It’s also exactly what I found myself replicating in my research practice, in spite of my best intentions. Good intention is a tepid claim to absolution. And try to justify my best intentions as I might, I know that more is always being asked of me. Whilst this struggle is precisely what led me to find weak theory (or, perhaps to let weak theory find me), it highlights a deeper struggle for researchers like myself within the academy, and one to which a weak posture of refusing claims and instincts towards objectivity, impartiality neutrality within research practice may offer other ways forward.

Dissenting within is a practice of recognizing complicity in problematic relations and contexts, and therefore being responsible for their ongoing repair. For Puig de la Bellacasa, ‘this stance … encourages knowers not to pretend being free of “pollutions” to our vision’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 80). In ‘testing the edges of a “we”, of what we consider “our world”, requires also openness to accepting one’s thought as inheritor, even of the threads of thought we oppose and worlds we would rather not endorse’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 80). In addition to acknowledging and attending to one’s positionality and relations, it recognizes the often impossibility of removal from the mess and the mishaps, from tensions and trouble. However, if I am in the trouble, if I am indeed here, then my position makes me responsible to respond and dissent from within – not from a state of purity, but from my location.

Rather than engaging in ‘the ironical snigger of destructive critique’ that stems from aspiring to (and perceiving) distance, exemption and impunity, dissenting within is a practice and posture that acknowledges ‘insiderness [and] withinness, to the worlds we engage with even if critically’, and which acknowledges ‘implication’ whilst moving towards thinking in ‘interdependency’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 80). To take interdependency and multiplicity seriously – the grit and grain of it – is to consider all attachments and dependencies, even those we’d rather not engage. To refuse such ‘self-erasure of attachments and inheritances is about acknowledging implication, about a way of thinking in interdependency that further problematises the reverence to critical distance and the correlative value of “healthy” scepticism’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 78).

For Puig de la Bellacasa, the politics of such practice becomes increasingly paramount:

as blurred boundaries deepen entanglements and interdependencies, the ethico-political demand persists and maybe intensifies for elucidating how different configurations of knowledge practices are consequential, contributing to specific arrangements. Even more than before, knowledge as relating – while thinking, researching, storytelling, wording, accounting – matters in the mattering of worlds (2017, p. 28).

Here, to dissent within is to practice and acknowledge ‘the difficulties of taking care of relations involved in knowledge creation’, and to take seriously the ‘effects of our thinking – even in worlds we would rather not endorse’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 83). Perfect self-awareness or reflexivity is rendered impossible by inherent imbrication in webs of uneven relations that are always located somewhere. Research methods can’t fix this. And perhaps, that’s kind of the point.

Rather than aspiring to remove implication in knowledges, relations and arrangements that harm, erase, undermine and dismiss, a weak methodological posture invites researchers to acknowledge both where we are, and what our emplacement is doing, and to take hold of our responsibilities and accountabilities as we move towards repair and resistance. To dissent from within, to recognize my unique complicities whilst conceding I will never fully understand them, is to say: I am here, therefore I am responsible (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 80). This comes ‘from an inside, from an involved commitment to the problems of a community’, even a community like the academy itself, which is entirely ‘different from the ironical snigger of destructive critique’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 80), but instead moves towards the shared labour of co-becoming something else.

Rather than critiquing from the outside, or offering the ‘right’ way, dissenting within is a practice that could also be considered inherently weak, in that it takes seriously the actually existing complexity, incongruence and multiplicity of who and where I am, and continues to move towards something different. Crucially, to dissent within is to insist that the world is unfinished – dissent is a practice that participates in shaping and forming shared worlds in ways other than the present. Rather than knowing the world, to dissent within is to move from within the muck and the mire, not to give up or give in, but to give out and onward in worlds that are always moving, emerging and becoming. Furthermore, to recognize that our presence in this, in the right here grounds of our location, carries its own inherent responsibilities, obligations, relations and potentialities.

Conclusion(s): and

‘And’ is the predominant word of writing – with – before ‘or’, ‘either’, ‘rather’

(Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 75).

To write a ‘conclusion’ carries a sense of finality that feels somewhat misplaced in light of all I’ve tried to say in this paper. After all, to conclude is to bring something to an end, to mark it as finished. To conclude can also be to decide what can be known about something; to reach a conclusion about who and what might be possible, or worthwhile. Indeed, any word that lays the Latin root ‘clud’ as its foundation encloses or shuts something (whether it be in, or out). So, if not to conclude, what am I to do?

In approaching methodology through weak theory, I have suggested that weak methodology engages methods in ways that allow places, relations, others to interrupt, (re)shape and move us and research in ways that are unanticipated, partial, emergent and that often lead somewhere else. This is a pleasing summary to me, and perhaps a good place to close. But it doesn’t feel true to what I’m trying to move towards, with, as, and through.

To return to Puig de la Bellacasa, she reflects that ‘“and” is the predominant word of writing-with’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 75). In thinking, doing, writing, shifting with, perhaps ‘and’ is one way to begin to sit with this, and to follow its provocations. And is never finished. And doesn’t always equal certainty. And points towards other things, other processes, others. And reminds me that things keep moving, keep happening, keep rupturing, keep breaking, keep insisting.

And. And. And.

Acknowledgments

As always, this paper only exists because of many, many others. I extend my deep gratitude to the women and places who so generously gave their time, wisdom and stories towards this research – thank you for patiently bearing with me as I stumbled my way through. My thanks to the two reviewers who pushed me to continue to wrestle with many of these ideas – this paper is better for it, and I’m grateful to you both. My thanks also to Kathy Mee and Michelle Duffy for reading and listening to different strands of ideas towards this paper over the last few years, I’m thankful for your encouragement and support.

Revisions for this paper were completed during a Visiting Fellowship with the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Project, supported by The University of Oulu and The Academy of Finland [PROFI6 funding (2021-2026), project number 336449]. My heartfelt thanks to (fellow) Fellows Monica Vasile, Mirjami Lantto and Jeff Benjamin for your generosity, encouragement, and listening ears during this time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

Notes

1. The Aboriginal English term ‘Country’ encompasses ‘humans, more-than-humans and all that is tangible and non-tangible and which become together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as place/space’ (Bawaka Country Including Wright et al., 2016, p. 456).

2. Cambridge Dictionary ND, ‘Strong’ Cambridge University Press and Assessment, <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/strong> Date Accessed: 01/05/2024