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Reorganizing our library during the pandemic, James secretly placed Jasmine’s copy of The Hundreds by his copy of Exercises in Style, the latter offering 99 different narrations of the same story. In our accidentally large archive of abstracts for which we never wrote papers, we had a collection of constrained writings, all iterations of our shared research narrative. Many of these were unsubmitted responses to calls for papers (CFPs), conferences we were not able to attend, or papers we never got around to writing. We share the following sample of 24 abstracts here as an invitation, should anyone wish to develop these ideas. Furthermore, abstracts themselves constitute a genre of scholarly communications, the art of which might be developed to make research more accessible, abstracts themselves being situated in front of paywalls. Ultimately, this project led to the 25th abstract and introduction to our podcast, the Researchers’ Cardbox.

With a pedagogical aim, we offer an overview of some, though certainly not all, of the potential initial framing considerations in forced displacement research. We then engage with several of the key terms currently in use by international agencies before discussing how those terms can be (re)interpreted as they are taken up in transnational contexts. In attending to the ethics of naming throughout, we suggest that terms developed by international policy bodies should be approached situationally in disasters as part of humanitarian aid. Just as document-specific definitions need not go beyond the document, situation-specific terms should not become oppressive labels that have the potential to stigmatize people for the rest of their lives. Thus, we caution against assigning such terms as fixed identity categories, as they have the potential to reduce a person to a situation in which they may have once found themselves.

There are many ways to frame how and why we go about research, particularly when it comes to unsettling traditions. From the beginning of our studies, we can be encouraged (or even required) to situate our contributions within gaps, or deficits, in the existing literature. This teaches us to launch our work on the limitations of others. As an alternative, I wonder how scholarship might turn on its own merits, instead. I suggest that care and gratitude offer two important possibilities.

Writing can be a (playful) practice that develops through techniques. To illustrate, I draw from the works of Erin Manning to describe how I take up techniques in both writing and dance. I then suggest several potential techniques for fostering a postqualitative writing practice: following creative impulses, situating writing within concepts, and finding time to not write. Discussions of these techniques are augmented by a series of play spaces in which readers might choose to experiment by folding, cutting together-apart, slowing, and more. The play spaces are designed to encourage readers to consider how they might invent techniques for their own practices. Significantly, writing techniques shape practices that emphasize how and why writing becomes. Without examining writing habits and how they might develop further through techniques, we risk holding scholarly writing in stasis and limiting its future only to what already has been done.

In the move toward a critical form of qualitative inquiry that realizes its transformative potential, this article encourages scholars to consider axes of need within research. A flexible framework suggests how researchers might respond to situated need through theoretically and contextually grounded inquiries. In first drawing from critical geography, the concepts of heterotopic space and spatial justice are used to theoretically explore potential sites of critical transformation. These fluid spaces next are situated along five possible axes of need: food, water, shelter, justice, and love. By way of illustration, axes then are read through the lens of an urban city; potential responses take shape as a research agenda that could include visual and experimental forms of mapping. Importantly, the framework offers methodological openings for a critical form of qualitative inquiry that directly responds to, and participates in, issues of local need.

What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. A philosophy of Slowness has sparked movements around the globe regarding Slow Food and Slow Cities; these and similar movements disrupt daily practices that prioritize speed, efficiency, and output at the expense of quality. In response, a Slow Ontology approaches writing as a site of creative intervention. This article offers methodological possibilities for writing a Slow Ontology in qualitative inquiry: each attends to how we might write the materiality of our local environments. In writing a Slow Ontology, researchers might create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive.

In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, alleyways, gutters, and dumpsters over a 7-month period in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Detroit ( N = 806). After describing street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti, I explore how street art contributes to a changing visual terrain through discussions of racism, decolonization, gentrification, and the role of art in spatial justice. Photographic cartography is introduced as (a) a visual method of performance geography that illustrates material-discursive “fault lines” and (b) a critical means of analyzing conversations in contested public space. Significantly, street artists simultaneously work within and against urban renewal policies in “creative cities” such as Detroit. Given that the arts are at the center of sophisticated visual discourse regarding neoliberalism, democracy, and the battle over public space, researchers might continue to examine how street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.

As the possibilities of hypermodal inquiry intensify against the boundaries of qualitative research, a hypermodal assemblage performs an unfolding–refolding of layers within the space of Deleuzian thought. By exploring a literary question asked by F. Scott Fitzgerald and later repeated by Deleuze, a Deleuzian lens transports the ontologically real into the realm of the postmodern, expanding alternative conceptualizations of the conventional question, “What happened?” Here, layered text, images, and sound flatten into a hypermodal intensity of passageways through poststructural philosophy, literature, and visual art. By exploring hypermodal reading and writing practices, this assemblage reimagines prohibitive thresholds within qualitative inquiry.

This article explores visual forms of writing through cartography and methodological events. As re-envisioned writing practices and textual methodologies potentially push boundaries of qualitative research, these new lines of inquiry also may respond to persisting educational challenges that confine occupational job design and career pathways in education. Various related and unrelated inquiries, representations, and practices set in motion a series of methodological events related to writing, analysis, and our researcher selves. In this article, career pathways provide one topical example that is used to focus our writing and cartographies, but we also imagine broader methodological mappings that extend beyond data on teacher career pathways. We therefore propose that writing visually through cartography may help scholars avoid recycling research and retracing existing educational policies. Furthermore, we propose that uncertain textual authority and non-linear textuality may manifest as productive analytical and methodological space within a Deleuzian installation of visual writings.

What if we expressed critical qualitative inquiry is/as love?