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This article performs the becoming intimacy of a reading (and, later, writing) group who met once a month for 2 years to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Through this collaborative piece, we explore the question of intimacy as both a form of activism and a mode of inquiry. We ask, “Where is activism as we subvert the hierarchy of academia by meeting as an assemblage of differing perspectives and positions in the university?” Furthermore, we ask, “What does the intimacy that occurred, that is occurring, do for both inquiry and activism?.” This article contains two sets of writing from our monthly meetings that we offered as performative conference texts. We contend that it is affect that brings our theorizing to life, and transfers it meaningfully between each other. We are affected by Deleuze and Guattari, by A Thousand Plateaus, and by how we form linkages with our lives to these bodies. Intimacy is what sustains and gives life to our collective inquiry, without which our affect might be more constrained. The complexity of the becoming of “intimacy as inquiry” becomes twofold, as it is not only a becoming of intimacy, love, and care for those in our assemblage but also a reterritorialization of the act of inquiry. Through the act of disrupting power structures in the group of “We 5,” the act of writing and presenting this work in an academic context pushes against the striated spaces that exist in the academy, that course through the milieu we occupy, and provides the means and necessity for reterritorializing the epistemic space. “Epistemic intimacy,” then, becomes a manifestation of engaging with the inquiry process and embodies an active resistance to the business transaction that the act of inquiry has become in the neoliberal development of the academy.

Written in early 2017, in the aftermath of the United Kingdom's vote in June 2016 to leave the European Union and the election, in November of that year, of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, this brief article argues for an activist scholarly ethic. The author calls himself and the qualitative inquiry community to (re)commit to urgent political and moral intent.

A manifesto for an autoethnography that moves, that lives in the shadows, and does both with urgency, which leads me to note that this manifesto declares itself not to be a manifesto.

This essay is drawn from the author's book, Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry, which explores the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry. The essay is a poetic meditation on being given the green light and not taking it. A meditation on permission, a meditation on warning: on the insistent green flash the performer heeds or ignores; and the invitations the client gives—there, then gone—there, then gone—there, then gone—that the therapist takes or misses. It is a meditation on hope, regret, and shame.

We are interested in collaborative writing as a process of ‘writing to it’: how, whatever it is we are seeking to examine or explore, ‘writing to it’ is what leads to new experimentations and productive writing practices. In this chapter we take the notion of ‘writing to it’ further in picking up this book’s necessary and urgent call for finding ways to resist the hegemony of ‘conventional’ academic writing. Through writing both with and against notions of ‘creativity’ and ‘detours’, we bring the two together as we seek to reconceptualise creative detours even as we follow them; or – better – as they take us with them. We write our collaborative way into an ontological re-configuring of creative detours.

In making a contribution to this collection of writings, and in writing to and with them, this paper is not conceived, designed or presented as summative, conclusive or as a synthetical representation of the other writings in this edition. This paper appears at the end of the collection simply and only because of the proclivities and necessities of the linearity and organisational requirements of journal production. It is written and presented with the hope that it will diffract from the (im)possibilities of rigid classification and of creating a category of difference with which to capture or unitise collaborative writing. Further, this paper, in resisting closure and conclusion, also wishes to write with and for becoming collaborative writing, sensing the opportunities, the potential and the creative anticipations that writing collaboratively always seems to afford. Any sense gained from reading the paper that it offers celebratory hints, suggestions of gratitude and an indication of pleasure gained in sharing the esteemed company of friends and colleagues is entirely intentional.

This paper is a response to Graham Badley’s welcome article in this volume, Two Nomads Writing , in which he takes issue with Gale and Wyatt’s 2009 book, Between the Two: A Nomadic Inquiry into Collaborative Writing and Subjectivity . In this paper, the authors address the two key points he raises, the first of which concerns the value or otherwise of the book’s contribution and the second the authors’ use of postmodern `jargon’. Wyatt and Gale argue that Badley does not engage with and/or misunderstands, the Deleuzian notion of the subject that they explore in their book and that the `difficult’ language connects with the complex notions that Deleuze invites us to consider. The authors end with responding to Badley’s observation that conflict and challenge are missing within their writing.

This paper continues the author's exploration of the experience of mourning his late father, following three earlier papers on the same theme. The impulse to write into the experience of loss, to tell in writing his father's stories, is interrogated through the narrating of such accounts and the questioning of this process in light of ideas about both the ‘normal’ progress of bereavement and meanings of loss.

This article explores the institutional and individual struggles surrounding the submission for examination of a jointly authored doctoral dissertation at a U.K. civic university. Two of the article’s authors (Gale and Wyatt) were the dissertation’s authors, and Speedy, the article’s third author, is their supervisor. Joint doctoral dissertations are rare and the dissertation was unique in this department’s history. The article is written as play script, which allows for different points of view to be offered and juxtaposed and for key issues to emerge and be explored. These issues include the institutional and individual impact of challenging what counts as original doctoral scholarship, the supervision relationship, and aspects of the experience of the completion of a doctorate. With a nod to the Deleuzian concept of the nomad, a significant theoretical component of the joint dissertation, the play works with the metaphor of nomadic journeying across desert terrain toward the “oasis” of membership of the academy as an image of the doctoral process. The play begins as the dissertation’s two authors hand in their dissertation for examination, and ends on graduation day, with its primary focus being the eleven weeks between submission and the viva voce examination.

This paper explores the interaction between religious faith and academic study. It presents findings from a small-scale qualitative study of how first year theology undergraduates at Oxford experienced the relationship between academic study and their faith stance. The findings suggest varied developments in the extent to which students adapted to the learning environment, the strategies they formed in dealing with the interface between faith and academic study, and the expectations they discerned as implicit in the curriculum itself. The paper considers the findings in relation to Perry's nine stages of students’ intellectual and ethical development, and proposes that, following Perry, the discussion of religious faith as one of the contexts within which undergraduate students make sense of their experience be restored to educational discourse. The article concludes by proposing that provision of curriculum space to explore the interaction between the existential and the academic is a key factor for subj...

This article tells the story of the death of the author’s father in 2003.Itrecounts tales of his life, his last days, and his funeral. Among other things, it may be a story of loss, of disability, of illness, of families, of masculinity, and of Englishness. Central, however, is a relationship between a father and a son.

This paper examines the relationship between how counsellors report working with religious faith in the consulting room and psychodynamic theory concerning religious faith. Drawing from the author's research, extracts from interviews with psychodynamic counsellors are offered in exploration of three theoretical themes. Two areas of tension and pressure that arose for co-researchers in responding to clients' religious faith are examined. The paper concludes with suggesting that, for the counsellors interviewed, theory, in the general rather than the particular, was integral to how they reflected upon their work, and that, for some, their identity as psychodynamic was problematic.

While there is a considerable psychodynamic literature on the topic of religious faith, little is known about how counsellors work with faith in the consulting room. Prompted by the author's own clinical experience, this paper presents findings from a small-scale research study that explored this phenomenon further, and provides an account of how the research was conducted from a Heideggerian phenomenological standpoint. Two research participants' experiences are examined and a fusion of horizons offered in conclusion.

I (Tony) have many scars from living in Danville, Illinois (United States), a factory and farming town of about 30,000 people in which I spent the first twenty years of my life. I have scars of the community’s conservatism, misogyny, racism, and poverty; scars of secret adoptions and belittled mental illnesses; and scars of heteronormative expectations, unnerving silences, and distanced and abandoned family. I try to do my best to ignore or camouflage these scars, though I have found this process to be difficult, if not impossible.

This engaging, informative book makes an exciting contribution to current discussions about the challenges and uses of contemporary autoethnography. Authors from a range of disciplines ‘show and tell’ us how they have created autoethnographies, demonstrating a rich blend of theories, ethical research practices, and performances of identities and voice, linking all of those with the socio-cultural forces that impact and shape the person.

These three scholars met during the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI) in 2005 when they were put on a panel together for autoethnography. They understand QI as a space of compassionate scholarship. In their text, they allude to Norman Denzin's performance of compassion and his intellectual dream that, accurately, has generated not only the beginning but, more importantly, the continuation and development of such a space. The authors understand their work at QI as personally and politically transformational, allowing a continual critical engagement of how meaning is made in contexts with others. Using their own journeys at QI as the theorizing tool, they conceptualize QI as a radicalizing space of pedagogy and scholarship.