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This article concerns how writing, collaborative writing in particular, acts: how it moves, how it resists, how it does, the four humans writing alongside our co-authoring ‘materials’ – a guitar, for instance – and other more-than-human co-authors, such as affect, friendship, time. We explore writing against systems of oppression and writing through materials of resistance. Writing through can ignite the seething potentiality of a breaking through, and a writing towards the not-yet-known of other lives. We sense this as an unleashing that can act as a challenge to the self-perpetuating autopoieses that neoliberal autonomies and competitive frameworks require. Writing through materials of resistance offers an inducement to work towards the social capaciousness and the thinking with those collective orientations. Writing through refuses the surrender of freedom and offers, through practices of speculation, fabulation and experimentation, an animation of movement that can tap into the capacious fugitive energies of emergent and new collective futures.

The authors of this essay ventured into the Scottish outdoors together for the weekend in September 2020. They made fires to gather ’round in the early autumn darkness. Here they return to these fires as they introduce the essays in this collection, writing their way into what stays with them, what changed (with) them, what continues to change (with) them, that weekend.

“A creative-relational inquiry,” writes Dan Harris, “might be so small as to be imperceptible to the human eye . . . [b]ut it might also simultaneously be so big that whole universes exist within, between, and through it.” In this brief article, I take up Harris’ claim, writing into questions of scope and pace at this pandemic time, like how the small and the slow of an Edinburgh lockdown flutters into writing, poetic and therapeutic life, while around, within and beyond there is the multiplicity of the small, vast and fast of a virus. The text mutates with one small word, “how.”

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.

This is the first of two special issues on qualitative inquiry as activism. This first issue focuses upon activism and/in the academy (academic work, academic cultures, academic practices, etc.), the second on activism in the processes of research itself and activism beyond the academy, in the world. Two issues with different themes, but the overlaps and conversations between them are both obvious and significant: inquiry is part of, rooted in, the academy; inquiry and the academy are both of, and in, the world. Drawing upon the concept of the “infinite game” where, rather than being driven by the need to win and compete (the “finite game”), we argue for the collective, collaborative work of giving close, deep attention to the human, the nonhuman, and the more-than-human in order to “create and recreate our institutions,” with activism key to this work.

Collaboration in scholarship holds the peculiar position of being expected, encouraged, and, in the process, somewhat taken-for-granted as monolithic academic practice. Collaboration is important for the cultivation of a rich ecosystem of ideas, thoughts, methods, theories, and experimentation. It seems safe to assume that most scholars would agree with the need and the possibilities of collaboration. Yet, collaboration in scholarship is often understood in reductionist and pragmatic ways: While ideas and thoughts flow in certain stages of the collaboration, labor is often divided among collaborators, authorship is ranked and quantified, and subjective lived experiences are most ignored or codified in rigid fashion. In this article, we attempt to further explore how collaboration can also be an act of leaning on each other in order to make sense of thinking and narrating hope and resistance in times of neo-nationalism and authoritarianism. We each live in different parts of the planet, yet we share a common hope. Here, we come together to think, feel, commune, and write with each other in hope to find ways beyond individual positions and in search of collaborations that allow us to imagine possibilities of resistance and paths toward a kinder and more just future.

In this essay, we consider the emergence of the concept of creative-relational inquiry (C-RI). We want to push further at the engagement between the creative, the relational, and the hyphen that binds them, and how it might provide a nuanced effort to problematize, and provide alternatives for, taken-for-granted assumptions concerning research and research practices. We work with C-RI as a concept and/or concept-as-methodology, and consider explorations and themes developed by the authors in this special issue as they also mobilize C-RI. We develop a conversation about our understanding and use of C-RI in our respective disciplines.

Through the authors’ continuing creative encounters with practices of collaborative writing, this article offers a troubling of approaches to ontology that inform a construction of simply human selves and a constitution of Being. The article seeks instead to foster processual movements toward always becoming and the creative-relational practices of concept forming as event. In their speculative experimentations with the concept of “ontogenesis,” the authors offer exemplifications of the capaciousness of collaborating writing bodies, always on the move, always folding and unfolding, always opening in active movements of inquiry, curiosity, and wonder. In the eventful potentiality of “notyetness” that each passage of writing affords, immanent sensings of becoming are imbricated in the intensification of fragile, prehensive, and ontogenetic emergence.

This is the second of two part-issues on qualitative inquiry as activism. The first focused upon activism and/in the academy (academic work, academic cultures, academic practices, etc.), and this second focuses upon activism in the processes of research itself and activism beyond the academy, in the world. Drawing upon Butler’s claim that we are always already, from the outset, ‘given over’ to the human, non-human and more-than-human other, we argue for qualitative research to do what it can to make the future different, better, more ethical.

Three poems written during the period of “lockdown” in the UK in early 2020. Each poem works in, and responds to, the confluence of the personal, the material, and the socio-political.

This brief article traces the intersecting lines and stories of this special issue on Deleuze and intimacy. It offers a take how it found its way onto these pages after nearly 2 years and through two conference symposia, and outlines how the contributions—variously and differently—make a case for intimacy, through Deleuze, as an approach to, a subject of, and/or a necessary and vital affective force in, research—and beyond.

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.

Objective This study aimed to provide the most recent national estimates for beverage consumption among children and adults in the United States. Methods Dietary data were collected from 18,600 children aged 2 to 19 years and from 27,652 adults aged ≥ 20 years in the 2003 to 2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Total beverage and sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption was measured by 24-hour dietary recall. Results From 2003 to 2014, per capita consumption of all beverages declined significantly among children (473.8-312.6 calories; P

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.

Drawing upon and infused by the ‘micropolitical’ moves of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper arose out of a participative workshop at the 2018 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry that took up Briadotti’s proposition to explore how collaborative writing “like breathing, [is] not held into the mould of linearity, or the confines of the printed page, but move[s] outwards, out of bounds, in webs of encounters with ideas, others, texts” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 166). We worked with the view that collaborative writing is a political act, a “minor gesture” (Manning, 2016), a world making that opens up to the new and challenges the sedimented. This is a paper that engages in and with collaborative writing, that dances with ideas of what collaborative writing might be and, crucially, what it might do.

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.

Purpose: We examined differences in lifetime human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing in relation to both sexual orientation identity and race/ethnicity among U.S. women and men. Methods: We used 2013–2017 National Health Interview Survey data and multivariable logistic regression to assess the distribution of lifetime HIV testing across and within sexual orientation identity and racial/ethnic groups of U.S. women (n = 60,867) and men (n = 52,201) aged 18–64 years. Results: Among women, Black lesbian (74.1%) and bisexual (74.0%) women had the highest prevalence whereas Asian lesbian women (32.5%) had the lowest prevalence of lifetime HIV testing. Among men, the prevalence of lifetime HIV testing was the highest among Latino gay men (92.6%) and the lowest among Asian heterosexual men (32.0%). In most cases, Black women and Black and Latino men had significantly higher adjusted odds whereas Asian women and men had lower adjusted odds of lifetime HIV testing compared with their White counterparts within sexual orientation identity groups. In many instances, bisexual women and gay men had significantly higher adjusted odds of lifetime HIV testing relative to their heterosexual counterparts within racial/ethnic groups. Compared with White heterosexual individuals, most sexual orientation identity and racial/ethnic subgroups had significantly higher adjusted odds whereas Asian heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian women and Asian heterosexual and bisexual men may have lower adjusted odds of lifetime HIV testing. Conclusion: Culturally relevant, linguistically appropriate, and structurally competent programs and practices are needed to facilitate lifetime HIV testing among diverse sexual orientation identity and racial/ethnic subgroups of women and men, including multiply marginalized subgroups that are undertested or disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS.

The aim of this work was to evaluate the accuracy of the RayStation treatment planning system electron Monte Carlo algorithm against measured data for a range of clinically relevant scenarios. This was done by comparing measured percentage depth dose data (PDD) in water, profiles at oblique incidence and with heterogeneities in the beam path, and output factor data and that generated using the RayStation treatment planning system Monte Carlo VMC++ based calculation algorithm. While electron treatments are widely employed in the radiotherapy setting accurate modelling is challenging (TPS) in the presence of patient being both heterogeneous and nonrectangular. Watertank-based measurements were made on a Varian TrueBeam linear accelerator covering electron beam energies 6 to 18 MeV. These included both normal and oblique incidence, heterogeneous geometries, and irregular shaped cut-outs. The measured geometries were replicated in RayStation and the Monte Carlo dose calculation engine used to generate dosimetric data for comparison against measurement in what were considered clinically relevant settings. Water-based PDDs and profile comparisons showed excellent agreement for all electron beam energies. Profiles measured with oblique beam incidence demonstrated acceptable agreement to the treatment planning system calculations although the correspondence worsened as the angle increased with the planning system overestimating the dose in the shoulder region. Profile measurements under inhomogeneities were generally good. The planning system had a tendency to overestimate dose under the heterogeneity and also demonstrated a broader penumbra than measurement. Of the 170 different output factors calculated in RayStation over the range of electron energies commissioned, 141 were within ± 3% of measured values and 164 within ± 5%. Four of the 6 comparisons beyond 5% were at 18 MeV and all had a cut-out edge within 3 cm of the beam central axis/measurement point. The RayStation implementation of a VMC++ electron Monte Carlo dose calculation algorithm shows good agreement with measured data for a range of scenarios studied and represented sufficient accuracy for clinical use.

This paper offers a discussion concerning the future of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. Taking the form of a dialogic exchange, we take up Isabelle Stengers’ notion of ‘wonder’ as a creative and political lens through which to consider the disruptive, radical and productive methodological capacity that collaborative writing as a research method potentially offers. Working particularly with Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that language in collaborative writing practices is deeply entangled with complex materialist practice; and through engagements with these ‘matterings’ we make sense of collaborative writing as immanent event. We discuss – and experience – the challenges that collaborative writing has for research and this paper pushes at established categories, works against the fixities of conventional theory construction, contests the humanist and phenomenological proclivities that arguably limit the process and effectiveness of collaborative writing as method of inquiry, and wonders at the immensities that are possible.

This brief essay works and plays with “ordinary affect” as it flows amongst, through, and between two apparently different milieus—a university workplace and a comedy club.

In this short paper, we pay attention to what an autoethnography might do. In relationality we understand autoethnographic practices as assembling and dissembling bodies that are active in always territorialising space and in world making. They have the capacity to affect and be affected and therefore, as performing and performative practices, they act and are acted upon. With Madison, we see these acts as activist, and we therefore see autoethnographic practice as always shifting, always about movement, intensity and potentiality; it never resides, it lives in the creation of the next moment, the next step into the not yet known.