Abstract

Qualitative approaches present challenges to the neat and orderly histories of research. Within this shifting climate, feminist researchers have blurred the boundaries of rigorous research, by bringing the personal into their methods and drawing attention to the liveliness of research methods. We build on this liveliness in this article to develop the conceptual framework of mess. We define messy methods as sensorial, relational, and posthuman in their resistance to binaries and predetermined notions of objectivity. We engage this framework as an excavating tool to explore three vignettes from the authors’ separate research on family violence, doxxing, and climate change. Through these explorations, we challenge understandings of the relations between human, nonhuman, and more-than-human actors, and argue that mess calls us into the “contingent tableau” of embodied feminist research praxis. This article also presents implications and challenges for qualitative research more broadly by calling for a messy movement.

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