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

Abstract

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.