Writing-With a Parasite Dis/Coloring One’s Skin: Toward Inquiries of Change

Abstract

In this article, I explore the potential emerging from writing-with a parasite (Pityriasis Versicolor) living on my skin at the time of writing. My parasite and I respond to the invitation to engage with Sarah Truman’s techniques for thinking about research-creation and Aaron M. Kuntz’s conception of methodological parrhesia. Together, we co-parasite (through para-citation, perhaps?), jointly and diffractively between the pages of Truman and Kuntz so as to experiment with our own situated entanglement and intra-actions with the process of inquiry by asking: how might we engage inquiry, not as a mode of static and distanced observation but as a process of change attuned to our own material intermingling? We do so by posing questions about emergence: (a) How might we activate the productive tensions between situated knowledges and the notion of emergence? (2) How might we engage the ever-emergent material-relational dimension of inquiry through an in-actment of “middling”? (c) How might we conceive of inquiry as the practice of parrhesia—a mode of care-full truth-making with-in emergence?