Reflexivity is a common methodological and ethical practice that researchers employ. However, reflexivity, especially for endarkened narrative inquiry (ENI), extends beyond exploring positionality, power, and complicity and requires an ethic of care that recognizes the integral role of tending to the researcher’s embodiment, relational accountability, and well-being in the process. This article explores reflexivity as an embodied, relational, social, and cultural practice that enables researchers to challenge dominant narratives, engage in intellectual play, and foster new possibilities for knowledge creation. To deepen reflexive engagement in ENI, I present a reflexive cycle that integrates embodied, relational, and spiritual dimensions of reflexivity. This cyclical framework consists of six phases: awareness, relational engagement, spiritual and cultural integration, critical examination, knowledge transformation, and documentation and integration. By focusing on the iterative and holistic nature of reflexivity, this model proposes a framework for researchers seeking to engage more deeply with their own inquiry processes while remaining accountable to the communities with which they interact.

In this autoethnography, I utilize my experience as a Korean American adoptee (KAD) to theorize and challenge the meaning of belonging for the KAD community. Through autoethnographic vignettes, I explore the possibility of reimagining a digital homeland that views borders as markers of belonging instead of exclusion. Moreover, I theorize what it means to belong in a diaspora community where “homeland” is complicated. Overall, this autoethnography expands scholarship concerning the KAD community, centers an adoptee’s voice, and offers a hopeful vision for what KAD community looks like in a digital age.

Inequities persist in working with Indigenous communities especially with power dynamics and structures. Relationship building and relationality with Indigenous communities in educational research are hindered by these power imbalances. Using an experience of flight of imagination to recenter researchers/community relationship building, this article engages a space for transformation—shifting from the Western academic institutional framing of research and relationship building to Indigenous epistemology of relationality. The article incorporates the Indigenous temazcal or sweat lodge, a space of healing and spirituality, as an approach that posits relationality as spirituality in the creation of safe spaces for learning and interaction of researchers and the communities’ full selves.

In what follows, I share a story. Emerging from engagement with critical autoethnography and danced movement as methodology during my doctoral research, my story explores the complex terrain of my sense of belonging as a Pākehā, or White woman of settler-colonial descent, in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. Inspired by scholars who have drawn attention to the power and possibilities of humble approaches to being an academic and doing academic research, I tell my story not to support a grand theory or critique but to answer calls for reflexivity and response-ability among those of White settler-colonial background.

Connecting Deleuze’s fold with Barad’s spacetimemattering, we explore how (un)folding origami cootie catchers/fortune tellers can infuse playfulness to enact and extend qualitative data analysis, (re)presentation, and audience engagement in poetic inquiry. -Presenting two distinctive dissertation projects, we demonstrate how origami arts fostered play and becoming-together with(in) these qualitative inquiries. Yixuan Wang presents U.S. English teachers’ intersectional experiences in China through an origami poem, and Shannon Perry shares how collaborative inquiry into affect and creative practice led to origami fortune tellers as participatory, performative presentations of research insights.

In this article, we explore the usefulness of adapting McAdams’s (2008b) life story narrative method in conducting research with transgender participants in a previous study. We utilize one participant’s story to demonstrate our ability to understand the contextual supports he pulled upon in order to positively impact his gender transition. Through this method, not only were we able to better understand the participant’s experiences and perspectives, but we were also able to communicate our commitment to seeing him as a whole, complex, and unique individual. We encourage other researchers to use this method in the future.

This article explores the act of showering as a fluid stage where selfhood is continuously negotiated, disrupted, and reconstructed. Drawing from Foucault’s panoptic surveillance, Butler’s performativity, and Bhabha’s hybridity, this work examines the shower as a liminal space where the body oscillates between visibility and invisibility, self-regulation and resistance. Expanding beyond Western assumptions of hygiene as a universal experience, the article incorporates postcolonial critiques from Spivak, Fanon, and Mbembe, interrogating water as both a site of cleansing and a marker of privilege. Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory is employed to further complicate this space as a site of identity fragmentation and contested belonging. Engaging with posthumanist perspectives, the article reconceptualizes water as an active participant in material-discursive practices, where bodily subjectivity is co-constituted through intra-actions rather than fixed dichotomies. Ultimately, this article destabilizes the taken-for-granted ritual of showering, revealing it as an existential performance entangled in histories of power, colonization, and embodiment.