The article presents the research as a gift and an invitation to expand our imaginations as to how we are moved and seek to move others through research co-production. Thinking with the research as gift is made possible through a dialogue between Whitehead’s process philosophy (actual entities, societies, intensity, and attention) and Lauren Berlant’s queer and affect theory (inconvenience, friction, and attention). Research as gift is an intense, inconvenient, and attentional research practice. It is a practice that can be complex and fraught, yet this is what makes it so generative. The article demonstrates how a carousel of creative methods and organizational arrangements with sufficient expertise and capacity enable young people to co-produce research through eventful and expansive adventures following gift intensities and achieving life-affirming encounters for those inquiring in a world in process.

This article examines Instagram as a tool for data collection with LGBTQ+ refugees and migrants in São Paulo, Brazil. While photovoice and videovoice are widely used, integrating Instagram enables forms of data collection not usually possible with these methods. Twenty-one LGBTQ+ migrants created original visual content. Instagram allowed participants creative control compared with conventional photovoice, choosing how to represent themselves through filters, captions, music, and privacy settings, while negotiating constraints such as digital literacy and platform visibility. Drawing on workshops, content, and interviews, the article analyzes how Instagram facilitated storytelling, community building, and agency, while highlighting the limits of digital participation.

This article discusses how datawalks, a method of mobility that provides information about oneself in relation to space and others, can be used to research race through one’s embodied experience in space. Datawalks have often been used to explore experiences of minoritized rather than dominant groups and as a collaborative research-participant experience rather than a self-ethnographic endeavor. This article tackles these gaps by showing how datawalks can be used for researchers to address their positionalities within race relations. Drawing on datawalks the four authors did through parts of Rotterdam (the Netherlands), the article addresses how datawalks can (a) help researchers recognize and experience race in and through space and (b) engage with one’s positionality. This article points out the relevance of using datawalks as an in situ and in-movement method to capture the shape-shifting materiality of race in cities and to draw connections to structures of Whiteness in academia.

The rapid emergence of generative AI tools challenges traditional assumptions about qualitative data analysis, particularly the central role of coding. This article introduces Conversational Analysis to the Power of AI (CA AI ), a novel methodological framework that replaces coding with structured, dialogic interaction between researchers and large language models. CA AI reimagines analysis as a process of iterative questioning, synthesis, and reflexive interpretation rather than segmentation and categorization. Grounded in a hermeneutic epistemology and emphasizing methodological rigor, CA AI integrates inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning strategies. It allows researchers to adapt procedures from established methods like Grounded Theory while embracing a distributed and co-constructive model of knowledge creation. The article outlines a five-step process for CA AI , discusses reliability and validity in this new paradigm, and positions the approach within broader shifts toward post-coding qualitative inquiry. CA AI offers a compelling alternative for researchers seeking to deepen interpretation, democratize analytic access, and expand the epistemic horizons of qualitative research in the age of AI.

This study experiments with post-qualitative methodologies to understand research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as affective and cultural forms. Revisiting data from an ethnographic case study of a RPP, and drawing on affect and cultural studies, I develop “scene-cases” to trace how teachers attach to professional-managerial metaphors as modes of recovery from institutional precarity, while students attune to institutional ghosts and ruins, generating detachment from improvement narratives. The analysis reveals how RPPs function as sites where differential affective orientations complicate assumptions of RPPs’ inherent goodness. RPPs can simultaneously offer recovery from precarity for some participants while catalyzing refusal in others.

This article presents my deliberations on the challenges of issues of trusting and discomfort in decolonizing research, and in particular where non-Indigenous researchers work in partnership with Indigenous scholars and/or Indigenous communities. It draws on the epistemological and methodological decolonizing process of The Tipuna Project as a significant and thoughtful means of conducting decolonizing research that has transformative, reparative intent and protective practice at its core. The piece speaks to debates about decolonizing research and Indigenous methodologies that have gained a foothold of attention in the academy.

This article, based on three research vignettes featuring methodological reflections from the visual and multisensory research on international migrations conducted in Norway and Poland, introduces the concept of multisensory positionality. Grounded in the theoretical discussions around positionality developed in migration studies, and supported by the sensuous scholarship, multisensory positionality is a holistic, intersectional approach that recognizes the body and senses as crucial aspects of positionality for both the researcher and participants. The article highlights how these embodied experiences actively shape the negotiation of meaning between people and spaces, both in the research situation and as part of a migration experience. As an analytical concept, multisensory positionality addresses the opportunities and limitations arising from the embodied, multisensory experiences of research participants. It bridges migration and sensory studies by situating the sensory aspects of people’s identities within their broader life-worlds, including the impact of structures and power relations.

This article proposes the concept of pluriversal mobilities. We use it to describe how creative practices, and people move across places, disciplines, and research traditions in ways that resist universalizing tendencies and one-way knowledge flows. Our theoretical perspectives draw on mobility studies and literature on artistic, participatory, and ethnographic methods. We apply them to the eVoices project, an AHRC-funded initiative carried out in 2018. The project’s outputs continue to circulate, long after its funding ended. We explore pluriversal mobilities in two areas: the movement of artistic artifacts, and the movement of stories and people. Our analysis is based on ethnographic fieldnotes and in-depth interviews to trace mobile lived trajectories. We define pluriversal mobilities around three dimensions: coexisting worlds (Brazil and Kenya), diverse research traditions, and intersecting disciplines. We argue that the artivist qualities of the eVoices’ outputs activated these pluriversal mobilities, fostering dialogues in South–North and South–South dynamics.

This Special Issue engages current debates on creative–collaborative methods (CCMs) as a means of reconfiguring qualitative knowledge production beyond conventional hierarchies. Bringing together arts-based, participatory, community-oriented, and digitally mediated approaches, the contributions foreground collaboration as an ethical and methodological orientation within ethnographic research on mobility. Central to the issue is the notion of reflexive devices: situated field practices that operate simultaneously as methodological tools and ethical propositions. These devices foreground care, reciprocity, and accountability across conditions of (im)mobility. Collectively, the articles reimagine ethnography as a reflexive, relational process through which methodological innovation emerges from epistemic responsibility.

This article demonstrates how Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) produces incomplete and relational images, directing our attention and senses to imagine what has been and may become. I argue that qualitative researchers can use GenAI images to investigate futures and foreground participants’ priorities and values. This approach allows participants and researchers to move with images and immerse themselves in possible futures. I show this methodological possibility, positioning this discussion in visual and futures anthropology and drawing on my future ethnographic fieldwork focused on Aging-Technology futures. In this fieldwork, I used GenAI images reproducing undesired scenarios during video-ethnographic household visits with older adults.