Writing Inquiry in a Post-Truth World: An Essay in Voice, Method, and Meaning

Abstract

In the wake of post-truth politics, neo-oral media, and epistemic fragmentation, qualitative researchers face intensified pressure to justify the legitimacy of our methods. This essay explores the idea that writing itself can be a form of research—not merely an act of representation, but an epistemic, institutional, and affective method. Structured in two voices—one stylized and poetic, the other scholarly and conceptual—the piece moves through five acts to examine writing as a form of border-crossing. It argues that voice-rich, situated writing is not indulgent; it is a way of thinking, navigating complexity, and holding space for uncertainty. Drawing on traditions of performative autoethnography, collective biography, data feminism, and more-than-human inquiry, the essay considers how writing can generate insight, foster civic resonance, and resist epistemic conformity. A heuristic table offers readers practical entry points for approaching writing as method. This essay is for those moments when something in the sentence feels off, but we write it anyway. It asks what becomes possible when we write not to comply, but to inquire.

Prologue—“Writing into the Mess”

The world is messy. You’ve noticed.

Not just “wicked-problem” messy—though there’s plenty of that. We’re talking traction-over-truth messy. Truth is out there, sure, but it’s competing with traction. Precision is fine, but it rarely trends. Researchers measure what they can, publish what they must, and then watch something feral and sticky go viral instead. In this vibe-based economy of attention, it’s easy to feel that serious scholarship has two options: retreat into fortress-methodology or join the meme-fight unarmed. But maybe there’s a third option.

This is a paper about that third option. It’s for scholars who want to matter without shouting. For researchers who know that complexity isn’t solved by adding more columns to a spreadsheet. For writers who suspect that writing might not just be the way we report our thinking—but the way we do our thinking. This is a case for qualitative inquiry—not as soft, anecdotal, or indulgent, but as rigorous, adaptive, and deeply equipped, for the epistemic chaos of now. It listens. It lingers. It lets in the unsaid. And it writes in ways that don’t just explain the world but engage it. Because writing, too, is border-crossing1. Not just the crossing of academic disciplines, but of ways of knowing. Of institutional rules. Of affective boundaries. Of the unspoken fear that being fully present in your writing might mean being disqualified from your field.

But here’s the good news: you’re not alone. This piece isn’t a warning—it’s a permission slip. A whispered dare. A slightly reckless invitation to pick up the pen not just as an academic, but as a thinking, feeling, truth-seeking human. You don’t have to fight the vibe with facts alone. You can write truth that resonates. You can cross borders in your writing—and bring others with you. Not polished. Not perfect. Just willing.

This essay builds on that invitation. It proposes that writing—as a form of epistemic, institutional, and affective border-crossing—is not merely a way of expressing research, but a legitimate method of performing it. Of course, voice travels through uneven terrain. The ability to write with presence, stance, or rhythm is shaped by one’s location in the academy—by discipline, seniority, race, gender, language, and more. What feels like expressive freedom to some may register as risk to others. Writing with voice is not simply a matter of craft; it is entangled with power. And yet, these entanglements are precisely why it matters. The proposition that writing is epistemic is not new, but it remains marginal in mainstream academic practice. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) made the foundational case that writing is not a method of conveying knowledge, but a method of making it—a view echoed by Barad (2007), who asserts that “knowing is a matter of intra-acting”, where boundaries between method, subject, and author blur in the performance of research. St. Pierre (2011) explicitly writes, “I write my way through theory—not to explain it, but to produce it” (p. 622). Building on this, we propose that writing can also function as a border-crossing method along three axes: epistemic, institutional, and affective. This framing brings together traditions that are often siloed: the epistemic arguments of feminist science studies (Haraway 1988), the institutional critiques of academic normativity (Bourdieu 1988; Amsler and Shore 2016), and the affective turn in qualitative inquiry (e.g., Ellis et al. 2011; Markham 2021).

Whereas much of the literature on “voice” and “writing differently” focuses on genre or form (e.g., Van Maanen 1988; Czarniawska 1999), we treat writing as inquiry, not style. To cross a border, in this view, is not simply to express oneself—it is to think otherwise, to locate oneself within shifting terrains of power, discipline, and emotion. Thus, writing is not merely where we show what we have come to know. It is where we come to know it—and often, where we come to know that we did not know at all.

Act I—Writing as Border-Crossing

We are used to thinking of writing as the end of the research process. The part where you sit down, tidy up your thoughts, and explain what you have found. If you are trained in the quantitative tradition, writing is where you translate data into results. If you are a qualitative researcher, you might be told to “let the data speak”, as if writing were just transcription with flourishes.

But for many of us, that has never felt quite right. What if writing is not what you do after you know? What if it is how you come to know?2 What if it is not the wrapping of the work, but the work? This is not a radical claim, though it may feel like one. Feminist scholars, narrative researchers, ethnographers, post-structuralists, and poetic methodologists have long insisted that writing is itself a form of inquiry (St. Pierre 1997; Richardson and St. Pierre 2005). They remind us that writing is not only expressive—it is epistemic. It creates openings. It reveals patterns. Recent methodological contributions have emphasized this alignment of epistemology and expression—Mahé (2019), for instance, argues that how we write is not peripheral to research design, but constitutive of what can be known. Writing asks questions we did not know we were carrying. It thinks. In this essay, we use the term writing not as neutral transcription or delivery of prior knowing, but as an epistemic and affective method—an active site where sense-making unfolds.

But there is more to it than that. Writing is not only about knowing—it is about navigating. It happens in spaces thick with rules, expectations, and risk. And it moves through bodies that feel—uncertainty, excitement, self-doubt, urgency, joy. To write boldly is to cross more than one kind of border: to think otherwise, to sound otherwise, to feel one’s way through. These crossings do not happen in sequence. They blur. They provoke. They often come at a cost. But they are how many of us are already thinking. And they may be how we write ourselves more truthfully into a world that is asking for something else. When we say we, we do not mean an identity group. We mean a shared moment—familiar to many—when something in the writing feels off, but we go along anyway. When we shape the sentence to sound right because we think we are supposed to. When we follow the canon, even as a small part of us wonders if something else is possible.

To cross these borders is not to abandon scholarship. It is to insist—quietly, insistently—that scholarship includes us, too. The proposition that writing is a site of inquiry rather than merely a mode of reporting has long circulated in the margins of qualitative scholarship. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) famously declared that writing is “a method of discovery”, while Ellis and Bochner (2000) framed autoethnography as a genre in which personal narrative becomes both data and analysis. These interventions challenged the idea that academic legitimacy lies in distance, detachment, and formalism. Instead, they positioned writing as epistemic labor—a process through which knowing occurs. Yet even within the literature, the implications for institutional and affective legitimacy remain underdeveloped. What is often missing is an articulation of what it takes to write this way in spaces where such writing is still marked as “unacademic”. To write through uncertainty, to linger in metaphor, to foreground voice or ambiguity—these are not just stylistic choices. They are acts of border-crossing, performed within structures that often punish deviance. This form of epistemic disobedience, as Rojas (2022) describes it, challenges dominant regimes of legitimacy not just through argument but through voice, genre, and situated knowledge.

We therefore propose an original conceptual triad: writing as epistemic, institutional, and affective border-crossing. We use border-crossing rather than the more familiar boundary-crossing to evoke not only disciplinary shifts, but also affective, institutional, and political forms of movement—drawing from feminist and decolonial traditions. These are not metaphors, but interlocking conditions of inquiry under constraint.

• Epistemic border-crossing involves resisting the assumption that knowledge must follow linear logic, generalizability, or methodological closure. It invites abductive reasoning (Tavory and Timmermans 2014), emergent theory (Markham 2021), and situated knowing (Haraway 1988). It allows for ambiguity and contradiction, and treats writing itself as a generative space where theory is not applied, but formed. As St. Pierre writes, “I write my way through theory—not to explain it, but to produce it” (2011, p. 622). This kind of crossing recognizes that writing is not the endpoint of knowing—it is its method. Epistemic border crossing, in this sense, means making visible and legitimate the act of knowing otherwise—an intervention into how knowledge is narrated and enacted through writing itself (Shah 2023).
• Institutional border-crossing entails a conscious reworking of scholarly voice, structure, and legitimacy. It challenges what is allowed—what journals expect, what formats get approved, what kinds of citation networks signal credibility. It may mean breaking genre, rejecting standard structures, or asking (sometimes quietly), “Must we really sound like this?” As Alvesson and Gabriel (2013) argue, much of management and social science writing is governed by “methodological fundamentalism and theoretical reductionism” (p. 251). Crossing this border is not a refusal of form, but a refusal to let form dictate thought.
• Affective border-crossing foregrounds the emotional and embodied nature of knowledge-making. It invites voice, relationality, and vulnerability into the frame—not to replace analysis, but to deepen it. Writing that allows itself to feel—whether through narrative, metaphor, or reflexivity—troubles the divide between researcher and research. As Lather (2009) insists, inquiry must be “rigorous yet not without emotion, accountable but not cold” (p. 21). This border-crossing disrupts the illusion of neutrality, and insists that rigor can also mean resonance.

Together, these crossings recast writing not as an output, but as a site of methodological negotiation. They invite researchers to approach writing as a live terrain of tension—where clarity and ambiguity, convention and disruption, invisibility and presence are all in play. What we purport here is not a stylistic flourish, but a research proposition: that qualitative writing becomes most powerful when it crosses these borders with intention and when it recognizes that how we write is part of what we come to know. We synthesize below the conceptual framing proposed in this section, presenting writing as a form of border-crossing across epistemic, institutional, and affective dimensions (

Table 1. Writing as border-crossing: epistemic, institutional, and affective dimensions.

	Epistemic	Institutional	Affective
Constraining Assumptions	Knowledge must follow linear logic, method-before-theory, or codified procedures	Academic legitimacy requires genre discipline, standardized voice, and ‘correct’ citation practices	Emotion and subjectivity threaten objectivity and credibility
Disruptive Logic of Writing	Writing generates knowledge, not just represents it; abductive, recursive, situated	Writing can challenge norms of scholarly sound, structure, and voice	Writing as embodied, emotional, and relational method
Mode of Epistemic Work	Thinking-through-writing; theory emergence; meaning in movement	Compositional disobedience; tonal hybridity; counter-institutional clarity	Writing the self-in-inquiry; reflexive positioning; felt cognition
Affordances for Research	Surfaces uncertainty, contradiction, and generativity; makes knowledge visible as it unfolds	Reclaims form as method; expands what counts as rigorous writing	Makes affect traceable, rigorously accountable, and epistemically productive
Verbatim Example from Published Research	“I had not planned to ‘do theory’… But in rereading the transcript, a realization settled in. The woman wasn’t describing leadership. She was enacting it. The data had already theorized.” (Carvalho and Gois 2022, p. 184)	“This text was rejected twice. The first time, a reviewer asked if it was a diary. The second time, I was advised to remove the poem. I have left both intact.” (Gabriel 2015, p. 237)	“As I transcribed the interview, I had to stop twice to cry. I wasn’t sure whose pain I was feeling—hers or mine. Maybe both. Maybe that’s what makes it research.” (Pillow 2003, p. 178)
Scholarly Anchors	Haraway (1988), St. Pierre (2011), Tavory and Timmermans (2014)	Bourdieu (1988), Freire (1970), Alvesson and Gabriel (2013)	Ellis and Bochner (2000), Mazzei (2009), Lather (2009), MacLure (2013)

). Organized comparatively, it outlines the assumptions typically constraining each domain, the disruptive logic that writing introduces, and the specific forms of epistemic work this enables. It also highlights the affordances of such writing for research, and includes grounded, verbatim examples from published scholarship to illustrate how these crossings can be enacted in practice. The table is not intended as a model to apply, but as a reflective aid for researchers navigating the complex terrain of writing as inquiry.

Act II—The Post-Truth Condition

The word “truth” has grown skittish. It still circulates, still appears in headlines and hashtags, but it no longer commands the room. Facts have not disappeared, but their force has been diffused. They now compete with performance, with sentiment, with signal strength. In some corners, traction—by which we mean the emotional or aesthetic force that enables content to circulate and resonate—has become truth’s surrogate. If something resonates—emotionally, virally, visually—that is often enough. With Alejandro (2024), we argue that this is not simply a distortion of truth, but a shift in the social mechanics of believability—where traction replaces justification as the dominant epistemic currency. This is a political problem. It is also an epistemological one. It changes how the world is made sense of, and by whom.

In this climate, the scholar’s authority is less assumed than ever. Expertise is suspect. Long sentences are skimmed. Nuance is drowned out by noise. We do not live in a public square of deliberation, but in an attention economy where affect and repetition often outpace reason. Some call it post-truth.3 Others, more precisely, speak of neo-orality: a return to a communication order where speech is immediate, embodied, improvisational—and where writing, when it appears, must perform. This is not entirely bad news. The logocentric, print-bound, “view from nowhere” model of knowledge production has long deserved a challenge. What we are seeing now may be chaotic, but it is also revelatory. It exposes the fragility of our epistemic assumptions. It shows us that reason alone does not travel far. That “evidence” is not what persuades, unless it is shaped, voiced, embodied. That the social life of knowledge is not a defect. It is the terrain. And yet, many of us respond to this situation with retreat. When confronted with epistemic instability, we double down on methodological formalism. When challenged by performativity, we reach for neutrality. Faced with affect, we reach for abstraction.

But what if these responses are not protective, but self-silencing? What if, in a world organized by traction and affect, the refusal to engage is not noble, but naive? What if stylized, situated, voice-rich writing is not indulgent, but epistemically appropriate? What if the world’s epistemic condition calls not for retreat, but for rigorously engaged, creatively written, qualitative inquiry? Not louder. Not simpler. But clearer. More alive. More willing to cross the borders that keep our work from entering the conversation. Because the conversation is happening—with or without us. How Do We Research—And Write—In a World Where Truth No Longer Binds?

We are not facing a mere distortion of facts. What we are witnessing is a transformation of truth’s condition of possibility. As McIntyre (2018) explains, post-truth arises when “feelings matter more than facts” and when reason is deliberately undermined to preserve ideological comfort. Durnová (2019) similarly frames it as “an emotional politics of truth”—where emotion is not secondary to knowledge but foundational.

This transformation is cultural—and infrastructural. People are persuaded differently; they are even trained to know differently. Papacharissi (2015) describes this shift in terms of “affective publics”—networks held together not by rational agreement, but by “shared moods and orientations” that spread affectively rather than logically. These publics do not deliberate; they vibe. Postman (1985) warned that a culture saturated by visual media would gradually “amuse itself to death”. But what we now encounter is even more destabilizing. Digital platforms have deepened what Ong (1982, p. 10) called “secondary orality”—a communicative mode that privileges spontaneity, repetition, and emotional performance over exposition. In this regime, knowledge travels not by argument, but by rhythm, visibility, and velocity. As one commentator put it, “if it does not circulate, it does not count”. In our own work, we have called this neo-orality: a new epistemic condition where communication is shaped by immediacy, ambient persuasion, and the aesthetics of traction and where rhythm, affect, and repetition shape believability (Fendt 2025). Here, truth is not verified but performed. It becomes sensed, rather than demonstrated. In this light, post-truth is not a deviation from knowledge norms. It is a reconstruction of them. And its effects are not limited to politics. They directly challenge what counts as scholarly authority. Faced with this, many of us retreat. We write more consciously. More rigidly. More defensively. But as Durnová (2019) warns, such retrenchment may only “deepen the irrelevance of academic voices” in public discourse. If traction now displaces verification, and if emotional resonance is the new epistemic currency, then we cannot simply rely on better methods—we must also write differently.

This is not a call to abandon rigor. It is a call to widen it. Qualitative inquiry, precisely because it is narrative, situated, and interpretive, is well equipped to write into post-truth—not from above, but from within. As St. Pierre (1997) reminds us, writing is not the transcription of knowledge, but the site where knowledge is made. With writing as border-crossing, we are not proposing a stylistic experiment. We are describing a necessary recalibration. In post-truth conditions, writing that crosses epistemic, institutional, and affective borders is not an indulgence—it is a method of civic engagement. Fricker (2007) defines epistemic injustice as the harm that occurs when people are not recognized as knowers. Today, we risk a new kind of epistemic exclusion: where scholarly forms are unread, unreadable, or uncirculated—not because they are wrong, but because they cannot resonate. Writing that reclaims resonance as ethical communication, not just emotional reach, becomes not just academic—it becomes civic. This is not nostalgia. Nor resignation. It is an invitation to write with eyes open, to write with more than logic. To write—not against post-truth—but into it. Thoughtfully. Fully. With form as method.

Act III—Writing as Civic Resistance

If the post-truth condition is the terrain, then writing must find new ways to move through it—with clarity and resonance. We are not suggesting that writing can save the world. But it can shape how the world is seen, felt, and known. And in times like these, that matters. Writing is not neutral. It never has been. The choice of form, tone, rhythm, and voice all carry epistemological commitments. When we default to flattened academic prose, we are not being more objective—we are often being more compliant. We are performing a ritual of institutionality, one that signals membership, not necessarily insight. This is understandable. We have all learned what counts. What gets accepted. What gets cited. We have also learned, quietly, what risks too much. What feels “off”, “too personal”, “too literary”. These warnings are rarely stated, but they linger in the margins. They shape what we dare to write and thus what we dare to know. But if the rules of writing were designed for another time, another epistemic order, another social contract—then clinging to them now is not professionalism. It is paralysis. This is where writing becomes civic. Not simply because it communicates scholarship, but because it performs scholarship. Because it investigates, theorizes, reveals. Because it brings knowledge into being through the act of composition itself.

To engage in writing as research—writing that does not merely describe but inquires, that does not just deliver but discovers—is to take a stance in how we understand and participate in the world. Especially now, when shared reality is so fragile, and sense-making has become contested terrain. Consider Laurel Richardson’s experiment in writing the same ethnographic research as a poem, short story, and scholarly article (Richardson 2000). Far from being dismissed as fringe, it has become a widely taught text in qualitative methods courses—a pedagogical mainstay that expands students’ sense of what inquiry can sound like. This uptake reflects not just stylistic innovation, but a shift in the institutional imagination of rigor. To write in this way is not to abandon rigor. It is to practice a different rigor—one that attends to resonance, to relevance, to the ethics of language. It is not to simplify, but to clarify. Not to seduce, but to connect. Kanngieser (2021) reminds us that knowledge can emerge through embodied listening—that attunement is a method, and that writing may carry resonance not through its structure alone, but through its attention to the unsaid. Not to perform for performance’s sake, but to write from where one stands, and to let the research emerge through that stance. In this way, writing as research becomes a form of civic resistance—not oppositional, but propositional. Not moralistic, but meaningful. Not louder, but truer. It says: I am still thinking. I am still listening. I am still in this.

Why Does How We Write—Epistemically, Politically and Scientifically—Matter?

The idea that writing is political has deep roots in feminist science studies (Harding 1987), decolonial critique (Smith 1999), and critical pedagogy (Freire 1970). But in the current epistemic climate, that idea acquires new urgency. In a post-truth atmosphere, writing becomes more than method, more than expression. It becomes a civic stance—a mode of refusing silence, flattening, and illegibility.

This is resistance, not through outrage, but through form. Through presence. Through reflexivity. Through the courage to write as if the world is listening—and to write in a way that it might. The fantasy of neutrality still haunts much of academic writing. But as Bourdieu (1988) made clear, neutrality in academia is rarely neutral. It is often in alignment with dominant institutions. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) put it bluntly: “The impersonal style is not neutral—it is a decision”. A decision with consequences: for inclusion, for understanding, for what knowledge gets counted. To write “objectively” in this sense is not to avoid bias—it is to hide it in convention. It is to perform distance, rather than investigate relationship. It is, too often, to retreat from the epistemic responsibility that qualitative inquiry demands. And that responsibility includes being read. In a traction economy, where attention is scarce and understanding must be felt before it can be followed, we argue that readability is not indulgence—it is civic method.

The insights of data feminism are central to this discussion—not as an aside, but as an epistemic intervention that challenges extractivist, disembodied modes of research. Feminist theorists remind us that how we write is never separate from how we know. D’Ignazio and Klein (2020), writing on data feminism, insist that knowledge production must be not only ethical but legible. “If it does not travel”, they argue, “it does not matter”. Design is not neutral—and neither is academic writing. This means acknowledging that ideas do not exist until they are taken up, responded to, or resisted. And that form shapes uptake. Clarity is not the enemy of complexity. Resonance is not a threat to rigor. To write in a way that holds the reader is not to abandon method—it is to extend its reach. D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism (2020) exemplifies this reach. By blending critical theory, data ethics, and accessible design, they crafted a text that circulates widely beyond academia—used in activist circles, government agencies, and classrooms. Their clarity is not simplification—it is political choice, grounded in the belief that “if it doesn’t travel, it doesn’t matter”.

In an era where political traction routinely eclipses truth—as in the communicative practices of Trump, Bolsonaro, or post-truth populism—scholarly writing must respond not by retreating into abstraction, but by reclaiming resonance as a form of civic clarity. As one of us has argued elsewhere, “If traction now overrules truth, then we must learn to write with traction—without surrendering to it” (Fendt 2025). This is why writing as border-crossing—epistemic, institutional, affective—is not aesthetic rebellion but methodological responsibility. It is the act of building thought in a way that includes more of the world. Lather (2007) calls this a “double task”: critique and creation. Writing differently critiques the inherited forms that exclude. But it also creates new ways of knowing, feeling, and being with the world. This is not writing against the academy. It is writing that asks more of it. Let us be clear: writing is research. It shapes what we know, how we know, and who is allowed to know. To write as inquiry—and to write for traction—is not to abandon rigor. It is to practice it differently. Publicly. Bravely. Together.

Act IV—The Risk of Voice

Writing with voice is not easy. It sounds liberating in theory—until you try. Until you hover over a sentence that feels too exposed. Until you worry whether that metaphor might offend, whether that first-person reflection sounds unprofessional, whether that moment of uncertainty belongs in a field obsessed with clarity. The risk is real. Voice makes you visible. And visibility is unevenly distributed in academia. Some of us are read differently. Some of us are judged more quickly. Voice, for many, is not just a stylistic choice. It is an exposure. But the absence of voice carries its own risk: vanishing. Flattening the self until there is no position, no story, no located stance—only a neutral ghost behind the data. And in a time when knowledge is questioned not only for what it claims, but for who speaks, the removal of the speaker is no longer neutral. It is silence. Voice is rigor’s companion. It forces us to be honest about where we are standing, what we are seeing, and how we are making sense of it. Voice makes the epistemology audible. It shows the work. And it helps others find their way. Because what is at stake here is not just permission. It is possibility. When one scholar writes differently, it opens a crack for others. It makes room. It signals: You can write your way into this, too. This is how fields move. Not through grand declarations, but through quiet insistence. Through work that dares to feel as well as think. Through language that risks revealing something real. Yes, it may be misunderstood. It may not be everyone’s taste. But in the current noise, in the traction economy, in the epistemic scramble we are in—there are worse things than being misunderstood. One of them is being unread. Another is being unreadable. And perhaps the worst is writing something so clean, so correct, so defensible… that it cannot be felt at all.

Writing as Epistemic Movement

This section is about writing as a methodological movement—how it acts as part of the research process itself, and the joys and perils that come with letting writing think. When researchers write not only to explain, but to discover, they enter uncertain territory. Voice, in this context, is not a stylistic flourish. It is a vector of inquiry—a way of knowing that is alive, relational, and full of risk. In most academic traditions, writing is treated as a final phase. Data is collected, analyzed, and then written up. But this linear model conceals a profound misunderstanding. Writing is not the packaging of research. It is a space of inquiry, a zone of experimentation, a method of movement. Barad (2007) reframes knowing as intra-action, where researcher and world co-emerge. Knowledge is not transported by writing—it is created in it. St. Pierre (2011) echoes this: “I do not use theory to interpret data. I write my way through theory to produce data”. Writing is not afterthought—it is encounter. This is reflexivity—and methodological non-linearity. As Tavory and Timmermans (2014) show, abductive reasoning—the logic of surprise—is triggered as much in the act of writing as in the field. “Abduction”, they remind us, “is also in the unfolding of text”. MacLure (2013) calls these moments the “wonder of data”—when words flicker, resist, or shimmer with meanings that outpace our intentions. Writing, then, is not just inscription. It can create emergence, rather than register what has emerged (Britzman 1998; Barrett and Bolt 2007). This insight is not new. Van Maanen (1988) wrote of ethnography as a “tale”—not to romanticize, but to signal that the very form of writing determines what kinds of knowledge are possible. Richardson (2000) argued that “writing is a way of knowing”—a method of discovery that produces different knowledge, and produces knowledge differently.

Voice is part of this. Voice shapes attention, tone, rhythm, and connection. As Pillow (2003) points out, writing that incorporates affect and position does not dilute the research—it renders visible the conditions of its making. It shows the work. Spry’s (1996) performative autoethnography is a powerful case in point. Initially provocative for its blend of personal narrative and performance theory, it has since been cited thousands of times and remains a touchstone for scholars exploring embodiment, race, gender, and voice. Its influence is not just academic—it has helped shape how identity and reflexivity are taught, performed, and published across disciplines. It shows the risks of the work. And risk, in this view, is methodological. As Lather (2009) puts it, “Risk means you’re doing something alive”. To write with voice is to surrender the illusion of neutrality—and in doing so, to make inquiry audible, situated, and real. Importantly, none of this makes writing looser. It makes it tighter in another dimension—demanding attentiveness to rhythm, nuance, hesitation, and possibility. It demands that we remain open to being moved by our own material. So yes, writing is communication, but also co-composition with the world. It is a knowing-with. To write in this way is to engage voice as method. Not a performance, not indulgence—but rigorously responsive thinking in language. It is to allow the inquiry to unfold in the writing, and for the writing to reshape the inquiry. To write as method is to risk being changed.

Act V—What This Looks Like in Practice

So what does it mean to write like this? To let research emerge through language that listens, lingers, and leaps? It does not mean becoming a novelist. Or abandoning clarity for drama. Or scattering metaphor like glitter across the page. Rather, we might attend to the craft of writing as part of the craft of inquiry. We might let the way we write reflect the way we think—and the world we are thinking about. Here are some ways that might look: It might mean writing a sentence that does not resolve, because the question you are asking is still unresolved. It might mean staying with ambiguity long enough for the reader to feel it, too. It might mean naming your discomfort—briefly, precisely—rather than smoothing it out for the sake of polish. It might mean writing in the first person, not to center the self, but to clarify the stance from which the research arises. It might mean describing not only what your participants said, but how their words landed in the room. It might mean resisting the urge to strip your prose of rhythm, cadence, or metaphor—because those are part of how understanding happens. It might mean rethinking structure—not as a straight road from A to B, but as a movement, a rhythm, a choreography of thought. It might mean asking, when a passage feels flat, what am I afraid to say here? And it almost certainly means reading differently. Reading not only for content, but for voice. For form. For how a sentence invites or evades. For who is allowed to speak, and how. To write like this is not to break the rules for the sake of it. It is to notice the rules, and then decide—consciously, courageously—when to follow them and when to cross. Because crossing is not always a rebellion. Sometimes, it is just the next necessary step.

How to Begin: Concrete Heuristic for Writing as Border-Crossing Inquiry

Writing differently is not a new impulse. For decades, feminist, post-qualitative, and arts-based scholars have written against the grain—risking genre, voice, and legitimacy to show that writing is not just a container for knowledge, but a method for producing it. Laurel Richardson, Elizabeth St. Pierre, Patti Lather, Carolyn Ellis, Tami Spry, Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt, Bronwyn Davies, Maggie MacLure, Lisa Mazzei, and others have opened space for writing that theorizes, performs, fragments, speculates, hesitates, and dares. Their work taught us that voice is not indulgence; it is situated epistemology. That form is not neutral; it shapes what can be known. That uncertainty is not a failure of rigor, but one of its sources. This paper stands on those shoulders. And while we write in deep continuity with this lineage, we also write into a different set of stakes—an epistemic condition marked by post-truth atmospheres, affective publics, and neo-oral traction logics. In such conditions, to write clearly, thoughtfully, riskily—and to be read—is not only a methodological choice, but a civic one. What follows is a set of heuristics: practical writing gestures drawn from this tradition and shaped by today’s demands. These pathways—expanded below in

Table 2. Writing-as-research: practices that surface knowing.

Heuristic	Value to Research	Verbatim Example (Empirical)	Major Authors
Begin in uncertainty	Surfaces tension and surprise; avoids premature closure	“I began to write about her silence, and it undid what I thought I had found.” (MacLure 2013)	MacLure; Lather; St. Pierre
Let form follow meaning	Aligns expression with epistemology; enables clarity through resonance	“The story didn’t fit IMRAD, so I wrote it as a dialogue between fieldnotes and theory.” (Carvalho and Gois 2022)	Richardson; Mazzei; Carvalho and Gois
Write from the body	Surfaces affective knowing; integrates sensory and somatic experience	“My fingers remembered the interview before I did.” (Spry 1996)	Spry; Manning; Bogart
Stay with movement	Keeps inquiry alive and responsive; enables epistemic shift	“Writing that sentence changed the entire direction of my analysis.” (St. Pierre 2011)	St. Pierre; Lather; Britzman
Let theory emerge through texture	Enables organic insight; resists premature coding	“Butler didn’t clarify my data—my data clarified Butler.” (Mazzei 2009)	Mazzei; Butler; Richardson
Honor absence and silence	Expands what counts as data; includes what resists articulation	“The absence of her voice on the tape was louder than her presence.” (Mazzei 2009)	Mazzei; MacLure; Britzman
Engage collective memory	Reveals relational knowing; surfaces shared sense-making	“In our writing group, her memory shifted my story.” (Davies 2014)	Davies; Ellis; Richardson
Write with multispecies	Acknowledges nonhuman agency; expands ethnographic imagination	“The mushroom refused categorization—it grew where I wasn’t looking.” (Tsing 2015)	Tsing; Manning; Barad
Treat narrative as data	Honors lived experience; links emotion, story, and analytic insight	“I wrote the chapter as a narrative, and only then understood what I had studied.” (Ellis 2004)	Ellis; Spry; Richardson
Revise voice deliberately	Reveals rhetorical stance; aligns writing with relational intent	“I read the sentence aloud, and only then realized I didn’t believe it.” (Richardson 2000)	Richardson; Mazzei; St. Pierre

—are drawn from decades of practice by feminist, post-qualitative, and arts-based scholars. They are not steps, but invitations. Each heuristic is paired with an articulation of its epistemic value, a verbatim example from qualitative research, and the thinkers who have shaped this tradition. Use them experimentally. Use them slowly. Use them to begin, to get unstuck, or to listen differently to your own words. They are not intended to standardize writing practice, but to support inquiry that emerges through relation, tension, and form. Let them remind you that writing is not the aftermath of knowing—it is where knowing begins.

• You might begin with uncertainty. Instead of seeking resolution, write your doubt. Let the tension appear on the page and circle it. Maggie MacLure calls this the “wonder of data”—those sticky, affective fragments that “glow” rather than code cleanly (MacLure 2013, p. 229). Elizabeth St. Pierre urges us to write not to explain theory, but to “produce it” (2011, p. 622). For both, what does not fit is often where the research begins to breathe.
• Let the form of your writing follow your inquiry. Laurel Richardson famously rewrote the same ethnographic data as a poem, a short story, and a scientific article, arguing that each form “yields a different kind of knowing” (Richardson 2000, p. 924). Bronwyn Davies and Lisa Mazzei insist that textual arrangement is not neutral—that “what gets said and what doesn’t is shaped by how we write” (Mazzei and Jackson 2009, p. 4). Choose the form that makes your argument think more clearly—not necessarily more conventionally.
• Write from the body. Tami Spry’s performative autoethnography begins with the self as “a body-being-in-the-world”, insisting that “performance is both method and theory” (Spry 1996, p. 20). Erin Manning writes movement as method, asking how concepts emerge “in the intervals between gesture and event” (Manning 2016, p. 6). Anne Bogart, writing from theater, reminds us that attention to breath and repetition is a form of “rigorous presence” (Bogart 2001, p. 10). Begin your writing day by moving—then let the sentence inherit the movement.
• Write iteratively, not linearly. Write as you collect data. Write while you are unsure. Write as method. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner model this in their autoethnographic collaborations, where “the story is the analysis” (Ellis and Bochner 2000, p. 745). Their work blurs data and meaning-making, form and content. Let your structure emerge from the material—not from the template.
• Let theory arrive slowly. Rather than “applying” it, let it soak into the text. Lisa Mazzei once wrote, “Butler didn’t clarify my data—my data clarified Butler” (Mazzei 2009, p. 48). In such writing, theory is not a frame imposed in advance, but a companion that arrives through encounter.
• Make space for silence. Mazzei also reminds us that absence is part of knowing. “What is not said is as important as what is” (Mazzei 2009, p. 166). Let fragments stand. Let pauses do their work. Show the tension. Leave a line unsaid.
• Invite collectivity. Bronwyn Davies developed collective biography as a practice of writing theory through shared storytelling, where the analytic work emerges from “a collective writing that thinks” (Davies and Gannon 2006, p. 5). In institutional contexts, Davies’ method has created spaces where teachers and researchers collaboratively analyze lived experience—not just as data, but as theory-making. In one study, collective biography restructured a school’s professional development program around shared feminist inquiry, transforming both relationships and policy discourse. Write in groups. Let someone else’s memory bend your analysis. Let meaning emerge in relation.
• Write with the nonhuman. Anna Tsing lets mushrooms lead her ethnographic method, writing “with the rhythms of fungal life” to rethink human–nature relations (Tsing 2015, p. 20). Erin Manning urges us to “follow the thing that moves”—whether it is fabric, light, or gesture (Manning 2016, p. x). Writing with more-than-human actors is not metaphor. It is method.
• Experiment with your own voice. Take a paragraph and rewrite it in three tonalities: academic, conversational, and embodied. Read them out loud. Lisa Mazzei challenges the idea of voice as a stable essence, proposing instead that “voice emerges from entanglement” (Mazzei 2009, p. 169). Choose the version that is most epistemically alive—not the one most likely to pass review.

These heuristics are already being practiced—in bold articles, hybrid chapters, speculative fieldnotes, and resistant dissertations. What we offer here is not a manifesto. It is a renewed invitation in the light of present times: to write as if the writing matters. Because it does. Let writing be how you know. Let it move. Let it resist. Let it stay close to what matters.

Finale—Write Anyway

And still, the question remains. Do we write anyway?

There will always be voices—inside and out—that ask, “Is this even research?” You will hear them. You might even believe them, briefly. But if what you are carrying out is inquiry—if it is thinking, sensing, risking, revealing—then it is research. And if writing is how you perform that, then writing is not the report. It is the method. Not every sentence has to shimmer. Not every paragraph must disobey. But the work that matters most will ask something of you. It will press at the edges of what you were taught to sound like. It will ask you to write closer to the world, and to yourself. This is somewhat about style—but really it is about stance. About being louder, perhaps, but mainly about being truer. Writing like this is not always rewarded. Not yet. But it is remembered. And sometimes, it is recognized by someone else trying to find their way. That is no small thing. So cross the borders. Carefully, carelessly, boldly. Write your questions, your fieldnotes, your findings, your footnotes—write them as research. Not louder. Not purer. But braver. Write anyway.

What This Essay Offers—And What It Cannot

This is an essay—written with curiosity. And in the old sense of the word, it is quite literally an essai: an attempt, a trying-out. It does not claim empirical breadth, nor offer a fully worked-out method. It does not aim to resolve the complexities of writing, research, and voice. What it offers is a proposition: that writing, when practiced as inquiry, can make knowledge move—and that such movement may be more vital than ever.

The urgency comes from the context in which we now write. A world shaped by traction-driven media (Papacharissi 2015), post-truth politics (McIntyre 2018), neo-oral dynamics (Ong 1982), and eroding civic trust (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Ginsburg and Huq 2018) challenges our habits of academic communication. In such a world, resonance is not decoration—it is epistemic relevance. When truths compete with vibes, our forms of knowing need to stretch. Elsewhere, we have examined how traction-based media dynamics challenge traditional scholarly authority (Fendt 2025); this essay offers one response—written not against that condition, but from within it. This essay also offers a methodological gesture. It defines three interwoven types of writing-as-border-crossing: epistemic, institutional, and affective. These are offered not as categories, but as ways to feel for the edges of our writing—and to cross them deliberately. Table 2 gathers these heuristics, anchoring them in purpose, example, and lineage. The lineage matters. This work draws from philosophy, pedagogy, feminist, and post-qualitative theory, and arts-based inquiry. It stands gratefully in conversation with Richardson, St. Pierre, Lather, Spry, Ellis, MacLure, Mazzei, Manning, and many others who have written fiercely and tenderly about form, voice, and research as relation.

This text, too, enacts some of the gestures it proposes. Each act begins with a stylized opening—more rhythmic, affective, speculative—followed by a more conventionally grounded scholarly companion. This structure allowed us to see the argument from multiple tonalities, and to let the writing itself be part of the inquiry. It does not offer conclusions. It offers openings. It is partial, situated, limited in its empirical grounding, and ambitious in its hope. It was not written from authority. It was written from urgency and care—by which we mean an attentiveness to voice, to uncertainty, and to the reader’s experience. Care, here, is not sentimentality; it is an epistemic stance. And still, something real moves here: writing, when taken seriously as inquiry, makes space for braver scholarship. Braver writing generates different knowledge. And knowledge that resonates might help us mend the fraying connections between research and society. It is no coincidence that some of the most courageous innovations in writing and method come from those whose epistemic survival has always depended on reworking borders—colonial, institutional, and bodily (Hayles 1999). Such writing—when carried out with attentiveness, depth, and accountability—is not just expressive. Andreotti et al. (2021) argue that to engage epistemic humility may require us not to assert our frameworks louder, but to hospice the certainties that no longer serve—making space for unknowing as an ethical and methodological act. It is a rigorous method of inquiry, grounded in decades of scholarly practice. Writing as method reveals dimensions of inquiry that other methods—such as coding, modeling, or structured interviewing—often obscure. While these approaches prioritize pattern, categorization, or generalizable insight, writing invites knowledge to emerge through rhythm, voice, and form. It holds space for ambiguity, contradiction, and the felt sense of not-knowing—elements that resist closure but are epistemically rich. MacLure (2013) calls this the “wonder of data”, where meaning flickers in fragments that shimmer rather than settle. Mazzei (2009) similarly argues that voice, when entangled in writing, disrupts the illusion of stable knowledge and opens pathways to knowing otherwise. Writing makes room for these unsettled moments to count—not as noise, but as insight. It allows us to inquire not only into the world, but into how we come to know it.

If any of this felt true to you, try it. Write—not to impress, but to explore. Let your voice hold tension, curiosity, and form. Let your writing move—and let it move you. If you are one of those scholars—tentative, bold, uncertain, curious—you are not alone. This essay was written for you. And perhaps, in some small way, with you.