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.
James Duggan (Fri,) studied this question.