Editor’s Introduction

As I write this introduction, I am sitting with a question that has been circulating in my body for some time. It is not a new question, but it feels newly urgent. The question is this: For whom do we write? And perhaps more precisely: From where do we write? The political and institutional landscape continues to shift in ways that are hostile to equity-driven, justice-oriented scholarship. Academic freedom is under assault. Funding for critical work shrinks. Colleagues are exhausted. Doctoral students are uncertain about whether there will be space for them in a field that increasingly rewards compliance over conviction. In the midst of this, I find myself returning to something I have known for a long time but must keep relearning: Not everyone can be on the front lines putting their bodies and lives in risky situations. But the pen is mighty. And when we write from what calls to us, doing community-situated and culturally-grounded research, we begin to write for the people with whom we are in community. We stop writing toward a center that was never designed to hold us. We begin creating our own.I have spent years thinking about the margin/center binary and how it organizes not only our social locations but our scholarly imaginations as well. If we remain tethered to a center that will always already hold us at its margins, then we exhaust ourselves seeking recognition from structures that were built to exclude us. The alternative is not to ignore the harm those structures produce. The alternative is to stop investing all of our inner resources in the relationship with the oppressor and begin investing in the relationships, communities, and knowledge systems that sustain us. This is not a withdrawal. It is a strategic reorientation. It is the creation of proliferating networks of knowledge that do not need the center’s approval to exist. The scholars in this issue understand this. Their work does not petition for inclusion. It builds something sovereign.What holds this issue together is a shared commitment to refusal and generativity. These are not contradictions. Refusal, as it appears across these essays, is not mere rejection. It is a precise, embodied, politically and spiritually grounded practice of saying no to extractive logics while saying yes to something more honest, more relational, more accountable. Generativity, in turn, is what emerges when scholars refuse the prescriptive architectures of traditional inquiry and build methodological dwellings that can hold the full weight of their questions, their communities, and their lives. Each piece in this issue enacts this dual movement. Each one refuses something that the field has normalized, and each one offers something the field urgently needs.Across these essays, I notice a collective insistence on treating the researcher’s body, spirit, emotion, and relational entanglements not as liabilities but as epistemological resources. These scholars are not performing reflexivity as a procedural gesture. They are doing the difficult, recursive, sometimes painful work of staying accountable to what their research asks of them and what their communities require from them. The methodologies explored here challenge linear time, institutional scripts of care, disciplinary boundaries, and the colonial assumption that legitimate knowledge must be distanced from the knower. This is the terrain of departure that this journal was created to hold.Evan Mitchell Schares’s essay, “Witnessing Refusal: Ethnographic Encounters With the Limits of Participatory Installation Art,” offers a rigorous and deeply situated ethnographic account of what happens when a community refuses an artistic intervention designed to serve it. Through 60 hours of fieldwork in Philadelphia’s Black Germantown neighborhood, Schares documents how residents of Vernon Park did not simply ignore a participatory installation art project about collective grief but actively refused its moral script, its therapeutic authority, and its presumption to know how urban Black communities should memorialize their dead. This is critical work. Schares does not pathologize the refusal. He theorizes it. He demonstrates that the community already possessed spiritually and politically grounded frameworks for organizing grief, memory, and relation, frameworks rooted in ecumenical Black spiritualities that the installation failed to recognize. For qualitative researchers, this essay is a profound reminder that entering a community with good intentions does not absolve us from the responsibility of deep humility, sustained listening, and honoring the sovereignty people already exercise over their own lives. The refusal Schares witnesses is not absence. It is presence, agency, and self-determination.Janelle Grant-Ashbaugh’s article, “Congregation Meeting Methodology: Black Resistance as a Site of Education and Inquiry,” introduces a methodological innovation that emerges directly from Black ontological commitments to community and creativity. Working with Black high schoolers in the Midwest during the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Grant-Ashbaugh developed congregation meetings as a qualitative method that refuses the distancing prescribed by dominant research paradigms. This is not simply a new technique. It is a methodological intervention grounded in the historical and spiritual traditions of Black gathering spaces, particularly the Black church, where education, resistance, and communal care have always been entangled. Grant-Ashbaugh’s work insists that qualitative researchers interrogate the ontological assumptions undergirding their methods, especially when those methods reproduce the surveillance and extraction that Black communities have long endured. By centering Black youth as co-creators and knowledge holders, congregation meetings offer a blueprint for research that nurtures rather than takes, that builds refuge rather than reproduces harm. This piece is a decisive contribution to culturally-situated, Black-centered qualitative methodologies.Rae Chaloult’s piece, “This Is Not a Method Section: Refusing Extraction Through Affective Ethics,” is a courageous and structurally innovative intervention that challenges the very form of the academic article as a site of ethical practice. Chaloult proposes affective ethics as a framework for justice-oriented qualitative research, arguing that procedural ethics (what the IRB approves) and even relational ethics (what happens in the encounter) are insufficient when research involves institutional betrayal, emotional labor, and grief. What Chaloult names is the space that remains after the interview ends and the story still lives in someone’s body. Drawing on Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Pillow’s insistence on uncomfortable reflexivity, Boveda and Bhattacharya’s critique of extractive research ethics, and Patel’s framework of answerability, Chaloult reframes ethical rigor as emotional and relational accountability. The structural rupture at the center of this essay, where the writing breaks from academic convention into poetic meditation, silence, and direct address, is not a stylistic flourish. It is the method. It demonstrates that affective ethics cannot only be theorized; they must be enacted in the form of the writing itself. This piece asks something of us as readers: to sit with discomfort, to resist the impulse to extract findings, and to recognize that what remains unspoken in research is often where the deepest ethical truths reside.Andrew Bassingthwaighte’s article, “Dwelling in the Third Space: Transdisciplinary Autoethnography as Relational Inquiry,” offers a thoughtful and theoretically grounded argument for the integration of transdisciplinarity and autoethnography as a mode of inquiry that can hold the complexity of lived experience across institutional, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Writing from his experiences of adoption, fatherhood, and navigating systems not designed for the kinship structures he inhabits, Bassingthwaighte demonstrates that transdisciplinary autoethnography is not merely a methodological hybrid but an emergent space, a third space, where vulnerability, ethical responsibility, and the entanglement of personal experience with systemic forces can be examined with relational integrity. His work is particularly significant for adoption research, where personal narratives are inseparable from policy, colonial legacies, and clinical discourse. Bassingthwaighte reminds us that transdisciplinarity is not a theoretical abstraction but a lived practice, one that many of us enact before we find the language for it. This essay creates an opening for researchers who work across boundaries not by disciplinary choice but by the demands of their lives and the communities they serve.Collectively, these essays refuse the premise that legitimate scholarship must be extracted from the lives it studies, sanitized for institutional consumption, and distanced from the communities it claims to serve. Each author, in their own way, insists that the pen can be a site of sovereignty, accountability, and care. This is what it means to write for our communities rather than about them. This is what it means to create our own centers.I invite readers to slow down with these pieces. Do not look only for what you agree with. Look for where you pause, where something unsettles you, where a question forms that you did not expect. Those are the points of connection between this work and yours. And if you invest in those connections, you may find that your own methodological terrain expands in ways you had not anticipated. Now more than ever, we need to preserve our inner resources and write from a place of conviction, creativity, and cultural grounding. The work before us is not to seek recognition from structures designed to diminish us. The work is to build knowledge systems that serve our communities, nurture our spirits, and create possibility pathways for those who come after us.This is not a moment for retreat. It is a moment for strategic, generative, and courageous scribing. Let us write for ourselves, for our communities, and for the futures we are building together.