Original Article Mai: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Art of Writing Qualitatively International Review of Qualitative Research 2024, Vol. 0(0) 1–19 © 2024 International Institute for Qualitative Inquiry Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/19408447241245114 journals.sagepub.com/home/irq Boni Wozolek1  Abstract Using grief as a node of beginning, this paper considers how all qualitative writing is an intra-action through which the process of engaging with one’s memory, remembering, and collective memory co-constitutes subjectivities and agency within and across the writing process. Therefore, this paper argues that through writing qualitatively, both the author, as well as broader sociopolitical norms and values be and become in ways that are worth our attention and intention as researchers and participants in local and less local contexts. Keywords qualitative research, grief, sonic ethnography, new materialisms, futurisms My aunt just died. An hour ago I received a flurry of texts from my other aunt that read as follows: - Aunt: (7:58am): Pepe is bad. (7:58am): Going back to the hospital. (7:58am): Got (heart) attack. (7:59am): They are reviving her. (8:00am): Doc said, “Not good.” 1 Penn State University, Abington College, Abington, PA, USA Corresponding Author: Boni Wozolek, Abington College, Penn State University, 1600 Woodland Rd., Abington, PA 19001-3918, USA. Email: bfw5188@psu.edu 2 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) - Me: (8:01am): Oh no… - Aunt: (8:02am): She’s gone. It’s now 2 years later but, on that day, just after 9:00am and I began writing this. I decided to write this because in the middle of “crying-so-hard-your-head-aches-andyour-body-feels-absent-while-you-can’t-catch-your-breath” grief, all I could do was stare at these texts and think, “Gone where? Maybe she’s not actually gone, gone. Maybe she’s just gone to surgery? No. The texts would have said that, right? Gone? She can’t be gone. She was relatively fine 24 hours ago. She’s my mai (mother). My mai…. She’s a woman I’ve loved like a mother since I was young, since her eldest son and I were running around the countryside in the middle of monsoon, constantly getting yelled at by our grandmother when we came in sopping wet. She’s a woman who loved me like her own, hugging me when I would come to her house and telling me in gentle tones that with three boys, it felt nice to have a daughter. An accident with a drunk driver stole my cousin, her eldest son, in 2005. She and I found each other, left in the wake of that loss, our grief often pulling us together during odd hours of the day and night. Mai. My cousin used to make me promise to take care of her should anything happen to him. Mai.” 8:02am: “She’s gone.” My body felt frozen as the sounds felt thick around my ears. My heart cried out, “Mai…” but even my voice had betrayed me. “Mai,” I managed to whimper, my voice sounding like a stranger. After a moment, my mind slowly woke up and I realized that I was left alone, in grief, in this life, comforted only with the knowledge that she was now with the ancestors. I found myself wondering who came to show her the way, to help her transition. Was it her son? I hoped so. “Mai.” In the middle of this deep “try-to-pick-yourself-up-but-find-that-your-body-isuseless” grief, I found myself staring at my phone, willing the words to disappear. After a few minutes, the combination of focused attention and tears blurred the text so that the letters became fuzzy at their edges. Another minute passed and the messages began to lose all meaning, like a word you’ve said too many times. Suddenly, as if to separate my very being from this body that was embroiled in grief, I had a thought: “If I were researching this moment, what would I hear? Feel? See? …Observe? How would I write about this…about mai? No. Not your mai. Someone else’s, depending on the methodology.” The thought hit me so funny that I began to laugh out loud. My own voice hung in the air, suddenly feeling foreign to me; it was a kind of maniacal laughter that arguably surfaces in the wake of incredibly raw emotions. When the laughter ebbed back into tears, I got up, turned on my computer, and started writing this paper. Sitting with the vulnerable moments that are often knotted with ongoing states of grieving, researching, and reflexive writing (e.g., Behar, 1996; Rosaldo, 1993), the purpose of this paper is to unpack the always emergent tensions of being and becoming as they are related to ideas and ideals of writing qualitatively. Admittedly, although significant time has passed since the first draft and this moment, I still feel Wozolek 3 underprepared to negotiate this paper. The purpose—to reflect on when and how one centers their voices and experiences, to what end, how that (de)centering oneself is balanced with methodological approaches, and other notions of world-building—still feels daunting as I negotiate lessened but rather present feelings of grief. As coconstituted subjectivities emerge from research, writing, and the dissemination of knowledges (Lather, 2004), this paper regards both what this process creates for the writer, and how vulnerability can be understood as a refusal of colonized conventions within the academy (Bhattacharya, 2016). To be clear, this is not a claim that an awareness of these ideas is somehow new. Rather, this paper serves an important reminder of the complexities of re-membering, vulnerability, oppressions, and the tensions of these things within writing qualitatively. Engaging with these aspects of qualitative research and writing is a complicated— and often unsettling—conversation for several reasons. First, what it means to “write qualitatively” can be contested in its aims, styles, audiences, and receptions (Grande, 2004). For example, writing qualitatively from a decolonial lens often means engaging in a form of expression that goes beyond writing solely for the sake of publication (Bhattacharya, 2019). Yet, the careers of pre-tenure scholars certainly depend on one’s ability to publish and, therefore, to write in ways that will be heard and accepted across academic spaces. As the opening of this paper, along with some of my other work, likely makes clear, I am simultaneously interested in writing as a process that can reclaim space—spaces lost, spaces stolen, spaces forced—while wondering how that reclaiming impacts the broader field.1 I am similarly interested in understanding how writing qualitatively can serve as a process through which scholars can be and become. This is an act of tracing one’s life alongside participant narratives; co-constituted becoming through spaces and places that are intra-connected to broader systems (e.g., Du Bois, 1899; Barad, 2007; Jackson, 1968; Tsing, 2005). It is also a way of possibly re-connecting with our own sense becoming a scholar as it is attached—though sometimes temporarily—to a research place (e.g., Clandinin & Caine, 2013).2 Geertz (1973), Rosaldo (1993) and others argue that the researcher, participants, and places are in a process of impacting each other. The impact of space does not end when the researcher’s context shifts. This is true for both the researcher and the context itself. In sum, we are all always already intra-acting. The idea that one can be/come through the art of writing in general, and through academic writing as it relates to this paper, is certainly not new but—as scholars like Nina Asher (2009), Devika Chawla and Ahmet Atay (2017) have argued—it is a point that remains nonetheless significant. Perhaps more important to my own queer, brown identity is considering what subjectivities might emerge as one intra-acts (Barad, 2007) with writing practices and their related ideas, and ideals that are firmly rooted in colonized sociopolitical histories; a point to which I will return below. Additionally, exploring practices of writing qualitatively can be difficult as one negotiates the tensions between “artistic” and “academic” writing. This is not to say that academics do not have a history of writing with a kind of flourish that can captivate readers. After all, Geertz’s (1973) call for “thick description” encouraged writing that 4 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) would allow readers to become intellectually enmeshed within the research context. This is where writing qualitatively engages with an attention to methodology. This methodological focus exists at the confluence of narratives, places and spaces, how data is collected, histories of collecting data through that method, contemporary methodological iterations, and other such factors matter. As method and analysis are expressed across forms deep listening, writing, and other artistic representations, important lines that distinguish between creative and academic endeavors emerge. This is especially significant given the sociopolitical climate in many countries, including the United States, that is tending and trending toward easily accessible information, rather than a deep engagement with critical, well-researched ideas (Berman, 2020; Sarathchandra & Haltinner, 2021). To be clear, I am not presenting a false binary between the arts and academic work. I am also not claiming that artists do not have clear methods through which they study and work. Rather, this is a close attention to the imbrications therein between the arts and writing qualitatively. Contemporary scholars, for example, have critically considered the knotted, messy nature of method, theory, and practice; often unfolding spaces of possibility for creative data collections and presentations of research (e.g., Clandinin, 2006; Gershon, 2017; Leavy, 2020; Stabler & Lucero, 2019). These conversations, and the forms of expression associated with them, are important when negotiating these tensions and the intra-connected ethical implications that include how participant voices and experiences are heard. Despite the emphasis that I am placing on writing approaches and genres, it is equally important to note the many ways that academic writing can be limited by the White cishetero patriarchy’s ideas and ideals of the academy and, relatedly, what it means to be an academic (Ahmed, 2006; hooks, 1989; McKittrick, 2021). This is often further narrowed by values focused on what counts as “data,” knowledge, and “scholarly” writing (Jalilifar et al., 2017; Reswick, 1994). Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), Audre Lorde (1984), and Imani Perry (2018) have argued that the academy, and every facet constructed within it—including what it means to write qualitatively—can be harmful to minoritized scholars in several ways, not the least of which is through a narrow set of possibilities for developing a scholarly voice. This is perhaps doubled by norms and values that continue to undervalue qualitative writing as a significant way to understand, interrupt, and refuse local and less local socio-politics. Developing a “researcher” voice often means that, to some degree, the scholar is expected to distance oneself from the work; stepping into a role where one observes—but don’t get too close to—the maniacal laughter or deep sobs of vulnerable experiences (Behar, 1996). While contemporary scholars have developed strong dialogues that argue against narrow ways of expressing narratives, traditional norms in qualitative research and writing remain prominent (Woods & Sikes, 2022), impacting both academic cultures and, returning to my point above, shaping the author’s scholarly ways of being, knowing, and doing. Finally, it is important to note that the act of engaging in academic systems, and locating oneself and one’s writing through them can, to some degree, reify longstanding systems of oppression (Boyce-Davies, 1994; Khanna et al., 2022). As Bell Hooks Wozolek 5 (2003) argued, writing about dismantling oppression, particularly in academic places for other academics, often does the opposite of what scholars purport to do in terms of decolonizing the academy and interrupting systemic violences. With these challenges in mind, while this paper unpacks these emergent tensions of writing qualitatively, I recognize that I am writing and responding to a system that is difficult—if not impossible—to decolonize, interrupt, and dismantle. This paper will continue with a section that underscores questions of control, vulnerability, and hauntings within the process of writing qualitatively. This section is an important reminder about the writer’s experiences as they are often in intra-action (Barad, 2007) with the analysis and writing process. Following Barad’s (2007) work on intra-actions, this is an argument that subjectivities are co-constituted through the event of writing. This is not a claim that the physical paper itself has agency. Rather, taking up Rosiek’s (2018) work that describes the agency of racism and McKittrick’s (2021) dialogue about the agency of scholarly perspectives, this is an argument that bodies of scholarship have agency within and across fields of study and broader sociocultural norms. As significantly, I would be remiss if I did not note the relationship between qualitative and post-qualitative research, especially as I find the work of theorists like Karen Barad and others, to be particularly helpful when conceptualizing how ideas and bodies are constantly de-and-re-territorialized, while arguing the inseparability of ethics, ontologies, and knowledges (e.g., Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Taylor, 2017). The goal here is not to conflate these factions of inquiry, but to allow them to play together while engaging with the art of writing as it is expressed across (post) qualitative understandings. The events related to writing therefore understood here as productively co-constituting agencies for the writer, the work itself, and across broader spaces and places. Next, this paper investigates the two-ness (DuBois, 1903) often created through qualitative writing and research. Then, I argue that the act of writing qualitatively can create a double(d) sense of vulnerability that emerges from the two-ness produced through the academy and the multiplicities of intra-acting. While there are many ingresses to theorizing this, I am specifically concerned with the intra-actions of memory and being re-membered as one writes (Dillard, 2016; DuBois, 1903; Lather, 1991). Throughout this paper, I have interspersed parts of my own experiences. As I reflected on my decision to include moments of deep vulnerability in the introduction and across this paper, I did not come to a decision to incorporate these stories lightly. On one hand, because this paper is a part of a larger special issue aimed at thinking and writing qualitatively, I struggled with the notion of inserting my voice alongside my methodological perspective. To this conundrum, Ruth Behar (1996) writes, “No one objects to autobiography, as such, as a genre in its own right. What bothers critics is the insertion of personal stories into what we have been taught to think of as the analysis of impersonal facts…The worst sin is to be ‘too personal’” (p. 12-13). Behar also clarifies that “vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes, [that] the exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we couldn’t otherwise go. It has to be essential to the argument…to move us into inertia…not into 6 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) miniature bubbles of navel-gazing, but into the enormous sea of serious social issues” (p. 14). As one might imagine, it is difficult not to be slightly self-centered in the middle of grieving. Following Behar, this does not, however, mean that grief should somehow overshadow the broader points I make in this paper. I therefore decided to include these deeply personal narratives with the intent of conveying the inherent tensions of writing qualitatively and, especially, how these enmeshed understandings can impact the researcher, the academy, and our writing. Following many scholars who have argued against a sterilized version of qualitative research and writing (e.g., Behar, 1996; Bhattacharya, 2019; Mahmood, 2008; McKittrick, 2021; Stoller, 1997; Tamas, 2008), I would similarly like to work within nested and layered intersections that center one’s voice alongside broader arguments that I make about the art of writing qualitatively. Qualitative Hauntings: Written Intra-actions When Dr. Carlson asked if I was interested in the call for this special issue, I immediately agreed. However, months later, I found myself struggling to write about, well, writing. I often scrolled through my calendar and noted the deadline to submit as it steadily crept forward. Everything I produced felt disingenuous. A sticky note took up residence on my desk that read: “What does it mean to ‘write qualitatively’? Advice for doc students?” When mai passed, however, I was seized by an inescapable wave of the everyday affects I often experience as a researcher. For me, these always feel like ideas that remain just out of my grasp as I feel haunted by events, oppression…something or somebody—some things, some bodies—that have touched every fiber of my being. As a scholar who regularly thinks with queer and questioning youth about self-harm and suicide (Wozolek et al., 2017), with women who survived intimate partner violence (Wozolek, 2021), and with young Black3 and brown youth about how they negotiate overwhelmingly white places (Wozolek, 2023), I’m used to being on the other side of the microphone. I’m used to listening deeply (Oliveros, 2005) while trying to figure out how much of myself to bring to an analysis and when to pull back (Gottlieb & Graham, 2018). I’m used to being touched by research contexts, frequently allowing myself to be emotionally emersed as I sit with people and communities (Sedgwick, 2003). I’m comfortable getting lost (Lather, 2007). What I’m not used to is the feeling lost in my writing. For me, writing is far from passive. It is not just about doing; it’s about what writing creates. Although it can be argued that writing is one way to disseminate knowledges (e.g., Gildersleeve, 2017), as a gatekeeping method used to oppress others (e.g., Foucault, 1978), a way to spark activism (e.g., Steinberg & Cannella, 2012), or a way to re-claim cultures and histories (e.g., Strum, 1996), among other possibilities, here I am more interested in the co-constituted subjectivities created through the event that is writing; the emergence of being for both the author and for the audience who will eventually sit with this work. To be clear, this process does not evenly distribute subjectivities that emerge from the wake (Sharpe, 2016) of academic work. The Wozolek 7 reception of work is delayed and, as Gershon (2020) argues, how ideas are received is not something the person who produced them can easily control. Additionally, a writer’s nested and layered ways of being are arguably shifted as they enter and emerge from ideas that proceeded their own, as they write, as they reflect, as they receive feedback and critiques, and (with any luck) as their work reaches past their time as a scholar. The lag-time between being heard (Gershon, 2020) and recursions of writing therefore produces multiple events of becoming. For me, writing often creates a saf(er) space, one where I’m in control of my body, my mind, my words. Perhaps this is because my body, like many of us who have survived unimaginable traumas, has not always felt like my own. As I laid in bed, tracing the sides of my phone, looking at those messages— “8:02am: She’s gone”—I again felt slightly out of control as I handed my body over to grief. Yet, I am not unique in these experiences. For example, eating disorders in youth people (e.g., Donti et al., 2021), the sexualization and exoticization of young women of color (Morris, 2016), sexual assault in committed relationships (H. Love, 2019b), challenges with pregnancy (Gottlieb, 2020), and depression that emerges from chronic pain (Lee et al., 2018) are certainly not rare experiences. And death. The past few years alone have served as a painful reminder that almost no one is a stranger to loss. As scholars, like anyone who has lived with/in trauma,4 we remain haunted. Haunted, for example, by the voices that are (un)intentionally absent from our fields (Quinn, 2010), haunted by our own experiences as we decide what and when to bring these stories to our work and, similarly, when to leave them out of our research and writing. Although my home fields of curriculum studies and educational foundations have moved toward being intentionally inclusive compared to what my intellectual fore-people experienced (Ohito & Coles, 2020), I recognize that this process is ongoing and will never be complete given that the academy remains steeped in cishetero whiteness. While I have been privileged in this regard, scholars often describe intellectual spaces where their writing is not their own, controlled by publication expectations and ideals set by their institutions that reinforce and reproduce academic sociopolitical norms (Rhode, 2006). This means that many times we are haunted by unspoken rules about writing and research that exist as intentionally unsettling waters created and enforced through past and present hegemonic structures (Fanon, 1963; Smith, 1999/2021). Laboring over and for scholarship entangled with our traumas, as many have noted (e.g., Behar, 1995; Lapayese, 2017; McKittrick, 2021; Tamas, 2008), is a process of being and becoming as we negotiate both the ethereal spaces that are “designed for, populated by and controlled by” (Nespor, 1997, p. 91) cishetero whiteness and the spaces carved out by minoritized folx for themselves and their communities. Like many colleagues, my research and writing tend toward topics that speak to my personal experiences and intellectual curiosities. When I become emersed in a context with participants, I bring my whole self and, because I might share similar experiences that participants describe, I pay special attention to how I present, how I listen, and how I move reflexively in the moment. Then, often using sonic ethnographic techniques 8 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) (e.g., Gershon, 2019; Wozolek, 2023) I take sound files and other artifacts home and listen to them until participant voices reverberate like my maniacal laughter; estranged yet distinctly a part of me. Then, when I’ve reached a point where things are massively overdetermined (Agar, 1996), I write. Although I approached the study and analysis with a particular attention, vulnerability, and, frankly, a fear of “getting it all wrong” (Wolcott, 1990, p. 127), I often let go when I write. To be clear, letting go is not a dismissal of my ethics or an abrupt lack of attention to and care for participant narratives. It is a way of letting go of my worries and, relatedly, of the crippling imposter syndrome that so many scholars experience (Taylor & Lahad, 2018). In these quite moments,5 there is a degree of control. While scholars should have ethical commitments to represent narratives as they were presented, we ultimately decide which representative quotes to include to render them sensible to the larger context. As Agar (1996) argued, eventually some data ends up on the proverbial cutting room floor and scholars have the responsibility—and the privilege—of deciding what is brought to the manuscript and what is left behind. For example, although I presented a piece of my text messages above, dialogues between family members continued as I have been writing this paper. At some point, I will need to decide if anything further should be included, or if I should cut aspects of the first section if they no longer speak to the broader points raised in this work. Like participants in our studies, I’ll need to decide which part of my grief I allow to be private. What parts of mai will stay? As Sophie Tamas (2008) argues, I struggle to ensure that this pseudo-intimacy does more than render my pain “useful” to the academy. Vulnerability Against Mastery and the Master’s Tools As a second-year doctoral student, I took an introduction to qualitative inquiry course. Early in the course, we read scholars like Ruth Behar (1996), Saidiya Hartman (1997), Patti Lather and Christine Smithies (1997), Renato Rosaldo (1993), and Paul Stoller (1997) to study how scholarship in the 1990’s impacted contemporary qualitative research. One evening, the professor posed a question about the reading. He asked, “What is it that draws you to the work of the authors?” I listened to my classmates give responses like, “The balance between theory and practice is important” or “The content is relevant, not just as it existed at the time but for contemporary contexts.” After a moment, I joined the conversation. “Vulnerability,” I began. “A kind of realness that you can’t read everywhere. They aren’t evocative just because they can be, but they use their writing in ways that I can feel. In ways that reach to parts of me that I don’t always acknowledge. Writing like that feels special. It does something.” I launched into drawing a parallel between the work we read in class and some ideas that I had read on my own. In what feels now like a rather “grad school moment to show what I had read,” I used Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999/2021) dialogue on power to define what counts as knowledge alongside Cynthia Mahmood’s (2008) thoughts on what makes “interesting” research, and eventually wove in Hervé Varenne and Ray McDermott’s (1998) writing on voice, success, and failure. In the self-congratulatory Wozolek 9 end, I felt I made a compelling argument for starting from spaces of vulnerability to think critically about research, analysis, and writing. After class, a student who was further along in the program approached me and said, “Look. If you want to survive a PhD program, you’ve got to be more critical. You’ve got to give answers that show people your ability to do theory. This stuff about how you feel won’t cut it past this year. No one cares about your experiences. No one cares about vulnerability aside from this one professor. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s not about your perspective but about their theories. For example, you mentioned Smith and power. Next time, try Foucault.” Before I could argue against his perspective, he started to walk away. My head was swimming with a combination of anger and shame for “not knowing”—or perhaps not knowing the “right” ideas. A few days later I video-called mai and told her about what happened. She laughed and said, “Remember when you asked me what race I would check off if I were you, with a white mother and a Goan father? Do you remember how embarrassed you were to ask? I understand. But you, you’ve got to be stronger, but not in the way that fellow might think.” She gestured making a muscle, then gestured to her heart and her head, and whispered, “Woman!” We laughed, but I knew she was right. There are several longstanding dialogues across fields of qualitative research that are entangled across tensions between a researcher, the contexts they occupy, and the expression of such tensions through the writing process (e.g., Behar, 1996; Geertz, 1973; Gershon, 2017). I’m reminded of Ruth Behar’s (1995) dialogue on women anthropologists that is reminiscent of W.E.B. DuBois’ (1903) talk on double consciousness, and Anna Julia Cooper’s (1892) thoughts on Black womanhood. These complicated conversations think critically about the “two-ness” (DuBois, 1903, p. (2) minoritized people experience as they simultaneously view themselves from both the perspective of the colonized and the colonizers. Although forming an identity independent from the oppressors’ perspectives becomes difficult, if not impossible, DuBois (1903) describes the “dogged strength [of the oppressed] that keeps them from being torn asunder” (p. 2). In qualitative writing, there is an emotional intensity tied to the labor of forming one’s identity that is informed by local and less local systems of power while simultaneously working to remain whole—to avoid being “torn asunder”—by such systems. What makes double consciousness so insidious is that the minoritized writer is always already experiencing such oppressions within the academy and across sociopolitical contexts. Even within spaces and places carved out by and for marginalized people, double consciousness persists (Delaney, 1988; B. Love, 2019a). Writing, as scholars like Katherine McKittrick (2021), Kamala Viswesaran (2010), and Sylvia Wynter et al., (2020) have argued, is not absent from experiencing, expressing, and reinforcing doubled consciousness. Yet, these authors also argue that the process and product of writing can be world-building. As one co-constructs place, writing qualitatively can be understood as a delicate balance—a seat between conventional academic expectations, practicing methodologies that are rooted firmly within the white 10 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) cis-hetero patriarchy’s norms and values, and contemporary possibilities of disrupting, resisting, and refusing oppressions. Toward this notion of interrupting forms of violence through qualitative work, writing can give shape to both participants and readers’ affects—from joy to rage—in ways that can become cornerstones for liberatory futures and their many movements (Smith, 1999/2021). Strong qualitative writing can also serve as a critique for the uneven geography that is (re)created when the material and the metaphoric are not sufficiently interlaced. This often emerges when writers lose sight of the broader political contexts, allowing various forms of oppression to continue through words and ideas that remain without critique (Helfenbein, 2021; McKittrick, 2021; Smith & Katz, 1993). Katherine McKittrick (2021), for example, examines how terms like “location, position, and mapping” (p. 10) remain tied to broader political understandings that, left unexamined, can reinforce broader hegemonic structures. Clifford Geertz (1973) wrote that “culture is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (p. 452). Reflecting on this, I frequently wonder if minoritized scholars’ ways of being, knowing, and doing are ever truly their own. This is not to say that minoritized scholars do not have agency or are not independent. Rather, this is an acknowledgement that systems of oppression run like a current below and through every aspect of the academy. On one hand, the academy itself is an ensemble of texts that were often stolen from and silencing to the communities and people from which the stories emerged. On the other, double consciousness makes it difficult to feel at ease with what is produced through qualitative research and writing. Or, as Walter Gershon (2017) articulates, these narratives are heard generally through colonizers’ languages, often privileging Western ways of knowing, being, and doing. Scholars like Cynthia Dillard (2021) and Ann Winfield (2007) argue that acts of remembering against normalized silencing are difficult and, frankly, an act of resistance and liberation. This is because collective memories—the way that sociopolitical ideologies persist over time—shape our ontoepistemologies. Collective memory presents yet another challenge when writing qualitatively because the writer is confronted with at least two sets of intra-actions (Barad, 2007): re-calling memories and world-building through writing. If, as McKittrick (2021) argued, writing is truly an act of world-building, one can conceive of writing as an intra-action. Subjectivities that emerge from writing are constructed by both collective memory that are always already resonating with the writer (which, for marginalized people, is entangled with double consciousness), and the physical act of re-calling memories. The multiplicities of intra-actions are what make memory so fickle. In this moment, I find myself struggling with the inconsistent nature of memory. As I try to recall mai’s voice, her smell, or her expertly cooked curries, I find that the recent loss leaves me grasping at shadows, reaching across time and space for events I cannot quite touch. As I duplicate her recipes, I’m certain they will not taste the same. Yet I wonder, what is “exactly the same?” The sensation of such things is left open to interpretation. Unless someone has perfect recall, memory is a negotiation between moments (Ally et al., Wozolek 11 2013). Rather than a static idea of memories, I argue that memory is a dynamic event. Like Barad’s (2007) dialogue on how events produce agency and subjectivities, memory can similarly be productive in terms of what is produced through the act of recalling memories. On a physiological level, memory recall and recognition involve a relational replaying between multiple centers of the brain that vary depending on the type of memory, the senses involved, and the method of recall. Through memory storage and recall, a kind of re-establishment of neural activity is generated that exists in relation to the original event being committed to and pulled from memory (Moscovitch et al., 2016). One way this can be conceptualized is as a reverberation, a process of retrieving the event that is never completely identical to the original moment. Each time a memory is recalled, the pathways are (re)established and altered slightly by the act of remembering (Staresina & Wimber, 2019). Memories are therefore fluid, changing and being challenged as people employ them through the writing process. Memories do not exist in a mental vacuum, either. Recalling them is complex not only in terms of the neurophysical act of retrieval but also because remembering is nested and layered by a person’s current emotions, contexts, coping efforts, and personality traits (Levine & Safer, 2002), as well as through broader collective, or cultural, memory (Winfield, 2007). Collective memory, as Winfield (2007) argues, is not random or apolitical. Rather, collective memory is a fairly structured way of remembering the past through a distorted lens, one that often reduces complex narratives to shape individual and community actions toward a common set of ideas and ideals. I use the term “re-member” intentionally. Similar to Dillard’s (2021) dialogue, here I am framing the act of re-membering from the position of collective memory, which involves recalling events as they are entangled with sociocultural and political values that order narratives within hegemonic systems. Memories, and the act of engaging with them (or deciding not to) through writing, are both a process and product of entangled events. I use event both literally and metaphorically. As memories are de- and reterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) through connections enforced or forgotten over time, they are intra-connected with past and present contexts and exist in relation to local and less-local collective memory, which dictate not only how events are recalled but also how a person might act on them. Writing qualitatively is therefore agentic, a “dynamism of forces” (Barad, 2007, p. 141). The agency of memory and writing qualitatively as one engages with memories emerges from the intra-actions between bodies, from our neurons to our coping mechanisms, from our contexts to the swirling ordinary affects, and the (un)intentionally remembered and forgotten collective histories that shape what and how things are recalled. As memories become distorted by the very process of recalling events, it is more likely that a person will correctly retrieve an event that they had not thought about in years than one they have gone over in their minds several times (Patihis et al., 2018). Collective memory is equally distorted—a sociopolitical shaping of the past to maintain the status quo. At the intersection of the physical act of recalling events and collective memory, even a person’s sense reflexivity can readily deceive them. 12 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) This is what makes writing qualitatively so difficult. It’s more than just “trying hard not to get it all wrong” (Wolcott, 1990, p. 127). There’s something inherently vulnerable in recognizing that what one remembers might inherently be “wrong” as our physiological and collective intra-actions with memory might position us to be remembered and, potentially, to re-member others. Conclusion Tomorrow will be one week since my aunt passed. Time has ceased to make any sense for the past week, yet I have found myself clinging to the time I have taken to write this paper. Even in the time-warp moments of grief, writing continues to be a space that grounds me, however slightly. I still don’t feel any closer to being able to answer the call for this special issue which asked its authors to define writing qualitatively. As someone who studied the art of sonic ethnographic inquiry (Gershon, 2017), there are ethical commitments and methodological procedures that I use when I collect and analyze data. Similarly, there are practices in which I participate when I write. Procedurally, these ideas can be taught and so I have decided not to engage with them directly in this paper. Writing, from that perspective, can be read and digested like any other scholarly idea. What remains intangible is what we don’t often discuss—our intra-actions with memory, how we are re-membered, how we struggle with-in oppressive systems that leave us looking over our shoulder as we look over the shoulders of narratives and to futures that are rooted in the ancestor’s possibilities (Dery, 1993; Dillon, 2012; Jones, 2013; Ramirez, 2008). I have, although likely insufficiently, tried to capture that here. Though I am aware that—like grief that is so big that it pours out of every fiber of your being until your left with little more than the taste of your tears and a disconnected body, tethered to this world only by the feeling of your heart throbbing in your head and the sensation of empty lungs as you exhale past the lump in your throat—the page cannot capture everything I experience when I write qualitatively. Still, I wonder how one might write qualitatively about this moment as they try to capture my relationship to writing, to grief, to love, to mai. *Post-Script As things often work, the review of this paper took some time. It was almost exactly one year to the day that I lost mai that I received my feedback for this paper. As I began to revise using the generous comments suggested by reviewers, I could not help but to be re-turned to where I was a year ago. The same week that this paper was accepted with revisions, I was living with/in difficult anniversaries and preparing to give a guest lecture for a colleague’s class. The focus of the class was intersectionality, but the conversation wrapped itself into a dialogue about qualitative writing. A student in the course asked, “How do you write this way? With vulnerability? I mean, how did you learn to write this way? How do you learn to let go but still stay rooted in theory?” Wozolek 13 A second student followed up, asking, “How do you write and know that you will be heard?” I had no answer, except to encourage them toward that feeling where the rhythm of writing is “working” for yourself, to check that feeling with trusted colleagues, to not be afraid to admit that you could be better, and to give yourself room to learn. The next morning, I opened a package my other aunt had sent me. It contained a few articles of mai’s clothes that I had requested. This package had remained relatively untouched for the past year. Burying my face in the clothes, which still smelled strongly of her perfume and of the earthy-curry smell of her apartment, I was brought back to her; to her touch, to the softness of her voice, to the care she exuded in just one smile. The reality is that we cannot capture it all when we write. Some sensuous experiences elude us. Perhaps those parts from the cut—what stays away from the page—are meant to remain affectively attached to the borrowed stories of participants, even if they are our own. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Boni Wozolek  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4226-1439 Notes 1. This does not mean that I am not consistently concerned about the future of the fields in which I work, think, and intellectually play. As is likely clear by my record of service to these fields, I remain dedicated to maintaining and intellectually participating in fields. However, my own recognition and future in those fields remains less significant than finding ways to resist and refuse the white cishetero patriarchy as it remains established in many academic spaces and places. 2. To be clear, becoming is complex. This paper does not aim to distill one’s way of being to writing, research, or the academy. The academy has been, and continues to be, harmful to people with disabilities, BIPOC folx, queer folx, and the like. Sometimes scholars become despite the academy. Sometimes the academy makes it impossible for scholars to be. What is explored here is a very specific set of intra-actions (Barad, 2007) related to writing qualitatively that form and inform scholarly identities; for the better, for the worse, and at every point between on this continuum. 14 International Review of Qualitative Research 0(0) 3. The capitalization of “Black” throughout this article and not “white” or “brown” is done with intention. The purpose is to, on one hand, attend to the shared sense of community in the diaspora among Black people and communities while, on the other, resisting shared supremacist dialogues around whiteness. This rationale is aligned with other publishing spaces like The Columbia Journalism Review, as well as scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). 4. To be clear, although I have decided to be open about my scholarly voice and personal trauma(s), it is important to note that one does not have to experience trauma to be a strong scholar, nor does one need to divulge traumatic experiences for their work to be considered resonant. This is an important point because there has been a cultural shift that has caused what often feels like a preoccupation with trauma, almost requiring an openness about one’s personal trauma for people to be heard in certain spaces (Rothe, 2011). To be clear, people should be given appropriate spaces to disclose such experiences when they feel it is helpful, both to themselves and, possibly, to others. Disclosing these narratives can help to bring a sense of transparency to what often feels like senseless violence, allowing it to be more readily disrupted. However, it is to say that making such events known should be a choice. Further, preoccupations with trauma can lead to unhealthy expectations and norms across spaces, including qualitative writing and research. 5. As a mother scholar with two young children in a pandemic, “quiet” is a relative term. References Agar, M. H. (1996). The professional stranger: An informal introduction to ethnography (2nd ed.). Academic Press. Ahmed, S. (2006). Declarations of whiteness: The non-performativity of anti-racism. Meridians, 7(1), 104–126. https://doi.org/10.2979/mer.2006.7.1.104 Ally, B. A., Hussey, E. P., & Donahue, M. J. (2013). 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Successful writing for qualitative researchers. Routledge. Wozolek, B. (2021). Assemblages of violence in education: Everyday trajectories of oppression. Routledge. Wozolek, B. (2023). Educational necropolitics: A sonic ethnography of everyday racisms in US schools. Routledge. Wozolek, B., Wootton, L., & Demlow, A. (2017). The school-to-coffin pipeline: Queer youth, suicide, and living the in-between. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(5), 392–398. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616673659 Wynter, S., Bennett, J., & Givens, J. R. (2020). “A greater truth than any other truth you know”: A conversation with professor Sylvia Wynter on origin stories. Souls, 22(1), 123–137. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2020.1811592 Author Biography Dr Boni Fernandes Wozolek is an Associate Professor of Education and the Director of Inclusive Excellence at Penn State Abington. Dr. Wozolek’s work has been Wozolek 19 recognized by several organizations, including Division B (Curriuclum Studies) of American Educational Research Association, the American Educational Studies Association, and Curriculum and Pedagogy. Her most recent books include Educational Necropolitics: A Sonic Ethnography of Everyday Racisms in US Schools (Routledge, 2023), Assemblages of Violence: Everyday Trajectories of Oppressions (Routledge, 2021), and an edited volume Black Lives Matter in US Schools: Race, Education, and Resistance (SUNY, 2021).