Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers the reader an up-close account of how a researcher lives inside the crevices, resisting the foreclosures of disciplinary thought and insisting upon feeling as a meaningful construct. It explores an academic life lived in the service of knowing and feeling, forging a clarion call for methodological evolution. The book discusses the dilemmas of participatory research in light of the political context of neoliberal universities making a fetish of ‘community engagement’, heading straight for the ‘fissures and faultlines’ of carrying out collaborative projects within the contemporary neoliberal context. It describes the startling discoveries of the non-human in a patient and delicate research methodology that mobilized walking, and dwelled inside ‘unknowing’ when theory and meaning were tenuous. Canadian feminist philosopher Lorraine Code has written of ‘ecological thinking’, or ‘ideal cohabitation’, relying heavily on the notion of a social imaginary.