When understood as material artifacts, digital photographs are able to do more than represent other times and other places. Their materiality creates performative possibilities of accident and agency that can be particularly useful during times of mourning. This poetic essay responds to a photograph of the author's mother that he took with his cellphone shortly after her death.

Written in the spirit of Maggie Nelson's “autotheory,” this essay takes up José Esteban Muñoz's notion of “ephemera as evidence” to explore how the body-as-object (i.e., the body-as-book) might reformulate understandings of materiality as an ephemerality of “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.” Bodies-as-books are distinctly material, though not always solid, and can be written and read as artifact-ephemera that end but do not disappear.

Scholars of color in white majority universities inhabit a zone of alterity, which forces them to make strategic choices about how they perform. Tactical essentialism is an alternative to the dichotomous ideologies of static and fluid ontologies. Rather than allowing oneself to be caught in the double bind between performing whiteness and resisting white supremacy, a tactical form of essentialism recognizes that identity is fluid, yet simultaneously linked materially to lived-empirical experience. By recognizing that the dichotomy can be complementary, the tactical subject intentionally engages in performances of identity that can be leveraged to decolonize merit in the ivory tower.

This essay is drawn from the author's book, Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry , which explores the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry. The essay is a poetic meditation on being given the green light and not taking it. A meditation on permission, a meditation on warning: on the insistent green flash the performer heeds or ignores; and the invitations the client gives—there, then gone—there, then gone—there, then gone—that the therapist takes or misses. It is a meditation on hope, regret, and shame.

This essay creatively evidences the materiality of a story and its ability to migrate and evolve. It does so by critiquing the non-human limitations of binary onto-epistemologies, especially visual/discursive ones. Here stories and words have lives, bodies, and agency and as such they matter, but that matter is not material. The mattering of stories is not contingent upon human telling or hearing. Stories linger where humans disappear. An ecomaterialist reading suggests we might productively decouple storytelling (stories about us) from storied matter (stories with autonomy).

Nunalleq is a pre-contact Yup'ik village (1350–1660 CE) massacred during a centuries-long conflict known today as the Bow and Arrow Wars. As global temperatures fell during the Little Ice Age (1300–1800 CE), conflict intensified along the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta as food raids and village burnings became commonplace among warring Yup'ik communities. The following essay considers the events of Nunalleq alongside a new era of migration as Yup'ik prepare to move farther inland in response to human-induced climate change. Specifically, I reflect on the relationships between Yup'ik material culture and oral history, and how these histories adapt over time. This writing is an experimental ethnography based in archaeological excavation and participant observation. This writing is oral history. This writing should be read aloud.

In this essay, the four authors explore the material and affective agency of art-making in a collective biography workshop. We work with our memories of the death of someone close to us, through stories, and through making art. Collectively we explore a specific, embodied moment of the particular deaths we have each experienced. The substantive focus of our work is methodological. We concern ourselves with what is made possible through including art-making in intra-action with the more usual storytelling/listening/writing/reading/making of collective biography.

This performative autoethnography sways between past and present, setting two towers and a flying trapeze into a “responsive dialogue” in the liminal space between waiting and weightlessness, the mirrored mediations engage in an intra-active word play that reflects the forward–back arcing rhythms of lived experience. The pas de deux of the intertwined stanzas seeks to embody on the page an iterative conversation between memory and materiality, time and form, sorrow and joy, connections missed… and connections made.

The power of the small can be seen in Jonathan Wyatt's articulation of creative-relational and its institutional embodiment at the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh. This short essay explores some ways this embodiment of the small has large repercussions for those of us who need and wish to have creative space made, held, and shared in the academy.

This essay is written in response to the emergence (or emergencies) of creative-relational inquiry, and in the writing and with the theory, thought thinks through what such inquiry can do, will do, strives to do, and must do.

In this essay, I reflect on the events leading up to and immediately following the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. In my reflection, I examine not only the events that happened, but also the role that my complacency played in my (lacking) preparation for pushback. In particular, I discuss how, in spite of my desire to be an ally for scholars of color, I had treated the problems facing marginalized scholars as an intellectual problem that was stripped of the emotional consequences. I conclude with a call to action to recognize complacency among white scholars as its own kind of violence.

This essay introduces a methodological praxis for those seeking a radically ecological approach to excavate relational narratives, experiences, and subjectivities that have been miniaturized through history and habituated practices. Through the progressive use of a MAP methodology (Movement, Art, and Poiesis) that seeks to question the body through movement, artistic expression, and invitation of poiesis, practitioners are encouraged to seek a form of catharsis that promises not release, but social change. The resulting cartographies are verbal representations for approaching an ecological level of understanding of broken, disrupted, and otherwise hegemonically damaged histories of relations.

How do Black feminism and womanism foster interconnectedness to one another and the sacred? What knowledges manifest through collective practices of wondering and wandering together? This essay provides reflections on our own engagements with creative-relational inquiry, manifested through our collective practice, Hill L. Waters, a scholar–artist collective rooted in love, Black queer resistance, and art as activism. Organized around and through three corresponding moments, this poetic essay embodies creative-relational inquiry and narrates our process of collectivity. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how collectivity as a writing practice, political commitment, and identity translates Black feminist and womanist theory into praxis.

Through poetic glimpses of an ongoing participatory art process, Tree Memory Gathering , this essay considers the special issue theme by questioning, “How might the concept of ‘social warming’ invite new possibilities for creative-relational inquiry?” Responses unfold through three variations of social warming inspired by socially engaged art and ecopoetry. These variations—gathering, participatory bookmaking, and perforating—unsettle residual boundaries between tree bodies and human bodies, generating ecological wisdom for living and inquiring differently in the world. Perforating is theorized as an alternative to research findings in post-qualitative approaches to inquiry.

New materialist and posthumanist studies lack accounting of colonial impact on how we think about who is and is not human. In this essay, I posit questions of what is real, who is human, and who we are in relation to each other. These questions, which are key to inquiry and posthuman relationalities, must be thought with Tiffany Lethabo King's “decolonial refusal,” a relational stance offering radical possibilities. In example, I turn to Audre Lorde's “erotic power” thought with adrienne maree brown's “pleasure activism” focusing not only on how we do research, but also on how we feel in relations of research. This move opens potentials for engaging in research relations that matter.

In this essay, we consider the emergence of the concept of creative-relational inquiry (C-RI). We want to push further at the engagement between the creative, the relational, and the hyphen that binds them, and how it might provide a nuanced effort to problematize, and provide alternatives for, taken-for-granted assumptions concerning research and research practices. We work with C-RI as a concept and/or concept-as-methodology, and consider explorations and themes developed by the authors in this special issue as they also mobilize C-RI. We develop a conversation about our understanding and use of C-RI in our respective disciplines.

This essay reflects on the campus sanctuary movement that accelerated in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, focusing on the promises and pitfalls for activists who pushed to have their campuses declared sanctuaries for undocumented students, staff, and faculty. It offers a personal case study that relates to the nationwide push for campus sanctuary.

In this essay, prompted by the disciplinary debate over #CommunicationSoWhite in summer 2019, I reflect on my past publications in Rhetoric & Public Affairs to identify how structures of whiteness influenced the shape and acceptance of my publications. Drawing upon my self-critique, the essay provides advice for white scholars who aim to responsibly address questions of race and racism as both authors and reviewers.

This essay examines the campus sanctuary movement that launched in response to the 2016 US presidential election. It focuses on the case of my employer to illuminate the broader context of the campus sanctuary movement's nationwide emergence, including the neoliberal evisceration of higher education and right-wing attacks on intellectual freedom and demands for social justice. Recognizing that the institution will not save us, sanctuary organizers not only demand that institutions use their resources for the public good, but they also work beyond the confines of institutions to build the resources that we need through community-based organizations.

Inspired by Dwight Conquergood, who calls on scholars to engage in intimate conversations, I offer an autoethnographic approach to explore the interconnectivity between place attachment, shame culture, and what I refer to as identity suicide through my journey to finding an attachment to place, to having interaction. Through these findings, I discovered the self-acceptance that had always been a struggle to reach due to the choices I was making within the shame culture in which I was living. This work is a reflective processing of my choices along this journey—choices that are denied to so many other queer individuals.