1245708
research-article2024
QIXXXX10.1177/10778004241245708Qualitative InquiryKoro
Research Article
Dark Inquiries
Mirka Koro1
Abstract
(Methodological) darkness returns. Metodologisen pimeyden elementit kutsuvat laadulliseen tutkimukseen. Hesitant dark
inquiries sensitize qualitative scholars toward relationality, whereas living dark futures may stimulate various contextual
practices and situational inquiry processes. Metodologisen pimeyden moninaisuus ja hetkellinen läheisyys aktivoivat tutkijaa
ja tutkimusprosesseja. In this article, dark and darkness, in their different affective, geographical, processual, linguistic,
cultural, and relational forms, connects with qualitative inquiry, methodological processes, and ways of living and knowing.
Keywords
inquiry, darkness, English, relationality
Welcoming Dark
(Methodological) darkness and dark inquiries offer specula-
tive possibilities for qualitative researchers and practice. In
this article, darkness, in its different affective, geographical,
processual, relational forms, connects with qualitative
inquiry, methodological processes, and ways of living and
knowing.1 Dark inquiries return with the day’s end and thus
serve as a constant reminder of methodological processes to
come and yet to be experienced. In addition, darkness fore-
grounds the potentially unknowable, slow, and inaccessible
in research and inquiry, including multidimensional knowl-
edge ecologies, affective and material relations, inaccessible
languages and discourses, and unseeable structures and
forces. Dark spaces resist calculations, expected visibility,
and normative forms of representation. Furthermore, dark-
ness as a vital practice may also create opportunities to prob-
lematize many elements and areas often guiding our
qualitative research practices, including actively sustained
monolingualism, predictable future influenced by past meth-
odologies, individualism, singular universe, and nonrelation-
ality. Therefore, in this article, I make connections to dark
and darkness as a linguistic and language-based relations. I
am also addressing dark as a spatial otherness and a meeting
place where differences are welcomed and celebrated.
We, as qualitative scholars, could embrace darkness and
its diverse dimensions within, across, between, and beyond
ourselves. Both dark inquiries and darkness in a method-
ological context are the metaphorical—a collective move
toward the unknown and instable—and the practical—as
indications of the immediate sense of absence of sunlight,
cycles of the nocturnal, and ethical responses to light pollu-
tion. Furthermore, dark may also signify a time-place where
Qualitative Inquiry
1­–8
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DOI: 10.1177/10778004241245708
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the foreign, including foreign languages, creates collapse of
understandings and potentially colonial forms of scientific
communication. Dark inquiries see and do without seeing
and doing anything particular. Dark inquiries also offer
opportunities to live together, express through multiple lan-
guages and cultures, space time not by knowing but sensing
and living. Darkness creates places where individuals can
refuse to learn while studying, making relations with the
foreign and strange, and creating opportunities to not do but
linger.
Lewis (2020) proposed a connection between studying
and dark/nighttime. He argued that the studier undergoes a
transformation from a productive citizen (i.e., learner) to a
curiosity addict like the transition from a human to a were-
wolf. A curiosity addict finds darkness and dark’s potential
in the texts. “While Marxist intellectuals focused on the
daytime (as the time of exploitation), rogue philosophers
and studiers were busy at night, concocting their own coun-
ter-narratives, reading what they were not supposed to read,
dreaming what they were not supposed to dream, and think-
ing thoughts that they were supposed to avoid” (Lewis,
2020, p. 67). Darkness brings forward un-narratives, coun-
ter measures, contrabands, ghosts, and methodological
skeletons. Laruelle (2017) used the term transcendental
darkness. This darkness is prior to light forming a universe’s
infrastructure which the human can never leave or enter.
1
Arizona State University, Tempe, USA
Corresponding Author:
Mirka Koro, Arizona State University, PO BOX 871811, Tempe, AZ
85287 USA.
Email: Mirka.Koro@asu.edu
2 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
This kind of pre-darkness and darkness without an essence
renders darkness invisible. Sometimes, we may even expe-
rience timeless and spaceless darkness where time appears
as circular and returning, not linear and progressive.
Dark Context
The earth’s rotation in relation to the sun generates a sense
of nighttime. Solar and lunar eclipses block the sun’s and
moon’s light. Dark clouds reduce and filter sunlight. Objects
block light and celestial bodies such as interstellar clouds
and nebulae block or absorb light in space. Curtains, shades,
and closed eyes create a sense of darkness. Black holes,
gravitational pull, and the absence of electromagnetic radia-
tion can lead to darkness. Darkness in life takes many
forms.
When I was a child, I spent hours looking out of my
grandparents’ bedroom window in the dark. I was not able
to see clearly, sometimes almost nothing at all. However,
only slightly visible shapes, shadows, and movements were
fascinating in their unpredictability. I patiently waited
sometimes for hours to see movement and the lights of my
parents’ car:
76 Toyota Corolla, approaching on the dark road ready to pick
me up and take me home. In this same dark room, my
grandmother sometimes put me to sleep singing the same
Finnish lullaby repeatedly. “Tuu tuu tupakkarulla mistäs tiesit
tänne tulla. Tulin pitkin turun teitä hämäläisten härkäteitä.”
Darkness became a sensory invitation to slow down, fall
asleep, think carefully while not thinking at all, to move and
live without vision, clear direction, while living in the
absence of linear logic and language which captures the
seen and experienced.
Later, I continued working through darkness in several
ways. Almost 10 years ago (2015), we hosted an experi-
mental weekend workshop called “Methodologies of
Darkness” which was held at the end of November, in
Nokia, Finland. At that time, scholars from a variety of dis-
ciplines gathered to engage with dark in a forest without
knowing what methodological insight and processes this
event might produce and create. Our aim was to disrupt our
methodological habits that we perform, that perform us, and
that perform educational research. Furthermore, we deliber-
ately wanted to unsettle notions of methodology as a pre-
dictable, known, and always visible process. We engaged,
interacted, and wrote about our darkness processes and
inquiries (see e.g., Koro-Ljungberg, 2017). I share these
stories and experiences with you so readers can begin to
imagine the invitation darkness personally delivers to them.
How might readers live with dark, darkness as their kin,
darkness as always present unforeseen future, a onto-episte-
mological and performative process which is always
becoming and becoming differently?
Rönkä (2017) in her column refers to darkness as a natu-
ral resource which could and should be protected and sus-
tained. Mitkään eliölajit eivät ole sopeutuneet jatkuvaan
valaistukseen [impossible light adaptation]. Kun pimeys
saa ottaa tilansa, tuntuu luontevalta hakeutua lepoon. Lepo
aktivoi mielikuvistusta ja lepäämisen liittyviä metodeita
[methodologies of rest]. Forsström (2012) puolestaan kir-
joittaa, että pimeys on esimerkiksi välttämätön edellytys
sille, että ihmiset näkevät tähtiä. Forsström (2012) vielä
lisää että esimerkiksi pimeys goottilaisuudessa auttaa
ihmisiä lähestymään elämän pimeää puolta, yötä, kuolemaa,
rappiota, makaaberiutta sekä ihmisyyden ja elämän
syvempää olemusta. Chepesiuk (2009) even warned us
about the absence of light. He noted that by not protecting
the night and nocturnal life, many habitats will be destroyed.
According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, 5 to 50 million
birds die each year from the collisions with communication
towers and frogs will inhibit excessive mating calls when
exposed to excessive light at night. Might excessive light
and visibility also destroy methodologies and harm/kill
inquiry processes?
Dark and darkness has lived in and with us for centu-
ries. For example, Ekirch (2005) elaborated on events and
happenings at day’s close and how night has been used in
the past and in times past. From shutting-in, dealing with
shadows of death, to domestication of night, artificial
night light, to 24/7 capitalistic production and manufactur-
ing, to lost sleep. Dark affects us differently. Pimeys on
myös osa suomalaista elämää, kulttuuria, ja jokapäiväisiä
rutiineja. Pimeys sisältää traditiota, rituaaleja, erityisiä
tekemisiä ja usein myos hiljaisuutta ja tekemättömyyttä
[darkness may stimulate rituals, silence, and stillness].
Pimeys avaa tietamisen ja tuntemisen sekä tietämättö-
myyden eri ulottovuuksia. Norlander-Unsgaard (1987)
addressed time-reckoning in old Saami culture. She
referred to the hibernation of bears as a macrocosmic ori-
entation. Hibernation matched the biocosmic rhythm of
light and dark. The bear transforms seasons and serves as
a passage between winter and summer while also mediat-
ing between heaven and earth. For Skolt Saami people, the
bear draws up the sun every morning. What can bears and
our more than human relatives teach us about darkness
and living in/with/from/of the dark?
What Might Darkness Teach Us?
To be able to adapt, change, and continuously become dif-
ferent, inquiries might need to become strange and foreign
to themselves. Despite the foundationalism sometimes
associated with methodological discourses and practices, I
still find the concept of inquiry and methodology produc-
tive. However, this productivity is not about normative, lin-
ear, expected, and predictable research approaches. Dark
inquiries and methodologies of darkness might appear
Koro
potentially unteachable, unknowable, and they may link
with indescribable elements which guide our intellectual
and creative processes and scholarly curiosities. Inquiries
and methods practiced in this way may function as stimu-
lants and facilitators, but they often do not have value in
themselves, and they could also be viewed as purposefully
useless and meaningless (Manning, 2020). Some forms of
dark inquiry may bring together materiality, kin, local geog-
raphy, climate, and inquiry. For example, engaging in
inquiry during dark winter days with limited or absent sun-
light shapes the processes, affects, and outcomes of differ-
ent research events and relations. Darkness and dark
inquiries also stimulate our research bodies and thinking-
feeling rhythms differently than exposure to daylight.
City of Helsinki offers 10 remedies for darkness and
dark time of the year (https://www.myhelsinki.fi/fi/
n%C3%A4e-ja-koe/aktiviteetit/10-vinkki%C3%A4-
pimeyteen):
1. remember you are not alone,
2. get outside at mid-day,
3. take light baths,
4. practice night “hygge” (homeness, coziness, light
up candles and fireplaces),
5. use red light in your electronic devices,
6. say no to the extra cup of coffee,
7. meet people,
8. visit paradise (arboretum, indoor gardens),
9. get enough vitamin D, and
10. wait until the day gets longer (after December 21)
Multiverse, rapidly changing circumstances, faster than
expected extinction of humans, wars, water and energy cri-
ses call for radical changes and transformations. Under
bright light and daylight, many phenomena and research
processes appear polished, normative, and potentially
overly ideal. Light methodologies and always already more
than visible processes are suitable for the users of research
who demand quick and efficient solutions and who praise
effectiveness and endless production of knowledge and
data. In some ways, the desirable and speculative future (of
inquiry) is dark but not hopeless. Rather, dark inquiries are
full of hope, hope which is not yet seen and not yet encoun-
tered. I suggest that in the dark methodological differences
do not disappear, but they may take different and unantici-
pated forms.
Darkness is also in us. Not as sadness but as an affect. I
encounter darkness when I walk through the shadows, when
I peek under the dark tree, when I look at the moon while
the sun is shining. When writing this talk in Arizona, bright
sunlight and darkness returned each night looping days,
time, and light. Darkness throws us into what Morton
3
(2016) calls a strange loop where two unrelated and strange
levels flip into each other. Lightness and light often have a
source, whereas darkness seems to operate outside tempo-
rality. This element of being and becoming outside (of data,
context, geography, politics, time etc.) provides affordances
and possibilities in the context of methodology. Differences,
nuances, and degrees may move in different directions and
in a strange rhythm. Dark inquiries may also facilitate the
ecology of partial connections: learning from each other,
being transformed by our shared learning, and acknowledg-
ing our debt to transformative experiences (see also
Stengers, 2018).
Stewart (2011) referred to the charged atmospheres of
everyday life calling them atmospheric attunements:
How do people dwelling in them become attuned to the sense
of something coming into existence or something waning,
sagging, dissipating, enduring, or resonating with what is lost
or promising? I suggest that dark atmospheric attunements are
palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material
yet abstract. Dark attunements have rhythms, valences, moods,
sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into
alert or incite distraction or denial. (p. 445)
These dark lived and sensed spaces and forms of attentive-
ness move, shift, and reproduce scholarship and knowl-
edges in relation and spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007).
Darkness may facilitate different methodological elements
emerging and coming together in unexpected ways beyond
binaries foregrounding matter’s agency and iterative pro-
duction of differences. “Temporality and spatiality are pro-
duced and iteratively reconfigured in the materialization of
phenomena and the (re)making of material-discursive
boundaries” (Barad, 2007, p. 179). The gate between two
darknesses, different forms and affects of the dark enable
thinking and doing differently:
Aika on aluton ja loputon.
Se yhdistää kaksi ajattomuutta.
Se on portti kahden pimeyden välillä.
Se on päätön rihma, jota tuntematon käsi kerii olemattomasta
olleeseen maailmaain vavistessa.
Me näemme siitä kulloinkin pisteen,
yhden ainoan ikuisesti etenevän pisteen,
jonka ohi me kuljemme matkallamme tuntemattomuuteen.
Siihen lankeaa valo, jota me nimitämme elämäksi . . . (Uuno
Kailas, 1922)
4 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
Darkness in the arts can teach qualitative researchers
about aesthetics of darkness and arts can offer some cre-
ative examples how darkness produces and produces differ-
ently. For instance, Laiho (2020) described her night plant
portraits as nighttime photograph journeys where nature
and plant observations usually conducted during the day-
light are now practiced at nighttime and in the dark.
Furthermore, Laiho approached plants in the light of a
headlamp creating a set of 14 plant portraits. Through these
nighttime portraits and multisensory observations, the
theme of time and plant time was explored. Laiho’s work
prompts wondering and questions such as how might one
study darkness in visual materials, in a film, through vari-
ous affects of dark, and their unexpected forms? How do
qualitative researchers relate to different dimensions of
dark inquiries and our own dark spaces? Where does dark
and darkness go from here? What if methodologies function
as degrees of darkness, different shades of dark becoming,
alternative breaths of life? What becomes possible when
outside finds its way to inside, dark its way to daylight,
sameness its way to difference? What kinds of transforma-
tional shifts may happen (see also Seigworth & Pedwell,
2023)?
Being in the Dark With(out) English
It could be argued that the hegemony of English as the aca-
demic world language and scholarly performance metrics
and requirement is colonial, Eurocentric, and quite prob-
lematic (see also Hohti & Truman, 2021). Hohti and Truman
(2021) further argued that linguistic colonialization and
privilege should be taken into account like other forms of
privilege and “born rights” since these privileges shape aca-
demic and scholarly subjects and their perceived and mea-
sured value. Beyond the academic colonial history of
English, Hohti and Truman also pointed out the privilege of
time which accompanies English language practices. For
example, native speakers do not need to spend hours trans-
lating, crafting texts in their second or third language, copy-
editing, proofreading, and double checking their phrases
and pronouns.
About 98% of science communication is in English
(Ramírez-Castañeda, 2020) and “the dominance of English
is like a snowball, too big to prevent” (Xue & Zuo, 2013, p.
2262). English as lingua franca in the Academy unevenly
promotes and hinders the work of scholars from different
linguistic contexts and backgrounds. In addition, many
qualitative scholars across the world who create culturally
situated ethnographies, phenomenologies, critical theories,
posthuman, and material inquiries are required to write in
English if they want their work to “count” even though it is
quite clear that scholars’ cultural and native languages
would be more suitable for their inquiries and communities.
Furthermore, presentations and papers in English are
expected if these scholars desire to represent their scholar-
ship and home institutions in a favorable light in the global
academic marketplace. The use of English as the prominent
language of also qualitative inquiry is commodified and
used as a justification for accessible global knowledge
transfers (see Curry & Lillis, 2017). However, what if quali-
tative researchers would support native languages, cultur-
ally situated communications, dark languages, the languages
of under commons, languages of the few, languages which
would create dark communications? What might become
possible?
Mitä sinä sanoisit lukijoille suomeksi tässä yhteydessä?
Ehkä kiittäisit mahdollisuudesta ilmaista itseäsi omalla
äidinkielelläsi. Ehkä välittäisit vähemmän siitä pystyykö
joku ymmärtämään suomen kieltä koska halusit stimuloida
provokointia, erilaisia tunnetiloja, ja arvaamattomia koke-
muksia. Ehkä haluaisit kirjoittaa englanniksi siksi että use-
ampi kuulija ja lukija pystyisi ymmärtämään tekstisi
sisällon. Ehkä kirjoittaisit suomen kielella siitä epävarmuud-
esta ja epätarkkuudesta mikä usein littyy vieraalla kielellä
kirjoittamiseen. Ehkä kapinoisit englanniksi kirjoittamista
vastaan ja piirtäisit tai säveltäisit pienen kappaleen.
Foreign languages and dark inquiries cannot be com-
pletely mastered. How might qualitative researchers
approach the mastery of inquiry and mastery of English
change if the goal is not to achieve or overcome mastery
but to survive it (see Singh, 2018)? Mastery “involves the
subordination of what is on one side of a border to the
Koro
power of what is on the other” (Singh, 2018, p. 13). Thus,
conversations, research, and inquiries that challenge mas-
tery, dominance, linguistic and communicative orthodoxy,
transgress, and push the boundaries of expected academic
performances are needed. The refusal of mastery and dom-
inant academic practices should not be a privilege but
something that could be put to work also in counterintui-
tive ways. For example, Andrew et al. (2020) wondered
what would happen if English speakers would be given
very limited time to adapt to new scholarly expectations
which require them to improve their foreign language skills
after they have learned that they are required to publish in
French, Spanish, or Chinese journals to obtain tenure and
promotion. Would these kinds of experiences and changes
also promote changes in peer review practices and publica-
tion languages?
Surviving the mastery of English also utilizes resistance
as a productive force and it names the harm and linguistic
violence that has taken place. Everything cannot and should
not be understood. Scholars’ desire to understand the
strange and foreign (communication, scholarship, knowl-
edge, cultures, subjectivities, etc.) can be seen as a form of
epistemological and ontological colonialization and need to
yield everything comprehensible and accessible (for some).
I borrow from Campt (2019), who proposed that refusal
(of mastery of English) utilizes negation as a generative
force. Campt’s practices for wondering how to write, think,
practice, and theorize while refusing draw from the work of
the Practicing Refusal Collective, which she co-founded.
The Practicing Refusal Collective promotes collaborative
expressions of refusal as a capacious everyday rubric.
Practice of refusal signals “the urgency of rethinking the
time, space, and fundamental vocabulary of what consti-
tutes politics, activism, and theory, as well as what it means
to refuse the terms given to us to name these struggles”
(Campt, 2019, p. 80). Dark inquiries invite struggle and
refusal.
Erin Manning (2016) mukaan vähäinen kieli ja pieni
kielenkäyttö toimii myös aktivaattorina ja kuljettajana.
Vähäinen toiminnan ja tapahtuman voima korostaa myös
kielellistä eriyttämistä, kielen ja kerronnan voimaa joka
vahvistaa ja tuo esiin loputtoman erilaisuuden ja pimeyden.
Erilaisuuden ja pimeyden, joka eroaa myös itsestään.
Loputtoman erilaisuuden elinvoima joka kehittää itselleen
uuden jatkuvassa liikeessä olevan kielen muodon, pimeän
kielen, ja luovan ilmaisutavan. Ihanaa leikkiä ajatuksella
että pieni, vähäinen ja vähäpätöinen kielen muoto ja kielen-
käyttö tarjoaa elinvoimaa isolle, merkittävälle ja suurelle;
samalla aina osana isoa ja isoa-pientä. Pieni (kieli, ele, teo-
ria, voima, teko, varjo, tapa ja metodi) asettaa rajat merkit-
tävälle ja isolle aktivoiden tapoja, suhteita, resursseja, ja
pimeyttä. Pieni ei ole erillinen isoa mutta osa jatkuvasti
muuttuvaa ekologista suhdetta ja vuorovaikutusta. Tälläisia
kielen muotoja ei mahdollisesti voi tuntea etukäteen vaan
5
ne syntyvat hetkessä ja tekemisen aikana aina jonakin osana
isoa ja näkyvää.
Actively Making Strange Relations
Relational research practices can be conceptualized in
diverse ways. For example, Barad (2007) proposed that the
research and the researcher are inseparable. “We don’t
obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know
because we are of the world. . . . The separation of episte-
mology from ontology . . . assumes an inherent difference
between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind
and body, matter and discourse” (Barad, 2007, p. 185). For
Barad, world is made up of iterative moment-to-moment
processes that coalesce to form “bodies” (phenomenon) that
become materialized. These bodies are in a constant state of
change and flux. Researchers make an agential cut to enact
a momentary stabilization of moving bodies and materiali-
ties. For Barad, cutting-together-apart is a twofold move-
ment that enacts what is “inside” and “outside” of the
entangled intra-acting “bodies.” The marking and cutting-
together-apart dark/life/methodologies reminds us that
intra-acting concepts are not either or but couplings and
flows of connected energies. Dark inquiries could fore-
ground the virtual exploration of endless possibilities of
how we may experience and meet relations and life.
Actively making relations, not just human relations, with
unexpected companions and relatives could serve as one
vital element of dark inquiries. When entering relations, one
cannot anticipate the outcomes of those inter- and intra-
actions. Engaging in qualitative processes with all relatives
(also beyond human relatives), relating through caring and
touch, relating through responsible and culturally situated
languages, and responsible actions can help qualitative
researchers to build a sustainable and peaceful world with-
out knowing or understanding everything. These kinds of
practices can decenter human, relate to the companion spe-
cies in more intentional ways, and explore other material
realities that surround us and constitute our lives each day.
Qualitative researchers could be more intensively called to
sense their belongings and becomings with the earth, take
their responsibility of ecological crisis, and create ways to
relate to less familiar species like moss, viruses, and dust.
We could think about relationality as ecological responsi-
bility, a part of material eventhood, and response-ability
(Haraway, 2016). Dark inquiries call for flexibility and
capabilities to be responsive, to negotiate, to see beyond our
own perspectives and beyond the individual, think about
collective values, collective forms of living, and the impor-
tance of shared lives and spaces.
Ideally research and dark inquiry happen in shared, car-
ing, and communal research spaces, information and knowl-
edge bring sensing-living subjects together, and the world
of inquiry and research does not end at researchers. This
6 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
form of relational thinking can be especially challenging for
academics, because so many researchers are trained indi-
vidually, and our academic rewards are individually aligned.
Thus, it is important to acknowledge the role of kin. For
example, I did not write this paper without traces and influ-
ences from my colleagues, peers, and other authors I have
read. The relationality among texts, theories, practices, and
pedagogies problematizes the conceptualization of single
authors and contributions of independent and isolated
scholars (see also Benozzo et al., 2016). Qualitative schol-
ars form interconnected communities with interconnected
thoughts, writings, practices, pedagogies, and lives. How
might we need to reconsider authorship when we move into
dark relational spaces and global knowledge exchanges?
Which dark languages could we use to share our scholar-
ship? Who owns a dark thought, a dark method, a study, and
who benefits from the dark knowledge being produced and
relationships being created? Can we move beyond the
extreme forms of individualism and Western driven neo-
capitalism? How might we vision ontologically different
dark futures?
Relationality is a practice which acknowledges that
scholars do not produce knowledge separate from living.
Bringing living to scholarship, care to all relations, and
ontology to epistemology forces us to take responsibility
for the lives we live, we create, and (methodological)
choices we make. The kind of pre-epistemology and past-
ontology practices can make theoretical and axiological dif-
ferences and enable us to vision alternative, collective, and
potential inquiries and living futures. Thus, it might be dan-
gerous to reduce relationality to (relations between) things.
Rather, relations of this kind form dynamic configurations
and entanglements within our shared world and cosmos. By
cosmos, I refer to multiple ethos of interconnectedness and
how constructed realities become (cosmos) (see also
Querejazu, 2022). Being rooted in Andean thinking cosmo-
praxis approaches living through situated interdependent
engagements, both and logic, co-becoming, and “being-
feeling-knowing-doing” (Tickner & Querejazu, 2021, p.
391). Like cosmological traditions in Hinduism and
Buddhism, cosmopraxis stimulates deep relationality
organically linking life, matter, affects, mind, and breathing
and digesting bodies. In addition, Tickner and Querejazu
(2021) explained that cosmopraxis relates all kinds of actors
(human and more than human) through “interdependence,
entanglement, and change” (p. 399).
Furthermore, Querejazu (2022) offered the practice of
cosmopraxis as “complex pluriversal, multidimensional set
of experiences” (p. 875) where the focus could be on how
relations relate and what they do. These relations are co-
constituted and transformative processes which create reali-
ties. In cosmopraxis, dual and complementary forces create
a world which is the same inside out, up and down due to its
cyclical nature and shifting elements. Querejazu (2022)
highlighted that “cosmopraxis is practical, experiential, and
ritual” (p. 884) including “asking we walk,” “learning by
doing as being,” and “doing things until we learn to make
them right again.” In this way, cosmopraxis brings back
dark experiences, transports scholars to other times, and
enables interactions with other-than-humans (Querejazu,
2022). In the context of scholarship, researchers are
prompted to experience moving among multiple worlds and
practice co-participation in the cosmos. For example,
Tickner and Querejazu (2021) wrote that the Coroma tex-
tiles of Bolivia are “living spiritual beings and storytellers
who co-became with the ancestor humans who wove and
wore them, thus allowing past, present, and future to be
connected” (p. 400). Without desire to understand and
deeper knowledge about Navajo or Bolivian cultural his-
tory, a person who becomes in relation with the woven tex-
tile can form a cosmic bond between the weaver and the
fabric.
Futuring Dark Inquiries
Denzin et al. (2024) in the most recent SAGE Handbook on
qualitative research note that our inquiries and research
must meet the demands of a hopeful tomorrow and evolving
future. They continue that without knowing what our future
holds, qualitative researchers should continue their every-
day interventions while aiming for more diverse, inclusive,
and transformative presence and futures. One challenge
with any inquiry and when teaching future generations of
qualitative researchers has to do with hopeful, speculative,
and futuristic thinking. In many ways, we need to move
beyond our methodological pasts while still being informed
by them, and critically evaluate what are the challenges and
methodological dilemmas of the future. Learning with and
in presence may be mastered by some but our responsibility
as inquirers and researchers does not end there. We also
need to envision dark life, methodologically dark tomor-
row, next year, and anticipate how the following decades
offer us unthinkable methodological possibilities and rela-
tional challenges.
Umberto Boccioni (1912) created a futuristic piece
called The street enters the house (La strada entra nella
casa). This oil painting creates a sense and experience of
looking at the street while standing on a balcony: the bus-
tle, sun lit street, buildings, sun covered balconies, simulta-
neous placement and displacement of objects and parts.
Objects and materials are connected without logic but
through a synthesis of remembering and seeing. Elements
which are remembered and mentally perceived come
together. The buildings tilt forward, objects penetrate like
the horse which cuts across women’s body and back. This
piece does not have one perspective or point of view but a
multiplicity of seen and various angles of the imagined.
Solid bodies diffuse into the surrounding space. Objects
Koro
stream toward the woman’s head. Marinetti (1913) in his
Futurist Manifesto refers to the imagination without
strings.
Inquiry approaches and methodologies are choices
which scholars make to resist capitalism, nationalism, indi-
vidualism, reductionism, and other forms of privilege and
self-promotion. Knowledges and realities of futures should
move beyond anthropocentricism and consider all method-
ological approaches as always partial yet important parts of
ecologies and global economies of the more-than-human
world. Pfohl et al. (2021) foreground the possibilities of
dark schools where students focus on shadows, glitches,
and the surface play of projection dis-placing uncanny pro-
jections or removing them from the places that place them.
These dark undercommons and commons away from com-
mons offer spaces for students to act as pedagogical actants.
Methodological presence (including current methods,
today’s methodological strategies, approaches, techniques
etc.) is shaping what we know but they should not be dictat-
ing or limiting how we might know, do, and become. This
pulling force between the known and unknown, past and
future also marks the distinction between knowing and
becoming methodologically. Furthermore, how could our
dark inquiries adapt to fit shared and multiple future visions
of equitable and worthy lives for all, meaningful and
responsible relationality across cultural, political and eco-
nomic landscapes, through sustainable ecologies? Both on
the local and global scale. Furthermore, who is entitled to
vision and revision dark qualitative futures and who is given
the task to try out creative, experimental, and innovative
dark inquiries? How does the Global South participate in
these creations? How do Indigenous scholars reconceptual-
ize wonder and dark materiality of inquiry? How do the
Same people sing their ontologies and sense their dark data?
We have options. For example, McKittrick (2021) in
Dear Science asks, “what if citations offer advice? What if
citations are suggestions for living differently? What if
some citations counsel how to refuse what they think they
are?” (p. 19). Maharaj (2009) also contemplated alterna-
tives to rigid methodological processes. He drew from
Samuel Beckett’s concept of no-how. No-how operates par-
allel to know-how where clear, technical, and predeter-
mined methodologies produce knowledge. No-how flow
and flux create unpredictable surge and set of potentialities.
“No-how embodies indeterminacy, and “any space what-
ever” that brews up, spreads, and inspissates” (p. 3) using
whatever is at hand.
Mignolo (2011) in his book The Darker Side of Western
Modernity contemplated about communal futures. Rather
than thinking dark methodological futures as spaces of con-
tinuing epistemological decolonialization focusing on
knowledge development and growth (for some), we could
imagine and create methods which call for dignity and col-
lective prosperity for all. How might dark inquiry
approaches promote living and studying in interdependent
7
harmony when coexisting together with an eco-biotic natu-
ral community? Within this future, vision horizontal soli-
darity within the cosmos would replace vertical and
hierarchical lines. Scholars could follow diverse moves of
delinking, engaging in nurturing methods, and re-generat-
ing life and life methods. Pluriversality of sustainable inqui-
ries builds from common good and democracy of many and
multiple. Mignolo called for pluriversal and global nativism
where all forms of knowing and doing interact.
Methodologies of these kind form homes not institutions or
properties. Rather than navigating darkness and creating
dark inquiries and methodologies alone and individually,
what if we build on proportional solidarity to address those
who have less, adding complementarity and convergence,
reciprocity: all receive, give, and share responsibilities also
methodologically. What becomes possible when qualitative
researchers linger in the dark?
Minulle käsitteellinen mutta elämänoloinen kokeilu ja
suomen kielen käyttö ovat välineitä pimeydessä, out-
oudessa, ja metodien viidakossa liikkumiseen. Ne antavat
selviytymisstrategioita vieraiden asioiden ja pimeän itsensä
käsittelemiseen (dark survival strategies). Yhdessä teke-
minen on pitkä halaus pimenevässä illassa (hugging long
dark night). Pimeydestä ja pimeyden tutkimustavoista
puhuminen suomeksi tuo myös esiin pimeyden eri väreja ja
muotoja kuten säkkipimeä, vääryys, hämäryys, pilvisyys,
valottomuus, pahuus, kaamos, katve, ja sähkökatko (lights
out). Haluan lopettaa tämän esitelmän ilman viimeisiä lau-
seita (without final words), painotuksia, ja sanoja. Jäädään
hiljaiseen pimeyteen. Jäädään pimeään ja tuntemattomaan
tutkimusvireeseen. Jäädään yhdessa olemiseen ja elämiseen
(relational lives and togetherness).
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
Mirka Koro https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0216-6007
Note
1. A version of this article has been presented as a keynote dur-
ing the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 2024, in
Helsinki.
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Author Biography
Mirka Koro (PhD, University of Helsinki) is a Professor of quali-
tative research at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona
State University. Her scholarship operates in the intersection of
qualitative inquiry, methodologies, philosophy, experimentalism,
and socio-cultural critique. She has published in various qualita-
tive, methodological, and educational journals.