Staying proximate with: :

Human and more-than-human relations in research.

Methodological approach: :

Hospitality as a metaphor.

Main concepts: :

Hospitality, welcome, hosts and guests, radical openness.

Tips for future research: :

Prepare to be unprepared.

The 2018 Nordic Tourism and Hospitality Symposium in Alta, Northern Norway, has just come to its end. We take a walk to the famous rock carvings located within Alta’s scenic landscape by the Arctic Ocean. This place has Northern Europe’s largest concentration of rock art made by hunter-gatherers 2000 to 7000 years ago. The area is inscribed into UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and signage protects the rocks by guiding visitors to stay on marked paths. Like so many other touristic sites and activities, the experience here is focused on seeing and gazing without getting closer or engaging through touch.

After a while, our focus is drawn to the lingonberry and blueberry plants growing next to the built path. Against visitor management norms and directives, we kneel down to caress their leaves, wondering together about the variety of berries in this place. We suspect that crowberries and cloudberries might also feel at home on these hills. Emily’s thoughts wander to the blueberry forest around her family’s summerhouse in Finland. Bryan’s mind’s eye returns to an annual cranberry festival in the heart of Ontario, Canada’s Muskoka region, a ‘near-north’ leisure landscape for second-home tourists.

We fight the urge to leave the designated path to explore the berry-world more closely. It feels like these plants are calling and welcoming us. But what do the two of us really know about what plants are saying? We both have a history of seeking proximate engagement with local communities and find it ethical to research with, instead of on or for, multiple others, and we are familiar with the epistemic difficulties and ethical challenges of trying ‘to give a voice’ to others (e.g., Grimwood et al. 2019; Höckert 2018). But relative to scholars we admire (e.g., Kimmerer 2013; Gagliano et al. 2019), we have so much to learn about plant communication. Thinking twice about our desires, we agree that the berry plants seem to do just fine without us. We continue our slow stroll and pass the figures of fishes, people, dogs or wolves, and reindeer, pondering out loud about the stories that the people who have lived and visited here wanted to share.

Between the rock-carving sites, we talk about our current research interests. Bryan refers to his forthcoming field research at the cranberry festival and how his interest in building relationships with cranberry histories and geographies seems to require him to temporarily step away from his family responsibilities. Emily brings up her interest in continuing to think with an ethics of hospitality—that is, not to focus on hospitality management within the tourism industry, but to approach hospitality as a relational and receptive way of being and becoming (see Lynch et al. 2011, 2021; Doering and Kurara 2022). This philosophical framing comes from postcolonial philosophies of hospitality that approach ethical subjectivity as generous openness to alterity and ‘the other’ (Levinas 1969; Rosello 2001; Kuokkanen 2007; Scott 2017).

Our discussion spins to the past, to how we connected through our mutual affinity for Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas about ethics and responsibility based on proximity (Grimwood and Doubleday 2013; Höckert 2014, 2018). Levinas’ thinking provides a basis for challenging clear-cut dichotomies between self/other, us/them, host/guest, in/out, here/there, and human/non-human (Levinas 1974; Barad 2007; Rose 2012) and, as Jacques Derrida (1999) suggests, calls attention to the ways in which the conditions of hospitality are negotiated in our continuously changing relations. We agree that the discussions between Levinas and Derrida seem to boil down to the different ways we—both human and non-human—make space for otherness in multiple physical and metaphorical homes.

As thoughts are shared and exchanged, we become more excited about bringing together our research interests to think through hospitality as a metaphor for responsible research inquiries. Eventually, we have to conclude our visit to the heritage site and head back to our hotel. Over warming drinks and a small snack, we decide to continue walking and thinking together with hospitality once we have returned to our respective homes in Sweden and Canada.

In the following pages, we share a series of letters and postcards that we have been sending each other across lands and seas. Through slow thinking (Ulmer 2017; Stengers 2018) with different beings and places proximate to us, we have used these correspondences to sketch out the idea of hospitable methodologies. What would research be or become, and what would research do, if oriented around the metaphor of hospitality? In this chapter, we offer not a clear methodological map but rather an invitation to join us in reflecting on how the ethics and politics of hospitality can be used to describe, unpack, and shape social research imaginings and arrangements, as well as how hospitable methodologies pivot from conventional processes and outcomes of inquiry. In other words, this chapter welcomes you, the reader, to further reflect with us on how the notion of ‘hospitable methodologies’ might shape our relations with the human and more-than-human communities we inquire, live, and stay proximate with.

4 October 2018, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Dear Emily,

Since returning home from Norway, I’ve been sitting with our ideas on hospitable methodologies. Actually, sometimes I’ve taken these ideas jogging with me or brought them along on a bike ride. These ideas—about how inquiry might become a practice of hospitality—have me thinking in questions. Dozens of them. Like what is the ‘why’ of hospitable methodologies? Why should we invite them in? Why should we spend our good energies with them?

We often talk about positionality and reflexivity and values in qualitative research, all responses to the ‘God’s eye trick’ of objectivity (Haraway 1991). We coach ourselves and our students to bring our humanity into research—in an upfront, subjectivity statement sort of way, or as values-engaged research. This to me is about integrity, honesty, and transparency in the research process. It is about sharing with audiences the situated and partial perspectives of the researcher ‘self.’ Our humanity is an expected ‘guest’ in research.

If we are to fully engage our humanity in research, we should take account of and be accountable to all our relations, no? Emma Lee has learned to do this based on teachings from Country and Elders (tebrakunna country and Lee 2019). Me? I think I’ve tried, but I’m realising I also need to recalibrate. For instance: how can methodologies be hospitable to my family—to my spouse and three cubs? Increasingly, I’m wondering how the spatialities and temporalities of my ‘fieldwork’ can be configured to better balance or include my contributions to home life. I’m no anthropologist looking for 6–12 months in the field, immersed in context and place as ‘fully’ as possible. Or maybe I am, just with family alongside me: my ‘father-ness’ present and not temporarily on hold while I’m out in the field—on that mythical heroic quest, so to speak, that maps too easily onto colonising narratives.

Thinking about hospitable methodologies in the context of family matters works for me as a starting point, one that drives with some existential, ethical weight. It enables me to feel genuine, to begin welcoming all of me (father, researcher, partner, scholar, etc.)—to exercise the best versions of myself.

So, hospitality as methodology seems potentially useful for inviting ways of being, knowing, and doing research that run counter to prevailing norms that expect us to compartmentalise the various aspects of identity and knowledge and to follow prescriptive and extractive procedures. And to be clear, the point is not to identify methods for researching hospitality, but to grapple with how the metaphor of hospitality—which is so central to our field of tourism studies—might usefully reconfigure the meanings and practices of inquiry.

All right, my question to you: what do we really mean by hospitality? Shall we approach hospitality as a virtue—something we can learn and practice? Remind me what Levinas and Derrida might suggest for us? I’ll get to reading.

Cheers,

Bryan

10 October 2018, Tärnaby, Sweden

Hei Bryan,

Thank you for your letter and for keeping our ideas on the move!

Thinking about Aristotle’s idea of cultivating virtues, I imagine that the ancient idea of hospitality, a responsibility to open one’s door to the stranger—to say welcome and to take care of one’s guests—could be described as a virtue. However, Levinas (1969) and Derrida (1999) approached hospitality as an other-oriented way of being that is a fundamental part of our existence. They resisted the Western intellectual tendency to totalise definitions of ontology and subjectivity and suggested a renewal of our understanding of subjectivity through the notions of hospitality and welcome, which call for radical openness towards otherness.

What is important here, and also quite radical or unique in the Western spirit of morality and justice, is the way that this idea of hospitality prioritises relation over the freedom of being and enacting. As we discussed in Alta, this priority makes it impossible for us to be responsible as an individual or detached researcher alone, and it also reveals the arrogance of taking for granted the welcome of the other (Levinas 1969). In other words, Levinas and Derrida disrupt any presumptions of autonomous, spontaneous individual subjectivity with a vision of relational and reciprocal responsibility as the basis of being and knowing. Importantly, they also disrupt the pre-set roles of hosts and guests, both hôte in French, and suggest that the positions of subjects and objects of welcome and care are continuously changing (Derrida 1999, 41–43; Rosello 2001). This inseparability means that one should never try to claim a mastery over the role of the host alone (see Kuokkanen 2007). Why hospitable methodologies? I think it can enhance the processes of decolonising methodologies, as the ideas of reciprocity and openness intervenes with the colonial and human-centred mindsets of controlling, providing detailed knowledge about, and representing ‘the other’: in other words, of enacting one’s self-interests by repressing others (Spivak 1988; Kuokkanen 2007, 113–122; Smith 2011). Inquiring with hospitality can be seen as striving for unconditional openness while accepting that it is unsatisfiable obligation, a utopia. This notion is what Derrida (1999), perhaps the biggest fan of Levinas, pointed out in his beautiful book Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Derrida embraced Levinas’ idea of welcoming otherness and the Other, yet he drew focus to the risks of leaving one’s door wide open to whatever and whomever may enter. If we did so, as Derrida argued, we could soon lose our ‘home’ and the capability to say ‘welcome’ in the first place. Hence, what Derrida encouraged us to do is to leave that metaphorical door open to surprises but also draw attention to the ways in which the conditions of hospitality are continuously negotiated among different kinds of hosts and guests.That said, the idea of hospitality also offers an interesting approach to the entangled negotiations in our family and work relations that you brought up in your letter, right?

Sorry for this tense, perhaps not-so-welcoming letter…I hope everything goes well with your visit to the cranberry festival!

Cheers,

Emmi

P.S. I want to add that I was originally welcomed to these discussions by Jennie Germann Molz and Sarah Gibson’s (2007) wonderful book Mobilizing hospitality.

12 October 2018, Bala, Ontario, Canada

Hi Emmi,

I’m in Ontario’s Muskoka region this week for the annual cranberry festival in the town of Bala. The Wahta Mohawk First Nation has owned and operated one of two cranberry farms supporting the festival over the years, but it was shut down recently for economic reasons. My research with Wahta involves tracing stories associated with their cranberry marsh.

I’m just beginning the study but already reliving previous experiences of adapting ‘procedures’ for securing informed consent. University research ethics protocols here in Canada expect that I read through a rather long-winded consent script with each participant and then have them sign off on it. I appreciate some of the intentions behind this, but the procedure seems rather uninviting and anti-relational, so I tend to be flexible with how I actually roll it out for each interview or community workshop. Do you have similar experiences of adapting research procedures so that your work is more welcoming? I wonder if others in our field might also relate to this as an example of how conditions of hospitality are negotiated in research.

Bryan

8 January 2019, Tärnaby, Sweden

Hi Bryan,

Yes, yes, I really liked your example of the research ethics script. I have been thinking about it and can definitely relate to the issue of ‘procedures’ that can feel like awkward, distancing tools.

Isn’t it the case that, when using these kinds of protocols, we describe how we will behave as guests, what kinds of souvenirs we are expecting to take home with us, and how we will take care of those souvenirs afterwards? Even when we wish to describe participatory methodologies, these kinds of ‘ethical procedures’ can make it look like the research encounters were pre-planned, the conditions all set, and that our desired aim is to eliminate any unwanted surprises. We have also discussed the epistemic violence caused by foreclosed meanings produced when we are eager, or forced, to make detailed research plans before heading to the field sites to collect empirical material. Even supposedly more participatory methodologies include this kind of risk when the forms of participation are defined and decided on behalf of the research participants.

Could it be that this means of securing ethical research encounters feels uncanny, as ethics should not be based on pre-set plans and rules? That ethical issues cannot be covered or taken off the table merely by signing a paper? I wonder how we could become better in embracing untidiness and surprises in our research methodologies?

Emmi

18 March 2019, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

Hey hey,

Your question—how we can better embrace untidiness in research—is an important one we should keep thinking through. Attuning ourselves to affect offers much promise, something Alexander Grit (2014) expressed in your book with Soile and friends (Veijola et al. 2014). Remember this bit?

Affect is the change or variation that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact. As a body, affect is a knowable product of an encounter, specific in its ethics and lived dimensions, and yet it is also as indefinite as the experience of a sunset, transformation or a ghost. (Grit 2014, 124)

If our attention is focused less on producing authoritative accounts of truth and more on welcoming multiple ways of knowing and being—some of which might offer some help in responding to urgent social and ecological circumstances—orienting to affect creates some useful openings.

My daughter, Edyn, helped alert me to this point one morning last summer. She was in the ‘field’ with me and awoke to a sunrise. She asked if she could go down to the dock to say good morning to the lake. Of course she could! And she did! When I asked about it later, Edyn described that saying good morning on the dock allowed her to ‘feel the sun and see it sparkling on the lake’ and greet a neighbour (the lake!) that provides her and the fish a place to swim. Edyn’s ‘good morning’ wasn’t just a speech act. It involved seeing and feeling, a being with the lake. She wasn’t ‘saying good morning to’ but rather ‘being good morning with’ the lake.

Bryan

23 August 2019, Luvia, Finland

Dear Bryan,

I recall you talking about the role of humbleness in hospitable methodologies and engaging with non-human nature—about becoming comfortable with not knowing and realising that expertise and knowledge come in multiple forms, just like Edyn’s beautiful relation with the lake (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1
A photo of a lake surrounded by a lot of plants and a few trees. A woman and a child are playing near the lake.

Hanging out with blueberry hosts in Finland

Full size image

During the past few days, we have been relaxing at our summerhouse here in Finland. However, the ripening of blueberries makes me always a bit stressed, as I have learnt that we should pick as many berries as possible.

Inspired by Edyn, I have begun to rethink my relations with the blueberries and have found them to be very generous hosts with lots of interesting things to share. This shift has also made me wonder: What kind of guest am I? A messy one, for sure. It is impossible not to step on the berries and different kinds of small creatures; there are also birds, many kinds of bugs, and most likely snakes and small gnawers. And then, there are the clegs or the horseflies that seem quite hostile. Commercials on TV suggest sprays and small machines that kill these kinds of creatures effectively, but what do these products say about humans as guests or neighbours with the woods (Valtonen et al. 2020)? If there was a research ethics consent protocol to be signed off by blueberries, would it include a promise of ‘no more-than-human casualties’ in the name of social science? And even more, what if the berry plants or some other hosts of this forest would prefer to deny my access?

I am also pondering how I should go about taking field notes in the woods with blue fingers? Have I told you about Anu Valtonen and Outi Rantala’s idea of ‘skiing methodologies’ (personal communication), which challenges our conventional ways of recording observations during fieldwork? What if we gave up the urge to write down everything and instead trust that the most important thoughts will linger and ultimately stay with us? Perhaps letting go of the desire to document observations and reflections could allow me to focus more on feelings, atmosphere, and being with my non-human hosts in more meaningful ways. Maybe it is also, most of all, about engagement through affects?

With happy summer vibes,

Emmi

15 October 2019, Bala, Ontario, Canada

Dear Emmi,

Hospitable methodologies would seem close kin to the sort of ‘patient, self-reflective openness’ and ‘poetic attitude’ that James Clifford (2013) is alert to in his ethnographic historicism. Clifford’s approach resonates, feeds, reminds, alerts, and stirs welcome. In my read, it boils down to this: ‘listening for histories’ is now more important than ‘telling it like it is’ (Clifford 2013, 24). And listening for histories—or maybe even making kin à la Haraway (whose ideas dance so close to Clifford at times)—cannot simply be reduced to a recipe of methods, right? The obvious question is: How does one listen for histories? Prescriptive methods seem to invest in telling it like it is, or should be, in a disciplinary sort of sense. My listening now, as I write this, is situated next to loud rushing waters, falling over and through a mixture of rock: concrete walls of the dam that diverts, masoned steps and steep of a historic church, dense origins of granite that have stood solid for generations. There’s bridgework here too—trains, feet, and cars lining over the falls. The volume of water is massive, its roar drowning out the hundreds of cranberry festivalgoers, the commodification, and the industry. The water thunders consistently in the background of immediate distractions and transformations like the taste of sour cranberries hitting my tongue (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2
A photo of a water body. It is calm at one end, and waves lash from under the bridge at the other end.

(©Bryan Grimwood)

Histories converging: A scene from Bala, Ontario

Full size image

Cheers to you.

Bryan

3 April 2021, Tärnaby, Sweden

Hi Bryan,

I hear you! I have been recently reading Despret’s (2016) book, What would the animals say if we asked the right questions, which has made me think about the questions we are posing, for instance, to berries. While I love this book, your letter made me rethink whether we should begin from seeing, feeling, listening, and becoming with instead of asking (Kato 2015). While posing questions is already about limiting our focus to something, starting with an open mode or attunement is more in line with what we’ve discussed so far about hospitable methodologies.

The mode of openness seems quite different from maximising the outcomes of field visits, be it berries or semi-structured interviews. To recognise and respect the hospitality of our research companions would mean, at the very least, eating all those picked berries and embracing the diversity and messiness of the received epistemic gifts. That said, I am probably not the only one who has forgotten berries in the freezer for few years or chosen to use mainly those parts of the empirical material that have supported my presumptions about the research phenomenon at hand…

#walkofshame

Emmi

13 October 2021, Bala, Ontario, Canada

Dear Emmi,

Your last note lingers on the notion that hospitality flips the role of the researcher from extracting knowledge for their use to extending care for diverse others and their respective needs. Mobilising care seems the best of intentions!

The cranberry marsh I visited this morning looks nothing like the ones you’d find represented when searching online for images of a cranberry farm. The marsh I wonder and wander about is no longer in the operation of cultivation. Yet that marsh still produces. Postcard worthy images are no longer plentiful there, but the vines and berries remain—the signs and remnants of agricultural production. I was walking along a sand road that separates dikes and weaves among cranberry beds and noticed a stretch of vines crawling onto and across the road. Three bright red berries with trickles of rain resting on their skin glistened up at me. Cranberry reclaiming space, or maybe just rooting and routing to where it might thrive…across the dike, up an embankment of shrub, mingling with the dense sand of the road. Productive. Generative.

Bryan

14 October 2021, Tärnaby, Sweden

Hi Bryan,

Argh, it feels like our methodological challenges are becoming ever more intense when we engage with non-human nature as social scientists. I mean, how do our concepts, methodologies, and methods become aligned with different ontological and epistemological positionings? At the same time, I guess we could just celebrate this constant feeling of hesitation and insecurity as a fundamental part of thinking and knowing with hospitality. What do you think?

These days, I am worried most of all about the anthropomorphism implied by notion of hospitality as such. That is, it feels dubious to explore more-than-human relations with inherently human-centric terminology. I talked about this with Veera (Kinnunen) and she pointed to Jane Bennett’s (2010) idea of ‘strategic anthropomorphism.’ I also remember you and Chris Hurst introducing the notion of ‘cautious anthropomorphism.’ Instead of celebrating the anthropos, both of these notions describe the phenomenon of re-engaging with familiar concepts and more-than-human relations in alternative, perhaps more caring ways. Have I understood this correctly?

I am curious to learn more about how posthumanist and new materialist literature has been drawing on Levinas’ also very much human-centred thought. More about that soon…

Cheers,

Emmi

15 October 2021, Bala, Ontario, Canada

Hey Emmi,

I’m not sure I trust this fellow—he looks suspicious. Would you trust him to help us navigate within and through the Anthropocene? He’s not even wearing shoes! Yet, I wonder if he represents the sort of outcomes we might be after in turning methodologies towards hospitality. As researchers, we can be so concerned with the conventions of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ and ‘rigor’ and ‘replicability.’ But maybe, like this fellow, we’re after something slightly larger than life, something that brings different patterns into perspective, something that tells a story that looks a little ‘real’ but also a little fictitious or flirtatious, something that draws others in and embraces them, something that rolls up its sleeves and will get going with the work needed to be done. But should we trust him to know the correct path ahead? Maybe knowing isn’t the outcome we need right now (Fig. 2.3).

Fig. 2.3
A photo of a man on the road, wearing long pants covering the frame he stands on. He wears a string of maple leaves around him.

(©The Bala Cranberry Festival)

Against conventions

Full size image

Chat soon,

Bryan

26 June 2022, Menorca, Spain

Dear reader,

Academic writing tends to place emphasis on the results, outcomes, and social and scholarly contributions of research. What an investigation ‘finds’ or otherwise produces garners the bulk of attention and accolades from funders, policymakers, media, journal editors, and university administrators. This priority is not, however, universal. One of the things we have learned through our respective engagements with participatory action research, for instance, is that in some situations the process matters just as much as, if not more than, the product (Grimwood 2022; Höckert 2018). The exchange of letters and postcards we have shared in this chapter have invited you as a reader into our process of working through, working out, and working with ideas. We have welcomed you to witness our process of planting and nurturing ideas about the potential meaning and utility of hospitable methodologies. What we have conveyed, in other words, are some possibilities for what hospitable methodologies might be and do. How these ideas blossom, or the extent to which they bear fruits for broader social or scholarly impact, remains to be seen.

Finally, after months of pandemic-related lockdowns and travel restrictions, we have had the opportunity to connect again in person. We are writing this letter in a hotel lobby in Menorca, Spain, where we have gathered with other colleagues for the 9th Critical Tourism Studies Conference. Despite the pace of these scholarly and social meetings, we have luckily managed to make time and space for walking and thinking together again and to reflect on our correspondences about the metaphor of inquiring with hospitality. In the following, we try to bring together our thoughts about the meanings and implications that hospitality might have for research, methodology, and proximity.

We trust it is clear that, unlike hospitality management, the idea of the ethics of hospitality is not about planning and controlling relations—nor are our discussions concerned with methods or inquiries designed around conceptions of hospitality as the business of serving and entertaining customers, visitors, and guests. Instead, we approach hospitable methodologies as an invitation to stay and think proximate with radical openness that avoids, evades, and recedes from foreclosing otherness as a mode of leaning into and embracing the infinite possibilities of difference (Levinas 1974). Importantly, the idea of proximity in Levinasian philosophy signifies togetherness that exists before consciousness or any established facts (Levinas 1974; Hand 2009, 54–55). This orientation means giving up the urge to fully and completely achieve truth, knowledge, or understanding, as there is always something about human or more-than-human others, about peoples and places, that remains beyond what can be comprehended and represented (Grimwood 2021; see also Kuntz 2015). Hospitable methodologies are a praxis that orients to this excess with a welcoming gesture. They are a commitment to unsettle and continuously re-negotiate the differences between host/guest, us/them, home/away, in/out, human/non-human, past/present within the context of the ‘thick’ and ‘messy’ entanglements and moments of encounter (see also Doering and Kurara 2022).

Moreover, the radical openness of hospitable methodologies extends into terrains of identity and discourse just as much as it does into those of interpersonal, social, and environmental interactions. As our correspondences with each other suggest, hospitable methodologies ask researchers to engage with aspects of their own identities, value systems, and pre-conceptualisations that tend to be censored by systems of expertise and objective knowing. As researchers, we are invited into proximity with our full humanity, to open up the conventions of research field ‘work’ so that it might be more inclusive of ‘everyday’ relations and spaces (e.g., family, home). The work of troubling ‘everyday’ concepts is a corresponding matter of concern here, as communicating and negotiating hospitality mean holding in tension, critiquing, and reconfiguring the words and language we use to convey meaning. Hospitable methodologies invite us to engage with concepts critically so that we avoid taking for granted the relations they forge or obscure (Doering and Kurara 2022; Pyyhtinen 2022).

How differences are greeted matters significantly to hospitable methodologies. Our letters specifically suggest that hospitable methodologies mobilise care through ongoing negotiations, where generosity is oriented as much around receiving and listening as giving and speaking (Scott 2017). Learning to notice the mystery of human and more-than-human kin—to ‘receive’ and ‘listen’ to the diversity of voices and stories and teachings—is an act of recognition. And recognising the other, as Caton (2018) observes, is a first step in showing care. Care is, of course, context sensitive, and so we need an array of tools and processes that we can adapt based on the relational contexts within which we are situated. Hospitable methodologies, therefore, cannot be framed in any rigid, procedural sense. Prescribing ahead of time what ought to be done or what can be done in any given research setting imposes epistemic, moral, and existential limits. Prescription forecloses the opportunity for ongoing negotiations and for the unexpected to arrive. The sort of method-level practices we need, then, for hospitable methodologies are imaginative, playful, curious, speculative, and experimental ones. We need methods that invite us to wonder, ‘What might happen if…,’ for instance, we shift our linguistic or perceptual orientations in subtle ways. Or, what might happen if we welcomed a rather unconventional style of representing and communicating scholarship, doing so through postcards and letters? Moving forward, we warmly encourage similar wonderings about research design, data generation, and analysis methods within a hospitable methodologies frame.

This line of thought brings us to affect, a slippery notion that we relate to as the change, or the potential change, that occurs when things collide—be they bodies, ideas, objects, discourses, or relations (see Grit 2014). Hospitable methodologies, as our postcards and letters suggest, invite us into proximity with affect as a derivative of research. Or following the Levinasian thought (1974), proximity as such is an affective mode that provokes different forms of dialogue. Attending to affect can be central to the praxis of hospitable methodologies as means for registering, negotiating, and communicating what research does or might do (see also Vannini 2015). Research that welcomes radical openness and mobilises context-sensitive care must hold in tension the conventional desires to know, record, and ‘capture’ information. This task is difficult because we are socialised within educational systems, and academia especially, to become experts and to reduce complexity into simplified outcomes and measurable impacts. Attending to affect can be seen as a hospitable, humble, but also politically infused alternative that helps us to recognise the non-verbal and non-human ways of negotiating the conditions of openness (see, e.g., Stinson et al. 2022).

The length of this letter begins to reveal that we are hesitating to wrap it up. Perhaps this delay is to an extent ‘exactly’ what hospitable methodologies and the mode of openness do to our research—cause us to celebrate hesitation and leaving the door open for unexpected.

With gratitude,

Bryan and Emily