How do we get to know this ever-changing world, a world that we are ourselves part of? Our research is much dependent on methods that capture the dynamics of becoming and the ways in which we are implicated in them. One methodological premise of this book is thus that ‘knowing must be reconnected with being’ (Ingold, 2011: 75). This is what Karen Barad captures in the term onto-epistem-ology: ‘we know because “we” are of the world’ (2003: 329, emphasis and quotation marks in original). Or as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would put it: we and the phenomena we study sit in the same folds (2003; Coole, 2010). There is mutuality: by doing research, we are part of making the world and the world makes us. This means that knowing the world is also a process of knowing ourselves and our influence. Accordingly, a good methodological attitude may be to allow for all elements in this complex, lively hive – including ourselves – to astonish us (Ingold, 2011; Chapter 2). While such a sense of wonder is a great vantage point for getting to know the world, we also depend on methods that enable us to grasp materializations. Grasping is the empirical, practical and material process of understanding through contact. A method of grasping takes distance from the more abstract ‘analytic’ that researchers inherited from the Cartesian split between mind and matter. This split implicates that analytics are based on the logic of the machine, the component parts of which are identified and manipulated by humans. Grasping, instead, goes back to a conceptual family of reaching and touching – something that was later captured in the term seizing. It is to understand fully and distinctly. Grasping is an active process, it is doing. By reaching, touching and seizing the phenomena we research, we also make them. We make parts of them comprehensible as we intra-act with them (see Barad, 2003).

Thus, this chapter not only endorses the much-articulated need for empirical research, the necessity of experiencing and plunging into the world. Grasping phenomena and making them matter also involves criticality. Both us and the phenomena we seek to grasp are critical to materializations. Yet, this criticality is two-fold: what is critically important also deserves critique (Kaufmann et al, 2020). Critique is not the distanced analytic of detecting and accusing (as criticized by Felski, 2012).