Unruly Materials

This article reflects on quilt-making as a method of handling flux in research. While the notion of flux has been widely discussed conceptually, as inherent to the social worlds or epistemologies, I extend this by focusing on how flux is “handled” in the course of practice-led and craft-based research. Drawing on a participatory quilt-making project that stitched together multiple participant-contributed fabric panels to explore migration experiences, I explore how this tactile practice attends to flux in research methodologically, ethically, and politically. Methodologically, quilt-making centres movements, non-linearity and messiness in knowledge-making. Ethically, it embraces slowness as a form of care and stitching as a form of attentive “listening” to non-human materials in knowledge-making. Politically, through stitching together diverse stories of migration, quilt-making brings situated, heterogeneous knowledges into a tactile-visual composition that embraces multiplicity.