in defence of what’s there: notes on scavenging as methodology

Abstract

Presented as a series of notes, this article explores scavenging as a methodology of refusal, anchored in black studies, black feminist thought, queer studies and indigenous studies, and thinks of the possibilities it offers for rethinking feminist research. Engaging with the works of Katherine McKittrick and of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in particular, I unravel scavenging and interrogate the possibilities it offers for feminist, queer and decolonial scholarship. I argue that scavenging cultivates wonder; resists extractive logics pervasive in academic research; refuses disciplinarity; demands attention; offers possibilities for repair; channels feeling, desire and the erotic; and, finally, encourages us to think about form in academic writing. Throughout, scavenging is therefore sketched out as a methodology for worldmaking.

This is a story of encounters (but aren’t they all?). This is a story about encountering people, encountering books, encountering songs, encountering feelings and pulling them together. By telling this story, this article is interested in the possibilities that the methodology of scavenging can offer to feminist research in the social sciences, in my case specifically to sociological inquiry. My first research project focused on the histories of black feminisms in Hexagonal France. Thanks to the wonderful activists/archivists working at the lesbian archive centre (ARCL) in Paris, I found myself at an event where Gerty Dambury was speaking, right at the end of my first week in the archives. Dambury is a playwright who—and this is what mattered to me at the time—was once a member of the Coordination des Femmes Noires, France’s first black feminist collective. I approached her after the panel discussion and introduced myself, hoping to set up an interview. Indeed, as a sociologist in the making (or so I thought), the semi-structured interview had been constructed as the holy grail of qualitative research. Real research meant interviews. I told Dambury about my project, and she replied, ‘oh yes, I gave an interview to the Mwasi collective about the Coordination, for their book, have you read it?’. I nodded enthusiastically. Of course I had read it; I had been preparing. ‘I think I said everything I had to say in these interviews’, she continued. ‘But I will give you my email address; if you have any specific questions that aren’t answered there, then send them over’. And then she moved on. I often think about this conversation, because it planted the seeds of what, years later, still directs my inquiries. An ethical concern for method: why do we do what we do and, as feminist researchers, what is our relationship to other people as we conduct our inquiries? ¹

By defining scavenging as a methodology, I agree with Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen (2013, p. 10) that ‘we need to differentiate between methods and methodologies’. Writing about indigenous statistics, they argue that ‘methodology is the active element in constituting the portrait of the realities that statistical techniques eventually create’ (ibid.). It is in that sense that, while my own research is not concerned with statistical data, I propose in this article, through a series of notes, scavenging as a methodology: an orientation to research that shapes the questions asked; the ‘data’ gathered; and the way these materials are explored, interpreted and analysed. Thinking of methodology as fundamental in shaping the process of research also aligns with Katherine McKittrick’s (2021) exploration of method-making, which will be discussed in more detail in Note 3 of this article.

Like scavenging as a practice, scavenging as a methodology is triggered by necessity. Indeed, as a practice, ‘scavenging represents an adaptive response to scarcity’ (Downs and Medina, 2000, p. 2). It is a last resort, something to turn to when there are no other choices. Scavenging as a practice is ungrateful, demanding work, overwhelmingly performed by marginalised people in pursuit of survival (Porras Bulla, Rendon and Espluga Trenc, 2021). Because it implies proximity to waste and sometimes operating in illegality, scavenging can also be a dangerous practice (Ferrell, 2006). Its outcomes are not predetermined: scavengers might not find what they need. These considerations matter because, while my own understanding of scavenging as a methodology is also informed by other associations with scavenging (like the scavenger hunt), the demanding aspects of scavenging as a practice colour our understanding of the term. Even in Jack Halberstam’s (1998, p. 13) brief definition of a scavenger methodology, which will be discussed further in Note 1 of this article, scavenging is necessitated by the fact that existing approaches do not allow the researcher to adequately apprehend queer life. Moreover, scavenging as a methodology is also akin to scavenging as practice in its approach to value, as it often implies seeing value where others might not (Reno, 2009). The turn towards scavenging as a methodology in research is thus also ‘an adaptive response to scarcity’ (Downs and Medina, 2000, p. 2), one motivated by the necessity to find new approaches and engage with different materials to apprehend our research topics. Without equating scavenging as a practice for survival to scavenging as a research method, pointing out lack and necessity as embedded in the very idea of scavenging can help situate it as a methodology attached to research by and about marginalised subjects.

As a methodology, scavenging stems from, and is informed by, refusal, specifically refusal of the colonial logics underpinning knowledge production in the social sciences. Tina Campt defines refusal as follows:

a rejection of the status quo as liveable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation i.e., a refusal to recognize a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible; the decision to reject the terms of diminished subjecthood with which one is presented, using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise. (Campt, 2018, p. 83)

For Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014, p. 247), whose work is central to the present article, ‘refusal, and stances of refusal in research, are attempts to place limits on conquest and the colonization of knowledge by marking what is off limits, what is not up for grabs or discussion, what is sacred and what can’t be known’. When it comes to scavenging, refusal, therefore, is not primarily a negative stance. Rather it is a generative orientation to research premised on the desire to look beyond what is, because of a commitment to the belief that there has to be another way of doing things, one which takes seriously the experiences and knowledges of marginalised peoples and is willing to look for alternative ways of pursuing knowledge. Refusal here encourages us to look towards and meaningfully engage with existing material. If, as Tuck and Yang (ibid.) suggest, refusal is always specific, then I must contextualise the refusal that birthed my commitment to scavenging as one against (a certain form and history of) sociology: its traditional approach to social problems, relying on an imperative desire to know extensively, to catalogue and categorise. Scavenging refuses this imperative to know above all else, within the parameters established by disciplinary research. It is also wary of the desire to always generate new data, primarily through interviews (when thinking about qualitative inquiry), to the detriment of a meaningful engagement with the wealth of resources already present in the world, created by marginalised people sharing and theorising about their experiences. Once again, it matters that this approach was developed within the bounds of sociology: the propositions I evoke here are not necessarily new for scholars operating in disciplines outside of the social sciences, such as history or literary studies. However, I believe that there is something to be gained by taking this orientation to sociological questions.

Rooted in black feminist epistemology, scavenging then aims at being an innovative research practice. It believes that the valuable knowledges created and shared by marginalised groups outside the bounds of academia need to be meaningfully engaged with, even if that requires bringing disparate or less traditional material together and finding new methods to work with them. In my case, this has for instance meant engaging with popular music through critical listening practices to think about identity and belonging, reflecting upon the sociological potential of fiction or mobilising theories emerging from afrofeminist blogs, tracing their trajectories. In bringing together disparate materials to address our research questions, scavenging engages other stakeholders in knowledge production, with the research objective of participating in new conversation in a manner we can hope will be less exploitative than that which previous practices led us to. It also aims at challenging what can at times seem like a one-size-fits-all approach to methodology in qualitative research; therefore, rather than being overly prescriptive, scavenging proposes an open-ended orientation to research led by an ethics of care. Consequently, the actual methods being used might differ widely from project to project, but the driving methodology will remain the same.

This article therefore traces the contours of scavenging as a methodology, anchored in black studies, black feminist thought, queer studies and indigenous studies. It does so through seven notes or considerations. Notes 1 to 3 explore the origins of scavenging, its investment in wonder, the tensions at work within the concept and its refusal of extraction and discipline. Notes 4 to 7 engage with some of the central ways in which engaging with scavenging as an orientation to research might shift the central concerns and shape of our enquiry, discussing attention, repair, the erotic and the importance of form.

I am not claiming to invent anything. Scavenging is an exciting idea, and others have claimed and built around it (Waite, 2015; Bao, 2018). Still, I hope to offer a helpful contribution, one that draws our attention to the importance of ‘method-making’ (McKittrick, 2021, p. 41) when thinking/feeling/dreaming about feminist futures, and the place of feminist scholarship in those futures.

One last preliminary note: throughout this piece I frequently use ‘we’ as a mode of address. This is done in two ways: one, pragmatically, is a ‘we’ that considers I am writing to a community of feminist scholars, all concerned with the question of feminist futures, concerned with thinking about what could be (because this cannot be all there is). The other, and perhaps more meaningful one, is that as I wrote, I wanted to experiment with some of the ideas encountered in my scavenging. One of these was formal (and led me, throughout, to treat footnotes as a parallel, alternative space; more on this in Note 7), but the other was an impulse taken by Kevin Quashie in Black Aliveness (2021). Quashie writes:

I want to elude the imposition of the generic nonblack reader, an imposition that […] excludes a black reader from being the ‘one’ who is referenced and imagined as the human person reading, learning, becoming. ‘Imagine’ installs the possibility that a black one might be the reader who could find themself there, beheld in the suspension of literary. (ibid., p. 14)

As a black researcher, thinking alongside other marginalised thinkers and writers, I found this proposition very liberating. What happens to our writing if we imagine that the reader is in the know, is one we might share in our experiences and concerns? What changes in our writing? To me, one of the things that happened was ‘we’ as an unqualified mode of address. Do with it what you will.

Note 1: scavenging ‘scavenging’, or scavenging cultivates wonder

I couldn’t tell you where exactly I encountered the idea of a scavenger methodology. I think I read it without stopping the first time I read Female Masculinity (Halberstam, 1998), and it was then recalled to my memory during a talk, online, in 2020 or 2021. I know that from that second encounter, I never let go of this idea.

Scavenging is in reality only mentioned in passing in Halberstam’s book, when describing the kind of queer methodology for which he advocates:

A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence. (ibid., p. 13)

This brief passage contains many of the elements that make scavenging so appealing (such as its anti-disciplinarity and its commitment to those who have been excluded). However, what resonated most powerfully with me was the way that scavenging echoed and resonated with ideas and hopes I had about my own research: it gave me a word for the methodology, the contours of which I was trying to draw. Beyond scavenging as a means to gather different methods, I saw scavenging as an open-ended orientation (Ahmed, 2006) to research.

I want to consider scavenging as methodology, a way to find, out there in the world, the elements necessary to making sense of the world around us. Everything we need is already here. This encounter, this messy origin story, also captures another central aspect of scavenging: wonder (McKittrick, 2021). In Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick (2021, p. 5) describes black intellectual life as ‘a way of living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder (the desire to know)’. She insists on the rigour of this way of thinking, but we’ll get back to that (Note 4, scavenging demands attention). Here I want to think of wonder as led by that which captures our attention, and of the power of scavenging as an image. Metaphors are crucial in sustaining wonder; they ‘offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through’ (ibid., p. 11). Metaphors also captivate our attention, by giving us something to think with. Nobody knows that better than Sara Ahmed (2017), whose writing is full of unopened doors and sticky feelings (Ahmed, 2004). Those images matter in the way they shape our thinking. As such, I first think of scavenging as the scavenger hunt. ² But the necessary aspect of scavenging discussed in the introduction informs the practice both ethically and practically. Ethically, refusing the logics of traditional academic research requires new methodologies, a new way of understanding and relating to ‘data’ and its analysis. Practically, within my own research project looking at black worldmaking practices in contemporary France, I found material scattered across genres, cultural objects and activists’ work. Each of these locations required a different method of analysis, but the belief that all of them taken together could help map practices also shaped my ideas about scavenging. It was never the easiest route.

In that sense, while the idea of the scavenger hunt, and a playful approach to research guided by wonder, is one that appeals to me, there is also a need to reckon with the difficulty of scavenging. Scavenging is demanding; it sometimes leaves traditional paths and takes us into dangerous terrains. We might not find what we need or might not know what to do with what we find. The way that disparate materials might fit together isn’t always evident; at times they might not fit together at all. There is also the question of when to stop, as arguably one could scavenge forever and keep finding new insights into one’s research questions. Moreover, there is a messiness to the methodology of scavenging: it gets in the way of a neatly bound corpus, of a linear approach to research (or perhaps it exposes the impossibility of linearity in research). This messiness does not compromise rigour, as will be discussed in Note 4, but it might give a different shape to our finding, one that is less orderly, less polished. As a methodology driven by ethical considerations, necessitated by thinking about marginalisation and oppression, scavenging also deals with dirty, violent processes, and this underlying violence might come up in unexpected places during the research process. The researcher can also be entangled with these violent processes, and this can add a layer of messiness that must be reckoned with. These are all questions and tensions at work within scavenging, questions that must be held and carefully considered throughout the research process. What I believe unites and characterises the various aspects of scavenging, its potential playfulness as well as its difficulty, is a sense of resourcefulness. That resourcefulness also characterises the black feminist intellectual tradition, to which scavenging is indebted, from the necessity of finding alternative sources of knowledge to the creation of new epistemologies (Collins, 2009 [2000]). This is a story of how by scavenging, I encountered scavenging.

Note 2: scavenging against extraction

Research is a settler-colonial practice (Tuck and Yang, 2014), ³ and sociology (my discipline of choice) is a particularly colonial practice. Indeed, ‘sociology did not have a formal existence before European colonialism’ (Meghji, 2021, p. 2). ‘Unlike many other disciplines, therefore, sociology did not “become” colonized; it was always colonial to begin with […] [it] both internalized the logic of a colonial episteme, and also (re)produced and bolstered that very episteme itself’ (ibid., p. 3). Refusing this colonial logic informs much of this article, and I will return to it, but for now what I am concerned with is research’s productivist logics, not only in the way we approach our output but also in the way we approach data collection. Indeed, in many ways, (sociological) research is collectively understood as a process of collecting and analysing data to produce theory. Often, this collection can look more like extraction, and considering this process seriously is crucial if we want to even pretend to do feminist scholarship. Here I will focus on a specific case study, which applies to my research to think about that issue.

In 2022, I attended the Afroeuropeans network conference in Brussels. Mireille-Tcheusi Robert, a black feminist organiser, delivered one of the keynotes and spent a considerable time in her speech addressing the relationship between (white) feminist researchers and feminist activists. She talked about researchers’ political responsibility to the groups they are studying and unpacked the various levels of extraction and exclusion present in these research relationships, including the extraction of knowledge, analysis and theories performed by researchers on activists and the activists’ subsequent structural exclusion from accessing the results of said research. Delivered to a room of (mostly) white (almost exclusively) researchers, this address pointed to a lot of fundamental questions that are too often ignored in feminist research. It reminded us, once more, of ‘the pervasive silence on questions regarding the contemporary rationale(s) for social science research’ (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 251).

We all know the time, effort and energy required from participants for data collection to happen, not least because as we move through the ranks of academia, we often experience being the participants ourselves. ⁴ Yet, we reproduce these patterns. I contend, however, that even within the realm of social science as it currently stands, we can resist these extractive logics, and scavenging can foster this resistance. Indeed, going back to my example, not only do feminist activists theorise and analyse without researchers’ intervention, but they also often share these analyses. From blog posts to self-published and traditionally published writing, to podcasts, documentaries and public conferences, this knowledge is present, we have access to it and it is often presented for us to access. Engaging meaningfully with this material enables us to centre the theories and experiences of fellow marginalised groups (including those outside academia) and theorise in conversation with them, without generating more unpaid labour, without mining knowledges in the way denounced by Robert (2022) and without always pre-emptively setting the parameters of the discussion.

Beyond this specific example, the long history of cultural studies has shown us what could be obtained from, and the importance of, studies of media or popular culture. Taking stock of the wealth of material out there, I therefore ask: what is so special about social science researchers that we think it is our own questions which must be answered? To recall my introductory story, ‘I’ve already said what I had to say’. Consider this again: Everything we need is already here (but we must look for it).

Note 3: scavenging refuses disciplines

We’ve already said, with Tuck and Yang, that research is settler colonial. Let’s say it again with Katherine McKittrick (2021, p. 36): ‘Discipline is Empire’. McKittrick (ibid., p. 40) continues, ‘in academic settings, identity-disciplines function to uphold misery and empire and the segregation of ideas and idea maker precisely because all disciplines are differently enfleshed and classified and hierarchized’. If this is the case, and it is the case, then we have no choice but to abandon disciplines, to loosen our allegiances to them. Just like the only possible relationship to a neoliberal university is a fugitive one, one where one ‘sneaks into the university and steals what one can’ (Harney and Moten, 2013, p. 26), the only possible relationship to disciplines is an antagonistic one, an interdisciplinarity led by anti-disciplinary thinking. Scavenging as a methodology can nourish this interdisciplinarity led by anti-disciplinarity. It can encourage us to engage with material beyond our own discipline, and to find ways to learn from it, theorise in conversation with it. And we do so because we believe in our core that it will lead somewhere: ‘the promise of interdisciplinary scholarship is that failing to return texts to their histories will do something’ (Ahmed, 2006, p. 22). This, of course, isn’t new either. As Katherine McKittrick (2021, p. 41) reminds us, ‘black methodology and method-making (which are academic and extra-academic), offer rebellious and disobedient and promising ways of undoing disciplines’. And as she discusses this black method-making, McKittrick (ibid., p. 44; emphasis mine) offers us another possible definition of scavenging, when she writes about method-making as ‘situating the process of inquiry as the analytical framework through which to study. Method-making compulsively moves with curiosity (even in frustration) rather than applying a set of techniques to an object of study and generating unsurprising findings and outcomes’. Scavenging is processual; therefore, it is concerned with methodology, with how things come together. ⁵ Scavenging brings us in and out of academia, with the respect demanded by each location in which we end up finding ourselves, and across disciplines. By untethering ourselves from disciplines (and attaching ourselves to method-making instead), we can actually commit to the feminist, anti-racist, decolonial and queer projects that fundamentally want their destruction. ‘One tactic is a programme of coordinated obliteration, and then using the embers to reconstruct’ (Olufemi, 2021, p. 84). Here again, scavenging’s resourcefulness is helpful. We can still scavenge among ruins.

Note 4: scavenging demands attention

If discipline is empire, then let’s pay attention to what lies outside of it. Here, we must become aware of the research’s voracious appetite for turning everything it encounters into research: ‘the relationship of research to other human ways of knowing resembles a colonising formation, acquiring, claiming, absorbing, consuming’ (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 259). This tendency of research is one that we (scholars ethically committed against the existing order of things) are often guilty of. However, along with the willingness to reinvent what research can look like, we might want to think about whether we want to bring certain forms of knowing into the hands of research. Perhaps we must instead ‘attend to the productive tensions between genres/epistemologies, to gather the benefits of what might be a dialogical relationship between research and art’ (ibid.). And when research isn’t the needed intervention, then perhaps we should take ourselves outside of it for a moment. Perhaps this project really should be a novel, one informed by a similar ethos. Perhaps it should be a documentary. ⁶ This in turn leads us to reconsider our own epistemological hierarchies and respect that other forms of knowing can be theory in their own right (not academic research, but theory), and helps us recognise, with Tuck and Yang (ibid.), that ‘the relationship between research and art can be one of epistemological respect and reciprocity rather than epistemological assimilation or colonization’. These are the considerations that scavenging might lead us to.

However, even while remaining within the realm of research, scavenging demands that we pay close attention to what we encounter. Scavenging demands that we read and listen and watch and discuss and write again and again, going back to the elements that sparked our desire to know. Because we’re scavenging across the board, we must make sure we aren’t misusing or misunderstanding; therefore, we go back to the source. This considerate, attentive engagement with the work of others shows how ‘arranging, rearranging, and collecting ideas outside ourselves are processes that make our ideas our own’ (McKittrick, 2021, p. 15, original emphasis). Hopefully, this careful engagement can also help us to resist ‘citation as quotable value’ (ibid., p. 26). Here we remember Audre Lorde (re-encountered in Katherine McKittrick’s footnotes): ‘Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?’ (from Lorde’s ‘Letter to Mary Daly’, in McKittrick, 2021, p. 26).

Within my own discipline (which I cannot deny as much as I refuse to pledge allegiance to it), this ethos is embodied beautifully by the work of Patricia Hill Collins (2009 [2000]) on black feminist thought. In her (sociological) work, she pays undivided attention to the shapes, histories and lessons of black feminist intellectual interventions in the USA (she scavenges), and from there, she theorises. When discussing the poetry of Audre Lorde or June Jordan, Collins engages ‘the productive tensions between genres/epistemologies’ (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 259). Poetry isn’t sociology, and because it isn’t sociology it can do things that sociological writing couldn’t dream of doing. However, it is theory, it is a way of knowing and there is no epistemological hierarchy in her work. ⁷ Scavenging demands attention.

Note 5: scavenging as repair

As I hope is starting to be apparent, scavenging as a methodology also comports an ethics of care. As Tuck and Yang (2014, p. 245) beautifully describe, ‘Social sciences often works to collect stories of pain and humiliation in the lives of those being researched for commodification’. They elaborate with an observation, which is central here: that although many researchers opt out of pain-driven narratives, ‘novice researchers emerge from doctoral programmes eager to launch pain-based inquiry projects because they believe that such approaches embody what it means to do social science’ (ibid., p. 249). This echoes earlier reflections on extraction, but also leads me to reflect on self-preservation as an academic from an oppressed group, perhaps even more so if this oppressed group is also the subject of our research (in any way). I want to conjure bell hooks (1994 [1991], p. 61) here, too, and the idea that ‘theory could be a healing place’.

In ‘Theory as a liberatory practice’ (1994 [1991]), hooks reflects on childhood experiences of ‘theorising’, of making sense of the world around her, and on the future-making possibilities she found in this enterprise. She writes: ‘I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing’ (ibid., p. 59). With these two axioms in mind (social sciences are obsessed with the pain of oppressed communities, and theory can be a place of healing for these same people), here is another story. Much like bell hooks, I came to theory hurting, and encountering texts again and again that cared enough to help me understand the hurt helped make it go away. I also was aware that I refused to have an extractive relationship with others in my community for the sake of research. While I wanted to centre the experiences of other black people in France, by focusing on their writings and other creative production, their art, their activist sharing of theorising, their public interventions, I was also wary of mining their experiences, or generating more unpaid labour just to earn a degree or shape publications.

This is what led me to scavenging existing material and moving away from interview as a central method for qualitative inquiry, as well as, for a time, to the idea of autoethnography. If I don’t want to mine other people’s experiences, I can mine my own, I thought. While I genuinely think some of these autoethnographic endeavours were helpful and contributed to my research, I struggled with relating some experiences of hurt, of pain. This is because, fundamentally, I don’t think that my individual experiences of racism are interesting. Of course, the structures of racism are interesting, its site-specific operations, its evolutions. But these are studied in other things (if anything, it could be studied in white people). Anger is interesting, anger is useful (Lorde, 2019 [1984]). But the dehumanising experiences of racism (or sexism or ableism or queerphobia, the list continues) don’t have to be. Yet, as a marginalised subject, it can feel like pain is what academia demands from you, if you are to insert yourself in research. Tuck and Yang (2014, p. 230), building on Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s critique of autoethnography, point out this tendency in which ‘autoethnography is distracted by trying to satisfy Daddy’s penchant for accounts of oppression’.

This might feel contradictory: how can theorising be a location of healing if all that academia expects from me is to revisit my pain? Refusal, again, is a salve. Like Audra Simpson (2007) and her participants, we can refuse research’s injunction. We can refuse them for others, and we can refuse them for ourselves. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we cannot theorise from a place of pain; as hooks (1994 [1991]) elaborates, this often yields crucial work. However, we don’t always need to give our pain to academia (it won’t take care of it). As Tuck and Yang (2014, p. 254) write, ‘Academia is very much about the generation and swapping of stories, and there are some stories that the academy has not yet proven itself responsible enough to hear’. In an article interrogating sociological writing, Gala Rexer (2022), thinking with Savannah Shange, thinks of the shape that ‘a sociology of refusal and repair’ would take. She asks, ‘instead of trying to make lives “knowable,” how does our writing disrupt the structures that make lives unliveable? How can we “care more than we know?” (Shange, 2019)’ (ibid., original emphasis). She also writes that ‘a sociology of refusal and repair is less considered, with violent descriptions of individuals’ hardship of living under racial capitalism yet analysing the structures that engender these circumstances’ (ibid., 2022). Scavenging helps in this endeavour, I contend, because it enables us to look, again and again, until we find the right location of inquiry.

Think of a thesis, or an article. Think of your research. Now, think of your story. Could the points be made through analysing literature? Through analysing policies in detail? Through listening, really listening, to the sonic fabric of a song? And then think, is this the space where I want to give this story? Should I be marked on this? Do I want an anonymous reviewer to dismiss this pain? An examiner to fetishise it? Now, we can make our decisions. ‘There are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn’t deserve’ (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 254).

Note 6: scavenging as an erotics

In Everyday I Write the Book (2020, p. 40), a rare academic volume focused on writing and style (more on that in a moment), Amitava Kumar quotes David Means: ‘before you write an academic paper, go back to whatever you loved early on; go back to whatever gave you the impulse to delve into the depths of the subject in the first place’. Scavenging is a methodology that sticks to what we loved early on throughout the endeavour, because this feeling, this impulse to delve deep, is what sustains our wonder (thinking again of scavenging as an orientation towards wonder). To quote Lola Olufemi (2021, p. 8, original emphasis), ‘here is my method: above all feeling!’. ⁸ Feeling is crucial in black feminist thought and in much feminist and queer inquiries. Feeling is a central part of scavenging; it is what drives us. We feel around for clues, we follow intuitions. Eve Tuck proposes ‘desire-based research as not the antonym but rather the antidote for damage-focused narratives’ (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 253).

Against research obsessed with pain, we feel for research driven by desire. This is where the erotic comes in. In ‘The uses of the erotic’ (2007 [1984], p.43), Audre Lorde defines ‘the erotic [as] a resource within each of us […] firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling’. Scavenging is an embodied practice: sometimes it takes us into new physical spaces (the library, the archive, the cinema, the concert hall, the theatre, the museum, the club), and the encounters we make are always also physical—we watch, we listen, we read, we observe, we speak, we remember, we ‘feel-with’ (McKittrick, 2021, p. 70). Scavenging channels the erotic, because feeling drives these encounters. Scavenging as method-making is demanding, but it can be pleasurable. Remember, we’re opening up a horizon beyond pain. And as Lorde teaches us:

… another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. (Lorde, 2007 [1984], p. 46)

The stir we feel, the pang of desire that drives us, that awakens with certain encounters as we scavenge, is rooted in the body, and in the erotic. Research perhaps then can be joyful, healing in this joy, in these connections and constructions. I return again to the treasure hunt: to the care and attention, the surprise, the curiosity, the wonder and the joyful encounters. I pull at this thread to remember embodied playfulness. Scavenging can reconnect us to this affect, to these feelings. What kind of research might we create then?

Note 7: scavenging for form

As a final note, and staying with Audre Lorde, I bring up one last consideration, which became central as I explored scavenging: that of form and style. In ‘The uses of the erotic’ (2007 [1984]), Lorde uses an image to illustrate her understanding of the erotic. She relates the story of when as children, during the war, they would buy bags of white margarine with one concentrated pellet of yellow colouring. Once the margarine had softened, they would pinch the colouring and knead it in gently until the whole bag had been coloured. Lorde (ibid., p. 47) then writes: ‘I find in the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience’.

I love the margarine story. It is so evocative, so haptic, I feel like I’ve done it. It makes the whole essay come alive, it sticks to my memory, and I return to it again, and again, because of how elegantly, tightly and clearly it is written. I return to it for its aliveness (Quashie, 2021). Kumar (2020, p. 80) writes that ‘style could be an elaboration of an erotics’, and Lorde’s style in ‘The uses of the erotic’ undeniably is one. One space where reflections on style and form are quite scarce is academia (Kumar, 2020). We (academics) write all the time, yet we aren’t always encouraged to think about how we write, about the shape that our writing takes on the page. In fact, this is often prohibited, given the rigid codes of academic writing, themselves anchored in gendered, raced and classed ideas inherited from Enlightenment thinking about what constitutes proper thinking. Yet writing can do so much.

Allow me, for an instant, to bring this down to the material. The shape of writing is, very often, how we first encounter ideas. If you are reading this, it might be in a journal, most likely it will be on a screen, as a PDF. Books are material objects that we wrestle with, but we often take their form for granted. People might experiment with chapters and subheadings, with overall structure, but it is rarer that we experiment with form, down to the shape that the text takes on the page. Yet, as I scavenged, I encountered writers who made this question of form evident. I encountered writers who let their footnotes eat away at the page, until most of the page was footnote, until the footnote was impossible to ignore, and used this newly created space to collapse time and space, to pursue different narratives simultaneously, to call details to the readers’ attention (see Rosenberg, 2018; McKittrick, 2021). I encountered writers who used the blank space on the page to interrupt the narrative, to recall the silences of history and make apparent the fabrication of narratives (see Rodrigues-Fowler, 2022), who used bold text and blacked-out text and stroked-through text and punctuation signs to make their arguments (see Olufemi, 2021). I encountered writers who included music and playlists in the books and told the reader to go and listen to them (see McKittrick, 2021; Rodrigues-Fowler, 2022). I encountered writers, slightly more often but not any less interestingly, who disrupted the order of written text with images, small images nestled among lines and lines or big images that spread out across a whole page (see Campt, 2012; Hartman, 2019; McKittrick, 2021). These writers made it impossible not to question form; they reminded me that texts are material, and that disrupting formal conventions is impactful. Now, I’m aware that this may sound evident or silly to a literary scholar, but as someone who operates mostly within the dominion of sociology, these were necessary encounters, precious reminders.

‘Writing is a material practice. Our books can hold, like dirt, the marks of our struggle to put words on paper’ (Kumar, 2020, p. 187) and they can hold so much more, too. How do these considerations of form change the way we think about research? How does form shape our research? How can we find new ways of writing for refusal and repair (Rexer, 2022)? And I go back to care, and theory as a place of healing, and think about the ways that form can help us in these endeavours. ‘All the writers I admire, each different from the other, erect structures that offer refuge’ (Kumar, 2020, p. 67). While scavenging isn’t a rigid or prescriptive method and doesn’t require a specific way of writing, I want to suggest that the open approach to research that it necessitates can lead to changes in unexpected places, in this case form, and that these changes can be meaningful in our attempts to think about a way of doing research differently, when thinking quite literally about what a different, more liberatory, feminist research could look like.

Before we part, one more consideration

I want to close this piece with a note on worldmaking. If scavenging is my methodology, worldmaking is my concern. I believe scavenging can lead us there. Like Lorde, and Tuck, and McKittrick, and Olufemi, and countless others, I go back to desire. ‘Desire is time-warping’ (Tuck and Yang, 2014, p. 253). Worldmaking conjures up and enacts impossible futures in the present, rendering them possible. It refers to an ‘ongoing collective practice of enacting “the radical aspirations of queer culture building”’ (Duong, 2012, p. 379) and resonates with José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) idea of queer futurity and queer utopias, insisting on the possibilities of examining the past to envision a hopeful future for queer subjects—beyond the bleak and totalising ‘here and now’. Kevin Duong (2012, p. 379) further argues that queer worldmaking is the making of a commons, ‘realisable only through claims for a common world that does not yet exist […] but [is] nevertheless retained as a possibility by enacting the aspiration to live another way now, here’. When I write that scavenging is worldmaking, it is because it enacts ways of researching differently here and now, pointing towards possibilities for better futures. Scavenging is method-making, it is processual, it is about what we do every time we sit down at the proverbial desk. Scavenging shatters the myth of lone authorship, it is inherently always a collective endeavour. It is a playful, embodied endeavour leading to an otherwise. Everything we need is already here.